BAD WRITING AND BAD WRITERS ARE NOT THE SAME THING

This week I read the article 'What Makes Bad Writing Bad?' on The Guardian UK website. If you are at all insecure about your abilities as a writer this rather high-handed pontification will not help matters, so I suggest you proceed with caution when it comes to reading it for yourself.

From just reading the title, it would be reasonable to assume it's about the things that make bad writing bad. wouldn't it? You know, the usual suspects; adverbs, passive voice, filtering, repetitive phrases...

Spoiler alert - it isn't. Somewhere along the line the author decided instead that it was certain kinds of people who made these grievous errors - and they personally were the 'things' that made bad writing bad. His issue wasn't so much with the way words were laid out on the page, but with the personality and motivations of the person who was putting them there.

I will concede he did make one or two good points. It's certainly true, for example, that any writer who believes they have nothing more to learn because they've become Masters of the Craft are generally full of something, and it isn't good writing. But overall I feel he swung his Bat of Shame in a pretty broad circle without much regard for who he might have been hitting. If you are an aspiring, as-yet-unpublished writer - or even an already-published one - I challenge you to get through the entire article without feeling at least a little bit stung by the end of it, because it's cleverly worded to stab little needles of doubt into the sensitive writer's self-esteem.

Aspiring to write boundary-breaking fiction like influential authors such as Jack Kerouac, Margaret Atwood, David Foster Wallace and Maya Angelou? You're probably a Bad Writer then. Been working for a few years on the novel that's been burning in your brain, and can't start another until you've got this one out of your head? You're probably a Bad Writer too. Writing a novel that explores certain ideologies and issues that are dear to your heart? Yep, you guessed it - you're a Bad Writer as well.

Now these declarations might make sense if every author who's ever written anything that fits in any of those above categories has always produced something bad. But that clearly isn't true, as - ooh, I don't know, several thousand classics and bestsellers over at least a couple of centuries will testify. Yes, these things can certainly be done badly by writers who lack the necessary skills - but that in itself shouldn't be clarion call to all writers to never even attempt to write what their heart wants to write. The problem is, this article doesn't make that distinction; it takes what it regards as 'bad writing,' looks for the genres and motivations most commonly associated with it and then brands everyone who writes or wants to write that stuff as 'bad writers' before they've even begun.

Bad writers don't realise they're bad, is the takeaway message from this article. They keep on writing their terrible stuff, convinced it's what they're meant to do, that their instincts are right and they should keep on writing, no matter what everyone else says. Bad writers believe in themselves and their writing ability when they really, really shouldn't.

And isn't that the very head-demon most halfway-decent, good and even great writers fight, every day of their writing life? That, actually, they're not as good at this writing lark as they think they are, and they should just quit their narcissistic dreaming and get back to the Real World? How many of us have heard those same sentiments echoed out loud by the naysayers among our friends, families, teachers, peers and work colleagues?

I bet you can picture the looks on their faces as they say it too. That half-pitying, half-contemptuous look that says "I'm just trying to make you see how much of a delusional loser you really are, because I'm smart enough to predict your eventual humiliation and kind-hearted enough to warn you about it in advance." Ironically, they're often not so kind-hearted that they'll be happy for you if you prove them wrong - in fact, their little hearts will shrivel with secret fury if you dare to defy their cutting non-expectations at some point in the future. Because here's the secret those people don't want you to know; if you're a creative person who's actively chasing your dream, you break their world view and that scares the crap out of them.

Society at large is not encouraged to 'think big.' If you want a guaranteed system for Making It in life, you work your arse off in a normal, steady job that pays a regular wage for practical skill sets that can be applied to everyday life - skills like retail, office-based, trades, hospitality, catering and managerial skills. Not only that, but if you're really serious about supporting yourself and then later on providing for your family, this is the path you should be committing your energies to. That's how you get respect in this society - playing the game by The Rules.

But while a large proportion of society accepts and abides by these Rules, that doesn't mean they're always happy about it. Even people without a single creative bone in their body have crazy dreams about the kind of life they'd live instead, if they didn't have to do their duty in their job that Pays The Bills and Puts Food on the Table. But they bury those dreams, shoving them aside for the Greater Good, and the only way they can do that without tumbling into a pit of inner misery is to convince themselves that they're doing it because the way they've committed to - the sensible, real-world-thinking way - is the way that works. That taking the rule-breaker path of following their dreams and sucking up knockback after knockback - probably for years and possibly forever if they never succeed - is the choice so life-wrecking and impossible it shouldn't even be contemplated. They need that to be the absolute truth in their life if they are to keep trudging down their safe but humdrum life of stability.

And then someone like you comes along. You, the creative, who hasn't locked her dreams away in a box marked 'Unrealistic' and stuck to The Rules like you were 'supposed to.' You're taking all the risks they're too afraid to take and - well, you may not have achieved all the things you've dreamed of achieving, but you also haven't died or been left destitute and friendless either. You're making chasing your dreams look... kind of attractive as a life strategy. You even look like you're enjoying the process, damn you! You're breaking everything - if you can do it and not get swallowed down a hair-clogged plughole of disaster, that means it might not be wrong for them to try it either... You're making everyone who takes the safe path look like wusses, you troublemaker!

You must therefore be stopped, before you convince others to follow in your footsteps and make those too scared to try feel even more resentful for choosing to stick with their safe life choices. And since rejecting and ridiculing what you do clearly hasn't been working so far, because you still insist on doing it anyway, the only alternative is to go personal and reject and ridicule what you are.

And that's how you get from 'Bad Writing' to 'Bad Writers' in a single web article. It's  also why you can swap out 'writing' and 'writers' for 'art' and 'artists, 'performances' and 'performers...' You imply the two are one and the same, a symbiotic relationship where each 'partner' feeds off the other to survive.

And no creative person on the planet is immune from such a judgement - if the kind of person who judges creatives in this way decides they don't like the way Stephen King writes his stories, they will judge him a Bad Writer until the day they die, in spite of a cosmic crapload of evidence that this can't actually be true. That's not to say he hasn't produced bad writing in his career - the man himself has owned up to that on more than one occasion. But doing anything badly is part of the process toward becoming good at it; every one of us once had to have bums regularly wiped clean by an adult because we hadn't figured out toilets yet. Imagine if, instead of being encouraged to keep trying, we'd all been branded 'bad children' and told to give up on our dreams of ever being able to control our own bowels?

So yeah, when people tell you they don't like your writing... they're entitled to their opinion, and you're entitled to make up your own mind whether you want to try and change it or not. If people tell you what you've written is 'bad writing,' the same applies, but it might be worth your while taking another look at your work and seeking some other opinions to see if there's any truth in what they're saying.

But anyone who tells you you're a 'bad writer?' Unless you're stabbing them in the eyes with your pen, abusing people on social media or committing crimes that have nothing to do with written prose it's a meaningless criticism. No writer in the history of forever was ever born a 'good' writer. We all suck in the beginning, and no two writers' journey from 'crap' to 'okay' to 'good' (and maybe even 'great') are the same, or take the same length of time to travel. That person who produces 'bad writing' now might bang out a kick-ass best-seller in a couple of years' time - or ten years' time, or maybe it'll take them twenty or more years to finally crack it. Meanwhile, another writer who wrote fantastic stuff in his early twenties might struggle to maintain that standard as he slides into his thirties, spend his forties in creative doldrums and then suddenly have a resurgence in his fifties and beyond. You could try and slap the 'Bad Writer' label on both of them - but you can't make it stick.

Even when your writing is bad, it is not because you are a bad writer. Remember that in your deepest, darkest moments of self-doubt. Mistakes are things, not people.

4 Ways 'The Book of Human Skin' Changed How I Write Characters.

It's a well-used mantra, quoted by everyone from Stephen King to Chuck Wendig to Neil Gaiman - as well as writing a lot, writers must read a lot too. Stephen King even goes so far as to say that if you 'don't have time' to read other people's books, then you'll never have the skills to become a decent writer.

