The Well-Presented Manuscript: Just What You Need to Know to Make Your Fiction Look Professional

The Well-Presented Manuscript

Just What You Need to Know to Make Your Fiction Look Professional

by Mike Reeves-McMillan

Copyright ©2015, 2020, 2022 by Mike Reeves-McMillan. All rights reserved.

A C-Side Media production.

Cover by Matt Davis of Rock and Hill Studio.

If you’re reading this book, you’re probably a writer yourself, so I don’t need to go into a long spiel about piracy and compensating the author, do I? Good.

Dedicated to my favourite teacher, the late Dr. Scott Allen, who nurtured my love of language through his entertaining and memorable lectures.

The aardvarks are for him.

Contents

Introduction

Conventions

Style and Voice

The Five Most Common Errors

Missing Past Perfect Tense

May versus Might

The Coordinate Comma

The Vocative Comma

Plural Possessives

Basic Building Blocks, Sentence Structure and Punctuation

Nouns and Pronouns

Subject, Verb and Object

Nouns and Noun Phrases

Appositive Identification

Compound Nouns

Unusual Plurals

Pronouns

Capital Errors

Titles, Terms of Address, and Names

Placenames

Names of Things

Abbreviations

Apostrophe Wrangling

1. Possessive Apostrophes

2. Abbreviating Apostrophes

So What About Pronouns?

Special Phrases and Special Cases

Adjectives and Adverbs

Adjectives

Adverbs

Verbs

Number

Tense

Using Active Verbs

Prepositions

Between

Prepositions in Idioms

Into and in to

Sentence Patterns

Pattern 1: Independent Clause

Pattern 2: Compound Sentence

Pattern 3: Complex Sentence

Punctuation Summaries

Colons and Semicolons

Hyphens

Dashes and Parentheses

Ellipses

Ending a Sentence

Dialog

Dialog Tags

Beats

Varying Tags

Tag Order

Tagging Before, During and After

Punctuating Dialog

Commas

Commas Not to Use

Commas to Use

Commas to Use Sometimes

Avoiding Other Common Errors

Common Word Confusions

Double Letters and Pronunciation

Eggcorns and Mangled Idioms

Jargon

Common Typos

The Perils of Revision

Spotting the Typos

Research

Names, Titles and Words

Real Life and Fiction

Tropes

Common Errors

Blocking

Continuity

Timelines

Submitting to Editors

Standard Manuscript Format

Other Resources