But have no fear if you think you 'don't read much.' I used to think that too. Whenever I heard the advice 'read widely and read lots,' I used to curl up inside and think "well that's me stuffed then - the last time I read a 'classic' was in an English Lit. class in sixth form." But then I looked at my bookshelf, crammed with books I'd collected over the years and covering all subjects imaginable - fiction and non-fiction. I remembered all the science and history magazines I like to buy on a regular basis. And then I realised my Kindle, which I got three years ago, currently has over 200 books stored on it...

Because the good news is that you're not confined to intellectual, classy or 'recommended' reading when it comes to broadening your horizons. All reading is good - and not just fiction in the genre you write in, but in the ones you don't and even the ones you couldn't in a million years. And sure, the Classics are named so for a reason, but the mass-market bodice-rippers, quirky chick-lits and rip-roaring thrillers are just as valuable for adding credits to your Experience Bank. Non-fiction is just as useful; books about science and history and nature and stuff are pretty much acorn factories for the research stash you'll rely on at some point in the future. So are books that cover the craft of writing.

But best of all, you don't have to be sniffy about the quality of the books you read either. A badly-written book can teach you just as much about good writing as a well-written one.

One book that taught me a lot about writing characters is The Book of Human Skin by Michelle Lovric. I enjoyed reading it and would recommend it to other writers and readers alike - as much for the things I didn't like about it as those I did.

Set in eighteenth century Venice and Peru, it tells the stories of Minguillo Fasan, collector of books bound in human skin and self-appointed torturer of younger sister Marcella, and a Peruvian nun called Sor Loreta who does for religion what the Ku Klux Klan does for race relations. The tale alternates between the POV of the aforementioned three main characters plus two supporting ones - Marcella and Minguillo's manservant Gianni and Doctor Santo - Marcella's 'love interest' (well, kind of. More on that later...) So you have five POV characters altogether - some of which were a joy to read, while others... not so much. Here are my top takeaways on writing characters, learned from reading this book...

1 - The greatest villains think they're heroes.

There were two villains in this story: Minguillo Fasan and Sor Loreta. They were without doubt the best characters in this book, even though they were, at least on the surface, very different from each other.

Of the two, the absolute, stand-out best was Sor Loreta. From the moment we first 'meet' her as a child, it's clear she's several beads short of a rosary, and as her story unfolds she just becomes more and more deranged. The only thing larger and more terrifying than her obsessional religious piety is her monstrous ego, believing as she does that she is quite literally the Bride of God, representing His will on earth. But what really kept me glued to her portions of the story - and longing for her next bit when the other characters got their turn - was the feeling that I, as a reader, was the only one seeing her for what she truly was. Everyone else in the story seemed to be either blind to her wickedness - totally taken in by her sob stories or a conveniently-timed 'miracle' she performed - or, if they did have suspicions, pretty much dead by the end of the scene (covertly by her hand, of course.) Even she believed she was a virtuous holy woman who was simply carrying out the will of her God - she did not, for one second, consider anything she did to be morally wrong. For example, she drowned a young nun in a bathtub of ice-cold water believing she was purging that nun of her sins (and therefore saving her soul.) So the question that burned in my head every time she made an appearance - and upped the ante on her evilness even when I thought she couldn't go any further down that path - was "Is anyone ever going to catch this psychotic woman out and stop her?" Because - and all credit to the author for achieving this - it never looked like anyone would, right up until the very end of her story.

In fairness, this was also true of Minguillo. But his attitude was different; he knew the things he did were considered evil by the rest of society, and he cared not a jot about that. In fact, he even taunts the readers about it, asking them directly to reflect on what it says about themselves that they are so interested in hearing about his evil exploits. This is a hard trick to pull off in a villain without making them look like a moustache-twirling pantomime character - "Oooh, I'm so eeeevil, muha ha ha haaa!" But for Minguillo it works because, while he might 'know' he does immoral things, he believes he has just reasons for doing them. Disliked and ostracised since babyhood because his debilitating skin disease has left him permanently scarred (and therefore physically unattractive,) he has decided he is an undeserving victim of a judgemental society, and all he is doing is exacting payback for wrongs done to him (whether real or imagined.) In that sense, he's as much of a 'hero' in his own mind as any morally-upright pillar of society.

And that's the key to making a really memorable villain. You actually can go into the shades of grey about whether a hero considers himself a 'good' or 'bad' person - as long as that villain is convinced he's entitled to be that way regardless of whether or not anyone else in the story universe agrees with him. If he believes that doing callous and immoral things to those who've behaved in a callous way to him somehow 'cancels out' the immorality of those acts, the reader will accept that he can be as bad as he likes while still believing he's on the side of 'right.' We may not agree with their mindset, but we can understand it, and - sort of - empathise with it. Even if we don't want to.

2 - Heroines with the patience of a saint just try your readers' patience.

Minguillo's little sis Marcella was the heroine of the story - although it has to be said, that really depends on what qualities you think a protagonist should possess to be considered 'heroic.'

If your idea of a strong female character is a woman so passive she practically floats through every injustice done to her like a leaf in a raging river, who sucks up her suffering so quietly and patiently her cheeks are permanently Velcroed to her tonsils and who never does one single, goddamn thing to stand up for herself ... well, you'll love Marcella. Yes, Marcella's superpowers were her jaw-dropping beauty and a saint-like disposition that would make Mother Theresa look like a mardy old battleaxe. 'Crippled for life now because Minguillo smashed my legbone into toothpicks? *Sigh* I do wish sometimes he wouldn't do things like that, but, y'know, I'm so blessed to be so pretty and have so many friends when he's so ugly and unloved I probably shouldn't complain...'

 Aaaarrrrggghhh! By the time I'd got halfway through the novel I bloody hated her - which made me feel oddly guilty considering the only people who seemed to hate her more were the two main villains in the story. I don't know how or where the author got the idea that making Marcella a simpering, uber-placid paragon of virtue would equate to being a tower of strength and resilience - if anything it had the opposite effect of making her look weak and, quite frankly, dumb. Thanks to her brother she was permanently crippled, then packed off to a lunatic asylum and finally banished to a convent - at some point in her miserable life she should've got at least a tiny bit cross about that. Not left it to everyone else around her to do on her behalf, while she just smiled inanely and carried on being Minguillo's human punchbag. In fact that was the other annoyance with Marcella; she never did a thing to help herself at any point. But then again she never had to, because all these legions of people who randomly fell in love with her for her pure, sweet passiveness were practically falling over themselves to fix every problem in her life, big or small. Everything that wasn't either a villain or an inanimate object not only decided Marcella was the most wonderful creation in the universe since time began, but often discussed the matter at great length with the other characters, while wringing their hands at what such an unworthy mortal like them could do to ease her suffering and fill her life with the ponies and rainbows she so richly deserved.... it's okay, you can have a quick break to throw up now if you want....

So yeah, Marcella will forever be my go-to example of a Mary Sue in fiction. If they ever invent a Glossary of Writers' Terms, they should probably just stick her name in as a catch-all reference. I will never, ever write a character like her in my stories, I promise. Unless of course I intend for her to die before the end in some horrible - ideally comical - way.

3 - Sometimes the colloquial accent DOES matter.

As I mentioned previously, one of the secondary POV characters was Gianni, loyal manservant of Minguillo and Marcella (although inevitably he was far more loyal to the latter than the former.) Let's note that his name was Gianni, and not, say, Wayne or Deano. This was because he was a rural Italian peasant living in eighteenth century Venice, and while it's fair to assume that his lack of formal education and general peasant status means he's not going to have a wide vocabulary and immaculate spelling, he's still going to sound - well, like he's lived in Italy all his life...

So why then, did he 'talk' like a Mitchell brother from EastEnders? I'm not much of a historian, but I'm pretty sure there weren't many Cockernee geezer-peasants around in eighteenth-century Venice.

I get what the author was trying to do. She wanted to leave the reader in no doubt that this guy came from a poor, unsophisticated background, where he would have gone into servitude as a child instead of learning the three R's like the rich folk. And yes, one of the best ways to highlight that is to have that character use bad grammar and spelling in his 'diary entries.' But there's a hidden danger with this technique, and it comes down to how readers pronounce those errors in their head as they read them. Everyone does it as they read - they hear what the character is saying as an actual voice talking. The problem is, anything where the words are being 'heard' differently because of the way they're written is going to translate to that reader as some sort of accent - and if that accent is geographically wrong for that character it jars. (That's also why characters in historical novels don't tend to say things like "Whatevs, babe, catch you later, okay?" Unless they're terrible historical novels, of course.)

The lesson I learned from that? If you really must use mis-spellings and shortening of words to convey a character's social status, read your dialogue out loud to hear what it actually sounds like as a voice coming out of a person. I don't know if the author actually did that for Gianni, but if she had I'm sure she couldn't have failed to notice he sounded more Essex Man than Italian Villager. In this case it may have been better to just go with the bad grammar rather than mis-spellings, which are after all phonetic errors (and how on earth do you translate an Italian peasant's phonetic errors in his native language into written English anyway?)

4 - He's called the Romantic LEAD - not the Romantic ON A LEAD.

Now we come to the other secondary POV character, the gentle and caring Doctor Santo (and the one guy given the actual job of being Marcella's Love Interest, even though God knows every other non-villainous human in the book probably tried out for it at the audition stage.) And I'll admit, the takeaway I got from him may well be a lot to do with personal preference. 

Not every romantic lead has to be a badass, I get that. They don't all prove their love by punching out the lights of every evil schmuck who so much as raises a hand to the love of their dreams, or by figuring out ways to protect said love from said schmuck - or even by alerting someone in authority who could do something that this evil schmuckery is going on. Instead, they - um, wring their hands and agonize from a safe distance, refusing to do anything that might jeopardize their position with the evil schmuck in case he blocks access to their lady-love? Especially since they haven't even revealed their true feelings to her yet, because oh my god, how could they ever be worthy of the love of one so perfect and beautiful..?

Mmmmyeah, sorry, but that's why Santo didn't exactly light my fire. If there was some sort of Saint-Off going on in this tale, Marcella and Santo were definitely going head-to-head for most of it. Santo starts off as Minguillo's doctor, treating him for his terrible skin condition, but ends up treating Marcella's smashed-up leg after Minguillo has a game of whack-a-limb with it, which is when Santo first falls hopelessly in love with her. So, his secret crush is permanently crippled by one of his own patients that he already knows is a horrible person - and how does he feel about that? Nope, not angry, that's not what he says. He tells the reader he feels 'sad.'

SAD? 

As in "Darn, that's really put a downer on my day?" Well, cheers for that moral support, hero! He also gets his knickers in a knot because, no matter how 'sad' he feels about his crush's appalling treatment, there's 'absolutely nothing he can do to help her' - and certainly if it involves harming so much as a hair on the head of Minguillo. Of course there bloody is you fool, you're a doctor. Here's how it goes: "I have this tincture for your skin condition, Mr Fasan. We've had some great results with it in other patients, but unfortunately the side-effects include stomach cramps and uncontrollable diarrhoea... you might as well just strap your arse to a toilet for the forseeable future. Sorry about that, but thems the breaks." (Hey, medicine wasn't that advanced back then - he could totally have got away with that...)

Even at the end, when he finally - finally! - starts doing stuff to free Marcella from her dreadful existence in the convent and get rid of Minguillo once and for all (like, after more than three-quarters of the way through the entire book) he beats his breast and agonizes about it as if it means he's turning into the Antichrist. Dude, I know the woman you've fallen for is more angelic than Gabriel, but let her win that contest and get this shizzle done, will you?  At least as a couple they're pretty much made for each other. Proof of that comes when they finally escape to a grotty little shack together, along with manservant Gianni, who asks what on earth they'll all live on now they have no money and Santo has no patients any more. Santo and Marcella's answer - spoken, of course, in unison? "Love!" Uuurrrghh, you bloody idiots..!

Like I said, maybe this is just me, but I like my romantic leads to have a bit more agency. To get more than 'sad' when the love of their life has the crap repeatedly kicked out of her, and to not feel the need to go off and have a cry after doing something that makes a really evil person die in a very long-distance, indirect way.  I mean, look at it this way - most of us wouldn't jump on a chance to actually kill an utter bar-steward in real life, for oh so many reasons. Which is why we like it when fictional characters do that stuff for us. It's cathartic, in a vicariously safe way - "You be the champion mate and we'll be... right over here in the corner, cheering you on every step of the way! Yaaay, go you!" No-one actually dies in real life, but we still get those feel-good vibes from Justice Being Served. 

That's your job, hero-characters. And if you can't handle it - well, maybe you'd be better suited to the plot equivalent of burger-flipper at McDonalds. 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I realise this may sound like I didn't enjoy reading The Book of Human Skin - but I did, and I would certainly recommend it to others. Its shortcomings were more than made up for by the gloriously-drawn villainous characters (along with many interesting minor characters) vividly-described settings and well-researched historical details that made the story feel real. If you like your historical novels on the dark and twisted side, this one certainly ticks the boxes.

Which novels have you read that have changed your writing in fundamental ways? Who are you favourite good guys and bad guys? Feel free to leave a comment below.

6 Clues to Spotting Your 'Screw You' Piece

The creative impulse often starts early.

Have you ever seen - whether on purpose or by some cruel accident - the Tommy Wiseau film The Room?

It's been a staple on many a list of Worst Films since - well, pretty much as soon as it first unleashed itself on an unsuspecting public, I would imagine. I'll admit I haven't see the entire film, just a collection of clips of some of the best/worst bits - but believe me that's more than enough to convince me its place on a Worst Films list is richly deserved. Here is a link to one such collection of clips, if you're brave enough to watch it (heads up, it's Not Safe For Work. Heck, it's probably Not Safe For Life.)

Were you brave - did you watch it? It just about walks on that narrow tightrope of 'so bad it's brilliant,' doesn't it?

Normally a stinker of this magnitude would prompt the question "How in the Hollywood Hells did a film like this ever get made?" However, in the case of The Room that's answered in the opening credits because, as you may have noticed, as well as starring Tommy Wiseau it was also produced and directed by... Tommy Wiseau. Oh, and the writer of the terrible script? Tommy Wiseau again. I wonder if he did the catering too..?

But this supreme example of multitasking also offers us an insight into why this film was made - and I don't just mean so Tommy Wiseau could try out four different career paths at once, in the hope of striking lucky with at least one of them. Because the more I thought about what happened in the story, the more I understood what else was going on behind it.

The Room is Tommy Wiseau's 'Screw You' Piece.

Every writer worth their salt writes a Screw You Piece at least once in their lives - it's pretty much a rite of passage. I wrote my first one when I was fifteen, as I've mentioned in this blog previously (and yes, it has since 'mysteriously' vanished from existing in anywhere but the Cringe Corner of my brain. Best place for it, believe me.) But what exactly is a Screw You Piece?

Filled with the fire and passion of a writer high on a bucketload of long-suppressed emotions, it's a piece of fiction where you pit a thinly-disguised Mary Sue of yourself against LEGO-people representations of all the shysters in your real life who ever Done You Wrong - and you take them down, baby. You destroy their lives and everything they hold dear... in fiction! Except it's really bad fiction that no sane person would ever want to read!

I'm willing to bet Tommy Wiseau got his heart stomped on by some girl he was totally in love with back in his teens. I'm thinking the most likely scenario is that he developed a huge crush on this girl - probably a super-popular, cheerleader-type - which may or may not have been unrequited. No matter either way, because at some point she chose to go out with his best friend instead - a high school jock-type, probably - and broke poor old teenage Tommy's heart in the process.

In the grand scheme of tragic stories that doesn't score high on the So-What-ometer; every angst-ridden teen has gone through something like that at some point. Most have a mini-meltdown in their bedroom for a few weeks and then get on with life again. But for the fledgling wannabe writer there's another way. You can sit on those all-consuming emotions for a few years, letting them bubble and stew, until the moment you're ready to let them burst forth like a Krakatoa of Vitriol. Because then they will have morphed beyond their original pain and lack of fairness into a terrifying monster of global injustice! With laser-beam eyes and everything!

How many of you writers are out there now thinking "Well I've never written anything like that. I don't think..."? How can you know? Well, here are some handy ways to spot if your story is a Screw You Piece...

1 - The Hero is a kind and wonderful human of infinite idealness...
He's a friend to everyone - even the stupid and smelly people. You can tell this, because everyone he meets constantly reminds him he is (unless of course they're horrible evil people, but even they only hate him because, dammit, they wish they could be more like him.) And how can everyone help themselves, because the hero is constantly proving just what an all-round awesome human he is, whether it's buying perfect presents for people, dispensing smart, insightful and compassionate advice and support to everyone (no wonder he's the guy everyone in the story goes to for that sort of thing!) or just regularly being kind to random animals and small children. Oh, and he also gets all the best lines. It's almost like... ooh, I dunno, the reader needs to be really really sure that this guy right here is the one we should all be rooting for...

2 - ...Even when he isn't.
Especially in those moments where he does things that, if some other dude did them, would be the act of a total douchebag, but because it's him it's totally justified because otherwise the plot won't work right and anyway he's the goddamn good guy, remember? He can't do anything wrong, it's against the Laws of Screw You Stories. Look, he's patting that dog's head 'cos he's an all-round cool person and he's gonna get screwed over by the evil people soon so you have to love him pay no attention to the dick behind the curtain...

3 - ...Or alternatively, even when everyone else isn't.
Everyone around her stabs her in the back, says mean and completely unfair things to her, uses and abuses her and just generally fails to treat her with the respect and compassion she so richly deserves. Even the supposed good guys who are supposed to be her friends mess up, goddammit - although, to be fair, they only do it by accident because they're slightly less awesome people than she is. But does she retaliate? Does she stoop to their level and give them a taste of their own medicine? Nooooo! She endures it all with a patient smile and the wisdom of Yoda himself, because she knows that by being so painfully morally superior to everyone else in every way she will be The Better Person, and readers will marvel at her saintliness and know that she is The Chosen One of this story!

4 - The Evil Evil Antagonists are Evil with a Capital EVIL!!!
The antagonists of a Screw You Piece aren't your run-of-the-mill bad guys. Forget about three-dimensional outcasts or damaged individuals who just happened to take the wrong path in life - a Screw You Antagonist has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, because their role in the tale is to be pantomime villain naaaassssttty, bwah ha haaaaaaa! They don't just punch fluffy kittens in the face; they tell the fluffy kittens they're ugly and their mother never loved them, then they sleep with the fluffy kitten's boyfriend and then they kill him afterwards and then they tell the fluffy kitten they just slept with their boyfriend and killed them... and they do it all while laughing gleefully because they just love every second of being so evilly evil..! Ha ha ha ha HAAAAA! *cough, splutter.*

5 - The Hero wins big - and the Villains lose bigger...
But it's all going to be okay in the end for our poor, put-upon protag - and I mean really, super-duper okay. Whatever the Grand Prize at the end of the game show was, they've got it, and in spades. Meanwhile, the villains lives have shattered into so many tiny pieces of despair they're practically a dust cloud - but you're not allowed to feel even the teeniest bit sorry for them because they totally deserved it, remember? How far is reasonable, d'you think, in making sure readers really get the message that Evil Villain has been well and truly crapped on? Well, it seems there's an actual formula for a Screw You Piece. For every disproportionately wonderful thing that happens to Awesome Heroine, an equally disproportionately terrible thing must happen to the Nasty Villains - oh, and bonus points if things of great value to the villains are taken from them and given to the Heroine instead, like a sort of karmic swap shop. So Saint Heroine of Awesome doesn't just get the guy, she gets the villain's guy, and while she becomes rich and famous and somehow even more beautiful and popular, Evil Villain becomes destitute and loses her looks and all her friends, then succumbs to some horrible disease that kills her, and when she dies no-one comes to her funeral and stray dogs come and pee on her gravestone, and then two years later it's concreted over to make way for a multi-storey car park... well okay then, maybe not that last one. A touch too harsh, perhaps.

6 - ...Or alternatively, the Tragic Hero's Tragic End is so tragic even the villains are gutted.
But you could of course be going for full-on melodrama instead. In this scenario it's the beloved hero who loses everything - usually resulting in heart-rendingly poignant death. This can either be in the form of suicide that they are driven to thanks to the evil villain's evilness, or as a result of a selfless sacrifice, made to save an unsuspecting bystander from an evil scheme the villain had planned for the hero. Either way, the demise must be a direct result of the hero being a super-awesome person who was just too awesome for this harsh, cruel world and the villain being a heartless douchebag who deserves to burn in Hell for eternity in the next life. Oh, but not before they've done some suffering before then as well - in the form of tortuous guilt. That's right - the Emperor of Nasty who once got borderline orgasmic pleasure from torturing the innocent hero is now  transformed, their eyes finally opened to their own horribleness. "Nooooooo!!! He's deeeaaaaad, and it's all my fault! I never meant for it to end this way - aaaarrrrgggghhh, WHAT HAVE I DOOOONNNNE?" The takeaway message the evil villain must be visibly seen to take away is "See - look what you did, you bar-steward! Look what you bloody well did!" In real life, of course, such a villain wouldn't give a flying monkeys - in fact he'd most likely view it as 'mission accomplished' and buy himself a celebratory beer. But in the world of Screw You Fiction his character arc must now do a sharp u-turn - and bite him in his own arse.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Whilst all of the above are exaggerated examples, they still form a blueprint for the typical Screw You Piece. And it's clear now what the purpose of such a piece is - a blunt weapon of revenge for the wounded author, hitting back at enemies from the past. If you weren't able to kick them in their actual balls at the time, why not belt them in their fictional ones a few years down the line - and capture that moment forever while you're at it? It doesn't even matter how vindictive you get, because after all, it's not like you're actually walking up to these people and hurting them in real life, is it?

And as a writer, you should write these pieces. You should pour them out of your injured soul and spread their blood and guts all over the page, in order to heal from them and move on from the scars they left on your heart. Not for nothing do they say writing is a form of therapy.

But the one thing you almost certainly shouldn't do is publish them. Because good fiction - the kind of fiction readers want to read - has rationality at its core. Sure, it may be chock-full of emotional events, but the sequence and motivations for those events come from a sound structure of logical cause and effect. And the vengeful heart is not rational or logical - it just wants to lance the blister of pain and let all the nasty gunk out. It feels damn good when you've done it - but it's best done in private. Do you really want the whole world watching the process? And then - even worse - turning away in disgust and saying "Ewww, that's gross?" Because that's what you do when you present a Screw You Piece to the world. Isn't it bad enough that you went through all that pain the first time around, without having everyone laugh and make snarky comments about it years later, and possibly for the rest of your life?

Poor old Tommy Wiseau.

How 'Alien' do we want our Aliens?

There's a wind of change a-blowing through sci-fi at the moment - one that relates in particular to extra-terrestrial life and how it's depicted in fiction.

Science fiction has been around for at least a century, but it wasn't until the 1950s that aliens and UFOs made an impact on the genre. Back then man had yet to land on the moon, poor old Pluto was still a planet and the Milky Way was thought to be The Whole Universe rather than just the astronomical equivalent of a zip-code. So there's no need to beat up ourselves or the sci-fi authors of the time if the depictions of aliens were... a little primitive, to say the least.

Now of course, thanks to space exploration, ever more sophisticated telescopes, satellites and probes and the brain-melting theories and experiments of various NASA boffins, we know so much more. And like the kid who grows up and discovers Santa, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny aren't real, we've all had to adjust our ideas of how proper alien life might have to work in order to actually exist.

(Unless of course you're a conspiracy theorist, in which case carry on believing whatever bullcrap you like and by the way, that tinfoil hat is just so you, dahling..!)

As a result, some sections of the sci-fi community have been railing against the 'standard' alien so beloved of fifty-odd years of popular space fiction, saying that not only is it now known to be nonsensically implausible but a sign of 'lazy and unimaginative writing.' Those who continue to write aliens as little more than humans in neon body-paint with innuendo-inspiring appendages are doing the genre a huge disservice, and they need to stop it, like, now. Get with the (space) program, dudes, and dig deeper for the Weird!

I get that. No honestly, I do. Even in the fairly recent past there have been aliens so badly conceived as to be insulting to a human of average intelligence. Here are just two of the worst examples:

Independence Day - A super-advanced alien race with motherships the size of a suburban town that travel beyond light-speed and are equipped with building-melting lasers have invaded Earth, and even as we speak are merrily destroying key world landmarks they researched on the way (because you don't want to look like a total noob blowing up a McDonalds in Ohio and a Pizza Express in Slough, right?) Oh noes, we're all gonna die! Thank God then, that their inter-galactic fleet of Death Spaceships are still using Microsoft Windows as an operating system, and in their rush to pack enough laser-ammo to LEGO-brick the White House forgot to renew their McAfee subscription! Otherwise that little trojan virus that geeky guy slapped together on his laptop would've been useless for singlehandedly wiping out their entire armada!

Signs - Just imagine for a moment how the Project Planning Meeting might have looked for the uber-powerful, faster-than-lightspeed-spaceship-owning aliens in this particular movie:

ALIEN #1: So... which planet in this little corner of the Milky Way shall we invade and plunder then?
ALIEN #2: Well, how about the one that's over two-thirds covered with a liquid that's pretty much lethal to us?
ALIEN #1: Oooh, sounds like a plan!
ALIEN #3: Um, not wanting to come over all Health and Safety on you guys or anything, but it seems that this lethal liquid is so prevalent that it regularly just falls out of the sky - sometimes for like, days at a time...
ALIEN #2: So..?
ALIEN #3: Well... shouldn't we perhaps consider wearing some sort of protective clothing while we're down there? Y'know, in case that happens?
ALIEN #1: Where are your balls, soldier? If we're gonna go down and invade a planet swirling in stuff that kills us on contact, we're gonna do it butt-naked! 'Cause that's how we roll!

Yes, the above and other examples like them are spectacularly stoopid, and the writers could and should have done better. Yes, now that we have all this new knowledge about how other worlds unlike our own might work, we need to use it to inform our stories about alien races and take them to new levels. Innovate, don't imitate and all that. But at the same time, I feel some of the calls for change could be argued as sacrificing 'authenticity' for story, and we should review each on a case-by-case basis rather than impose new standards across the board. Changes like:

I'm a sexy alien and I know it.
 It's a popular trope - randy alien gets the massive hots for sexy earthling (or sexy alien-of-a-different-planet-to-the-other-alien) and they end up making sweet lurve, sometimes to the point of producing an adorable little hybrid-alien baby to boot. Captain Kirk certainly got close many a time, although fortunately for the Starship Enterprise he also had commitment issues when it came to putting a ring on it.  But could such inter-planetary dalliances ever happen in real life?

Well.... the getting the hots and making sweet lurve part isn't impossible. Humans are certainly kinky little devils who can get all fired up over and doing the most disturbing things (look in any murky corner of the internet for proof of that. On second thoughts, don't. You may be scarred for life.) But, like a union between a human and an animal will not produce a humanimal, the chances of procreation between two different alien races resulting in offspring are close to zero. So hybrid alien babies and plots involving aliens 'spreading their seed' among other alien races (including earthlings) are now considered uncreative as well as unrealistic erotica. (Compared to the other - um, 'realistic' erotica out there? Like, for instance, Dinosaur Porn?)

S'okay, primitive humans - my people memorised the Rosetta Stone on the way here.
In the ultimate example of long-distance language courses, most aliens who rock up to Earth can instantly speak whatever the local lingo for the area happens to be, often quite literally like a native, right from First Contact. Sometimes the explanation for this miracle is little more than a vague hand-wave and a 'just because' from the author, and other times they wheel out whatever name they've devised for the old 'universal translator' thingy (i.e. some technological gizmo/super-weird creature-pathogen possessed by the aliens that just magically translates everything everyone ever says to everyone else forever, instantly and in real time.)

You don't need to be a scientist, rocket or otherwise, to know there's no way this could work in real life, simply because the data still has to be collected, and to do that the different alien races need to spend a decent period of time interacting and then extrapolating that data first. Even websites like Google Translate won't help you instantly converse like a local with someone whose language you don't actually speak - and that's before you take into account that alien worlds may have things, ideas and states of being that have no equivalent in context on Earth, and vice versa.

So again, the feeling is growing that universal translators and instantly multi-lingual aliens are a lazy way of getting round the inevitably real-life language barriers. Especially if these aliens don't even use verbal language to communicate in the first place. And why should they? After all, we're the odd ones out in that sense right here on earth (yes we are - sorry Cat Lady, but Tiddles does not understand every word you say and you do not speak Meow.)

Oh hey, you're just like me - but blue, with random tentacles!
I saved this one for last, since it's potentially the biggest can of worms.

If we've learned anything in the last twenty or so years, it's just how crazy-weird and wonderful other planets are - not just in our own solar system but light years away, in the farthest reaches of the Milky Way and beyond. A frozen waterworld moon! Planets where it rains liquid methane! Planets with storms that last hundreds of years! A moon covered in volcanoes and lava lakes!

Obviously, us puny humans would struggle to last five minutes on worlds like these, so it stands to reason that any sentient natives of those worlds aint gonna be using much of our physiology as a blueprint. We are also carbon-based organisms, because there's a lot of that element on earth and carbon bonds well with lots of other elements, enabling complex structures like sentient life to exist. Other planets with crazy chemical make-ups nothing like ours would have to use other elements with similar properties - silicon is the most popular one touted as a next-best - which means they would probably look and even function very differently to us. And why would creatures on a waterworld need legs, or breathe air? Why would creatures who get their energy via photosynthesis (like plants here on earth) have a digestive system - or even mouths?

So the new, up-to-date message from many quarters of the sci-fi market is clear; writers of alien worlds need to start thinking out of the Star Trek costume box for today's ETs. We're a lot less dumb than we used to be about What's Really Out There (well, except maybe the aforementioned conspiracy theorists) and the guy in the rubber suit won't fool us any more - not even in books. We want proper, faithful depictions of scientifically plausible aliens, and we want them now.

But... do we? Really?

Remember when NASA announced they'd found evidence of life on Mars? The whole world did a collective squee and tuned in for more, panting to know what these critters looked like, what they did, could we bring some back to earth someday and breed them to keep as pets? Until the pictures emerged of these pudgy little worm-y things that NASA told us were so small that this view was actually them magnified about a hundred times, and these ones had probably been dead for about a billion years anyway...

At which point the world did a collective 'humph' and stomped off to - I don't know, play Star Wars Battlefront probably ("at least that's got shootable aliens in it!") Big red buzzer for the non-interesting aliens!

And that's the risk fiction writers take when they try to create 'scientifically realistic' aliens. Sure, they might be spot-on, factually accurate recreations of life that could exist on the fantastical planet of their imaginings - but would anyone want to read about a race of sentient snot-balls whose only form of expression is to spit snot-globs and change colour? For 200-plus pages?

No. So we're going to have to boot our imaginary aliens further up the evolutionary ladder - to be, at the very least, on a developmental par with us humans. And luckily, the boffins of the world have been thinking about that too, and devised a wish list of key characteristics such a species would need to possess in order to dominate their environment the way we do:

Sensory organs - all the better to see, hear, touch, taste and smell. The last three can be achieved a number of ways, as is the case on earth, (a snake 'smells' with its tongue and its skin provides the sense of touch, for example) but for seeing and hearing the requirements are more specific. For complex tasks like building stuff, throwing and catching and manipulating tools in general you need stereo vision - that is, at least two eyes next to each other, facing forward. Meanwhile, binaural hearing offers the greatest chance of survival, enabling a creature to not only hear sounds from all around them, but also to pinpoint the direction of that sound. This is why most highly evolved creatures on earth have two ears - one on each side of their head.

Opposable digits - Aint much civilisation gonna happen without these. This requires at least two twiggy appendages that can move independently of one another while also being able to function together as a unit, where pressure between them can be controlled (enabling gripping and releasing.) This is why apes, monkeys and humans can do complex things with tools, while dogs and manatees just try and eat them.

Highly-evolved socio-communicative skills - No man is an island, so the saying goes - and the same would be true for ambitious aliens. You want to get shizzle done, you need teamwork and an ability to communicate your plans that goes beyond pointy hands and grunts. The reason we can make the wide range of complicated sounds that constitute 'talking' is all to do with the configuration of our tongues, teeth and larnyx, and - get this - our upright standing/walking posture plays a part too. An ability to pass on complicated, non-instinctive information when we're not around to do it personally is also a bonus - which is why us humans invented writing, music and art. But first we needed big brains, and once we'd got one of those it took priority over muscles when it came to feeding our bodies. This is why most of us aren't naturally as huge as an elephant, pumped as a silverback gorilla or as fast as a cheetah; all the fuel that would go into priming the muscles required for those traits gets diverted instead to our massive brains. It also means they'd need to eat actual food to survive - particularly, but not limited to, proteins or something with protein-esque qualities- so no purely photosynthesising life-forms if you want them intelligent, I'm afraid.

So taking all of the above into account, it would seem the ideal alien for interesting and believable fiction would need at least five senses, forward-facing seeing organs next to each other, hearing organs on either side of its head or body, at least two opposable digits, flexible tongues and larynxes, an upright posture, a digestive system that can utilise proteins or an otherworldly equivalent and large brains at the expense of being pretty small, slow-moving and not overly strong.

Wow. That sounds a lot like... us!

You could argue that of course we'd believe that, because humans have proved throughout history that we think we're smashing, the best things ever invented. But even if you're not a scientist, it's hard to argue that the characteristics listed above aren't a massive advantage that mark us out from all the other creatures on our planet. So writers can feel justified in continuing to use them as a starting point in creating their own aliens. And there's still scope for turning up the weird. Why stop at just two eyes, for instance, when you could have three, four or even multiple mini-eyes like a fly? They might need an upright posture - but who says they have to have legs? And when it comes to how they procreate - well, that's between you and your inner therapist, my dears....

So when it comes to creating aliens that won't get the pointy finger of 'outdated cliche' thrust in their face, there's no need to panic; there are plenty of scientific reasons for them to not be so wildly wacky they no longer resemble humans in any way. But there are other reasons too, and they are to do with why we read stories in the first place - about anything, not just aliens. We want to read about shared experiences, to step into another's shoes for a while and walk their path through life, and to do that we need to see how, why and where those characters are like us. We want to laugh, cry, rage, fear, love and hate with them as they lead us through their story.

And it's darn near impossible to do that with a non-talking, quivering blob of goo.

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So what would you add to an alien to level it up from Rubber-suited Guy? What cliche do you think should be taken away? Feel free to put your ideas in the Comments below.

How Not Writing Your Novel Can Sometimes Help You Write Your Novel

It's the Easter school holidays here in UK-Land now. Which means...

*drumroll and fanfare - probably played on a kazoo...*

'Excuses-for-not-writing-of-the-busy-mum-variety' - time!

Put down that tiny violin please, it's not necessary. I worked through my guilt in the week leading up to this one, so by the time it arrived I was already down with having a week 'semi-off.' This is partly because my husband also had a week off, so I knew it was pointless trying to adhere to my usual writing targets. I'd just get my inner Gollum on when I couldn't meet them - "we didn't mean to be bad, preciouss... You failed ussss! Ussselesssss little hobbit!"  So.... it's fine. Really. Not a problem at all.

As well as Easter, Spring has also... sort of started. It's a bit hard to tell here in the UK, what with random raging storms and torrential rain still rearing their spoilsporty heads (I have at least two friends who lost their greenhouses in Storm Katie this week. Yep, we've started naming our storms too, just to make them feel that bit more important.) But the calendar says it's here, and for me that means getting my allotment ready for this years crops - so yeah, lots of digging over plots and sowing and potting up of seedlings. But there's something about losing yourself in the rhythm of digging and garden-pottering that gives your brain time to ponder over the mechanics and machinations of a novel-in-progress, and I've solved many a twisty plot-knot while up to my elbows in mud and weeds.

Equally, while I may not have contributed as much to the actual word-count of Redemption this week, I have found another way to work on it that's really helped me in ways I could never have imagined, so I thought I'd share it here.

I first discovered this strategy by accident a few weeks ago. Neither my husband nor my son enjoy accompanying me on a food shopping trip at the best of times, never mind on a Saturday morning when there's serious gaming time to catch up on, so I usually end up going into town on my own and leaving them to it. However, this week I went in an hour earlier than I normally do, and took a big notebook and pen with me in a rucksack, so I'd have an hour to myself for sitting in a nice cafe and scribbling with a coffee and a snack beside me. I've done this several times in the past, and even talked about it previously in this blog as part of a process for unsticking a stuck bit in your novel. This time I didn't have a specific problem with anything in Redemption, but I did feel as if my progress was slowing down a bit, so, without really thinking about it too much, I opened my notebook, stuck the date at the top of the page and started writing about it.

I started by writing about the scene I'd just finished writing; what I'd changed from my outline and why, how I felt about that, and what else I might now have to change further along in the story as a result. Then I wrote about the scene I was going to write next; where I would stick to my outline and where I might deviate from it and try another angle. As the debating and deliberating occurred in my head I wrote that down too, transcribing each little internal question and argument along with the mental responses that followed. It was part free-writing, part journalling - and indeed, by the time I had written a full A4 page in this manner it did look very much like a diary entry. Along the way I was able to make crucial decisions and answer nagging questions I'd had in the back of my mind about those particular scenes, which I was able to tackle as soon as I sat down in front of my computer to work on them.

So, when next Saturday rolled around, I decided to do the same thing again. By this time, I was at the stage of writing a scene that would need to change as a result of the scenes I'd changed last week. Not a problem; I had all my scribblings from last week's diary entry as notes to help with figuring out those changes. Again I wrote down all the internal debating as well as the solutions I came up with, even if they seemed trivial or irrelevant (or simply repeating what I'd written in my previous entry.)

And as the weeks have passed, I've found this to be exponentially more helpful with each new journal entry (I'm doing at least two a week now, even if that means doing some of them at home rather than in a comfy cafe.) It's not just the nuts-and-bolts decisions and outline alterations that have been useful to record; expressing the doubts and questions still to be answered has been just as useful too. Particularly since the act of writing them down seems to ignite a kind of slow-cooker process in my brain so that, by the time I come to write the next journal entry, the answer is at least half-formed already as I address it again.

When I worked as a software technician for an avionics company they had a standard practice that was very similar - the Project Log Book. Each employee had their own, and was required to record details of whatever code they were working on, progress made and things that still needed to be done to complete it. Of course this was a software environment where only the dry, technical data was to be recorded - putting in your feelings about what you had to do and internally debating whether it was the 'right' thing to do would have been somewhat frowned upon. That may have been why I didn't take the Project Log Book ethos all that seriously when I worked there (mine wasn't just written emotionally, it was filled with silly/cynical cartoons expressing those emotions.)

But now I can see how the basic idea of the software environment Project Log Book, combined with the freedom afforded by a diary format to express the accompanying emotions, can be invaluable to a writer. Done regularly, it offers deeper insights than an outline, helps you devise a plan for each writing session before you sit down to begin it and - best of all - creates a record you can look back over, to observe thought patterns for those particularly troublesome parts of a work-in-progress. And unlike random scribbles jotted down on the nearest piece of paper as and when inspiration strikes - which are just as useful in their own way and not to be dismissed - this type of W-I-P Journal works best as a one-stop location where all decisions and feelings about the project are recorded and collated over time.

Try it, is all I can say. It may well help you as much as it's helped me.

3 Not-Obvious Writing Gremlins that Can Really Mess up Your Stories

The world of writing is awash with rules, and some are shouted louder and more often than others. Never use adverbs, avoid passive voice like the Ebola virus, show don't tell, etcetera etcetera... if you haven't heard these at least once in your life before, trust me, you will the moment you emerge from the nuclear bunker you must have been living in up until now.

Of course rules aren't always a bad thing. The three above are actually good, when used sensibly and as and when applicable rather than obeyed 100% of the time, forever to the power of infinity. In terms of writing they were invented for quality control, to help writers create the best work they could so that readers could have the best experience... well, reading it. And that, ultimately, is what us writers strive for (isn't it?)

But some of the little glitches that crop up in stories don't really fall into the category of 'rules.' They're more like gremlins, i.e. only a problem in certain circumstances (like - um, getting them wet or feeding them after midnight? Okay, bad analogy...)

At first glance, you may look at the following list and, for at least some of them, think "Seriously? Who's going to notice that?" But that's how they do their damage. Readers - especially readers who aren't writers, and therefore haven't been bombarded with a metric tonne of rules and regs about writing - will still feel their effects, but they won't know why. 'I don't know, something about the way it was written just irked me,' is the usual vibe that's communicated by those who tossed a book aside because they just "couldn't get into it," or "it bored me." Leaving aside examples like those who try to read a Barbara Cartland novel when they hate Romantic Fiction,  many readers feel this way because something in the writing keeps knocking them out of the story world and back into the I'm-reading-a-book world. And these little gremlins might not be obvious, even to the reader, but they're there....

1 - Oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah.... jeez, this tune is boring.

We all know about the umpteenth Deadly Writing Sin of Repetition. Poor old E.L. James got called out on it in her Fifty Shades series, with her heroine's 'Inner Goddess'-ing and 'Oh My'-ing. (Every writer in the history of forever has that problem by the way, before we all get too smug. The only difference between us is how ruthlessly we edit our pet phrases out of our work before it sees the light of day.) Other variations on this theme include overuse of the same type of body language; that permanently windswept hero might fuss with his hair in a million different ways, but when he does it to express every emotion he ever has, in every possible circumstance... well, he's got bigger problems than just looking like a raging narcissist. These types of repetition are obvious, because the words are acting more like pictures for the reader, and they're seeing that same damn picture over and over again.

But a more subtle form of repetition is more like music, in that it messes with the rhythm of sentences - most often dialogue, over paragraphs, scenes and even whole chapters. It's a bit like listening to a Black Lace song (click on that link at your own risk.) Once you've heard one verse and a chorus you really don't feel a need to hear any more... but still it goes on... It happens when you use the same sentence structure for each line of dialogue, over and over again. Here are some examples:

EXAMPLE 1:
"I never killed your wombat," said Jane.
"But you were the last one to see him alive," said Tom.
"That doesn't mean I killed him," said Jane.
"Jane loved Flopsy like her own child," said Barry.

EXAMPLE 2:
"Well," said Mary, "how are we going to open this tub of Pringles?"
"We can't," said Harry, "when both of us have broken our nails."
"I wish," said Mary, "we'd never gone to that cowboy manicurist."
"But then again," said Harry, "she did give us great spray-tans."

EXAMPLE 3:
John straightened his tie. "I'll show that clown mascot who's boss," he said.
Susan patted his arm. "Ronald McDonald won't know what hit him," she said, smiling.
Ted picked up the briefcase. "You're supposed to meet him at noon. What time is it now?"
Miranda looked at her watch. "Eleven twenty-five," she said.

Did you feel the plodding rhythm as you read them? Each example may have had different approaches to where they put the dialogue tag/action beat, but they were always in the same place, over and over again. After just a couple of lines it starts to sound like a nursery rhyme, which is only fine if that's what you're writing. To avoid this effect, it's better to mix and match where you put your tags and beats (and indeed, miss them out entirely when it's obvious who's speaking anyway.) However, this can be difficult when you have more than two people in conversation at once, and is when Example 3 is most likely to occur. Readers need to know exactly which character is saying which lines of dialogue, and in cases where a two-plus group aren't 'taking turns' to speak, putting the tag/beat anywhere other than right at the beginning of the dialogue can feel too late to impart that vital information. Making your characters' speech patterns more distinct is the key to this problem, so readers can guess by the tone and word usage who's talking. And you can cheat it a little bit by having a couple of non-tagged back-and-forths between two characters every now and then before letting a third jump in. You can also mix up Example 2 and Example 3 placements; as long as the dialogue before the tag/beat is short (just one or two words) the reader won't have to wait too long to figure out who's talking.

2 - "What did you do to the house, Honey?"

 'For weeks Hermione had been coming in through the front door and flopping straight onto her living-room sofa after a hard day's work at TaxidermyRUs. Until that fateful day... she magically acquired a hallway! It wasn't there before, but at some point between the end of Chapter Five and the beginning of Chapter Six the Builder Fairies paid a secret visit, and now she has to navigate an entire new set of interior architecture before she even sees her beloved sofa. As if she didn't have enough problems, what with the gravity-warp from that giant wormhole threatening to swallow up Chingford in less than a week from now...'

Do not think for a minute that readers won't notice something like that. There are Star Trek fans out there who complain when one of the redshirts has 'the wrong insignia for their rank' on their uniform, so you betcha life there'll be readers who notice when you doof up with the layout of your settings. Of course there'll be many who don't, but for those who do it not only yanks them out of your story-world as they try to recalibrate, but they lose a little trust in you as an author. After all, if you can't get little things like that right, how are you going to get us to the finale of this novel in one piece?

If you have real-life settings in your story your job is slightly easier, since there are ready-made photos, maps and even floor plans of most places thanks to the wonder of sites like Google. For made-up locations, you'll need to draw your own maps. Yes you will, don't look at me like that. I've had to draw my own map of the secret underground base in Redemption, so that a) I could figure out where all the different areas should be and b) so I can then remember where I've put them. I spent hours on that map and looked at it loads of times since, but even now I still have to refer to it to find out if, say, my characters really would have to walk past the lab to get from the mess hall to the library.

Obviously it's nice to get all that info right first time... but you won't, so don't sweat it on the early drafts. Make it a bona fide editing pass in its own right later on, where you can go through a more polished draft looking specifically for those kinds of doofs. You'll be glad you did - and so will any eagle-eyed Trekkers who read your work. (Not 'Trekkies,' by the way. They don't like that, apparently.)

3 - Behold, the amazing multi-tasking superpowers of Octopus-Man!

'Kargo the Barbarian hacks and slashes his way across the battlefields of Doodah, his battered shield smeared with goblin blood and his sword all covered in entrails. When he finally storms his way into Castle Dropnuts he spies the fair lady Britnea, and is overcome with love for her. "Fair lady," he says, "forgive me for my intrusion. I may be naught but a lowly Barbarian, but I am still capable of rocking your world. Please accept this gift as a token of my love." She gasps and blushes as he presents her with a single, perfect red rose...'

Whoa, hang on a minute, where did that come from? Was he hiding that rose up his kilt somewhere? (And with all those thorns.... ooh, doesn't bear thinking about...) And what happened to his hulking great sword and shield?

Okay, that was a bit of a daft example, but sometimes when a character has a prop of some kind and there's a long portion of action or dialogue happening, it can be easy to forget that, until you say otherwise, they're still holding and probably even using that prop. The same thing can happen with having them do some mildly strenuous activity like chopping wood for the stove outside the front door, and then in the next moment they're somehow in a chair on the porch, chillaxing and cracking open a beer.

It happens most often when you have long sections of dialogue and interaction between characters, where it's easy to get so lost in the drama of what's being said you forget what they were actually doing before the conversation started. So it pays to make a note of what each character is doing and holding at the start of each section, and make sure you either keep those details consistent or add in the necessary 'transition business' if you want them doing and holding something else by the end of it.  You don't have to get silly about it - "Ted put down his cup on the table that was next to him and then got up out of the chair he was sitting in so that he could walk over to the closed door on the other side of the room before putting his hands on the handle and opening it..." - but unless your characters are wizards don't have them conjuring things out of thin air, turning them into something else in the blink of an eye or making them randomly disappear while they teleport to the other side of the building.

I'm sure there are some people out there reading this and thinking "this is pretty pedantic stuff here - nobody cares about little things like these, surely?" They do. Just look at some of the one-star reviews on sites like Amazon and GoodReads. It's easy to dismiss those who rage about the continuity errors in films and tv shows as nerds and obssessives - but the bloopers they spot only appear on screen for a few seconds at best. The average reader can take far longer within the page to spot any of your continuity errors - which means they don't need to be uber-observant to pick them up. The result? Many more chances for you to look like the prize wally if you don't take the time to check that stuff before you publish your masterpiece.

What other Gremlins would you add to this list? Do you have pet doof-ups that you routinely make in early drafts? Feel free to share in the Comments.

So... Why Are We Doing This Writing Thing Again?

If you're a writer, have you ever asked yourself "Why do I write?" Or does it seem like a redundant question?

I'll admit it's not one I've given much thought to in the past. Why do I write? Might as well ask 'why do I eat chocolate?' or 'why do I listen to music?' So perhaps it was rather ignorant of me to assume most other writers felt the same way. After all, the process is not always rainbows and fluffy kittens, so it's gotta be something pretty powerful that keeps you showing up at the page. Especially during those times when everything you write makes you feel like a dyslexic toddler trying to bang out War and Peace. With a crayon. On a pebble-dashed wall.

But then I saw two posts on a writing forum I frequent, from two different members, in the same week. And, on the surface at least, they seemed to be making two very different points about writing and writers.

The first was just a simple, one-line statement: "Everyone can write, but not everyone is a writer." That was it -  nothing more in actual words, but the added sentiment of "discuss" was certainly implied. And discussed it was. Of course it wasn't the first time I'd heard the view expressed - in fact, anyone who's been writing for longer than about ten minutes usually gets to hear it by at least the eleventh minute. Many people who responded to the post shared the view that the very act of writing is enough to make that person a writer, and objected to the implication that only those who were 'good at writing' had the 'right' to award themselves the title of Writer.

Because therein lies the problem. How do you quantify what 'good' writing is? E.L. James and Stephanie Meyer, to name but two, have been repeatedly mauled by both literary critics and 'discerning book lovers' (whoever they are) for their allegedly terrible prose and awful characters, but they've sold millions of copies of their books so they must be doing something right for a hell of a lot of people. While at the other end of the spectrum Hemingway is regularly lauded as a literary genius, but if you don't like his style (and I'll confess to being one of those who doesn't) you're not going to enjoy reading his books no matter how super-awesomely frickin' amazing he apparently is. So what if it had been up to me and people who shared my views to determine whether or not Hemingway was 'allowed' to call himself  a writer? What if all those publishers who initially rejected the Harry Potter stories also got carte-blanche to tell J.K. Rowling "Oh yeah, and, because we don't like these books we also don't think you should consider yourself a writer anymore. Sorry and all that, but' y'know - not everyone's got the X-Factor?"

So this post received quite a clear, majority answer; if you write, you're a writer, and any implication of there being some sort of 'standard' that must be met before you're allowed to think of yourself as a 'proper' writer is elitist and pretty much unenforceable anyway.

The second post, however, was a little more complex, and definitely harder to unpack. The Poster said he'd been writing for just over four years and had learned a lot about writing in that time - from books, courses and online websites and forums just like this one. He'd also recently been reading a lot of works by other authors - authors he'd always admired and were well-regarded. And he felt that, after all these four-plus years of learning and writing, his own work was as good - and in some cases, better - than works written by these other authors. In short, he felt he'd learned all he could possibly learn about writing and couldn't get any better at it than he currently was. So... should he quit writing altogether?

If your reaction to that was "whaaaaat?" don't worry - so was mine. Why in the holy heck would you quit doing something you thought you were - not just good at, but better at than people who were already successful in that field? That's not so much dropping the mic as whacking yourself between the eyes with it and then falling offstage because you can't see properly. As the thread progressed it seemed what he was really saying was that, after his four years of learning all he could possibly learn about writing and reaching a position where he felt he was at least as good as most of the authors he admired, he still wasn't published or anywhere near as successful as those authors. And with that in mind, if he really couldn't get any better at writing because he was as good as he could ever get... what was the point in carrying on? Why waste his time continuing with his writing if apparently no-one was noticing how talented he already was?

A lot of people pointed out the most obvious thing to him; four years is a ridiculously short time in the growth of a writer. In fact, in terms of human development it's comparable to reaching potty-training stage. You wouldn't expect a four-year-old to beat Roger Federer at Wimbledon - even a super-talented one - and it's the same for writers, because there's a lot more going on under the surface than what you see on a page of any author's work. Successful authors become so because they make what they do look easy - but they only get to that stage after years of hard slog. And none of them would ever say they've learned everything they could possibly learn about the craft - nope, not even Stephen King or J.K. Rowling.

But as I thought more deeply about these two posts, I realised that, even though they appeared to be offering different perspectives on writing, the sentiment behind them was actually the same: if you can't be among the elite of writers there's no point in even trying to be one. Forget about doing it for the love of writing, or because you feel you have things to say - commercial success and recognition is the only thing that legitimises your work.

If you really believe this - if this sounds like your reason for becoming a writer - you are, I'm afraid, setting yourself up for a lot of frustration and disappointment. At the very least in the early years of your journey as a writer - and, maybe, for the majority of it. Because success and recognition isn't guaranteed, for any writer - no matter how talented they are. For every famous writer like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling, who are able to make being a best-selling author their actual career, there are hundreds more who make so little from their book sales that they still have full-time, non-author jobs to pay their rent and bills (or a supportive spouse with a reasonably well-paid job.) These authors have no shortage of loyal fans who love their work... but in terms of money earned from that work there are probably part-time shop assistants who earn a higher wage than they can ever make in book royalties.

I can't help wondering if the two posters of those forum threads consider those kinds of authors fools. Would they tell them to give up? "Face it, you're obviously not good enough at what you do to make a proper career out of it, so stop wasting your time and find some other vocation you can make real money from." Thing is, if writing is in your blood, heart and soul it's not that simple. Because here's the point that those two posters are missing; those of us who love being writers don't write for the money or the fame. I'm not saying we don't want those things (most of us do, even if we don't admit it) but it's not what drives us to write. If we could look into a crystal ball and see our future, and that future showed us we were never going to make any money or get any fame for the stuff we write - well, we'd still write anyway. Because we'd have to. It's who we are and what we do.

I used to say that I would never, ever tell anyone they should quit writing. But after reading these two posts I've changed my mind. Now, if anyone comes to me and says "Should I quit writing?" I'm going to say the following:

"Yes. If you're asking yourself this question - and asking it honestly, rather than in that cringey fishing-for-compliments way people sometimes do - you should quit writing. If you're thinking "that £1.99 Kindle book I read said writing books was a quick and easy way to make money, but I'd have earned more working in McDonalds by now," then definitely quit. Quit it completely. And then see how that goes...

"If after a while you feel like a weight has been lifted, or you find some other hobby or creative outlet that fills you with more joy or brings greater rewards than writing ever did, you'll know you made the right decision. You were dead right to quit. Enjoy your new, writer-free life!

"But if you feel like a part of you is missing, like some of the colours have gone from your life, and that you keep finding yourself going back to your notebooks or computer and jotting stuff down 'just for fun'... you'll know you can't stop yourself from being a writer. It's who you are. You might never be a famous one, or a rich one - but you are a writer all the same."

If a writer is what you are, quitting is not an option for you, any more than breathing. So don't quit being a writer. Instead, quit building up a list of expectations for what a writer is 'supposed' to be. Contrary to what the media would have you believe - in this Tweeting, FaceBooking, selfie-posting, Strictly X-Factor's Got Talent-saturated society we live in - fame and fortune are not mandatory qualifications for being a proper, bona fide writer. Hell, you don't even have to wait until you've had work published before you can officially wear that Writers' Badge.

It's not about the money. It's not about the fame. So if that's all you want from writing... well, there are quicker and easier ways to get both of those these days. Being a writer aint a job, sweetie, it's a way of life. But a rich and rewarding one - even without the cash and the celebrity status - if it's what you're born to do.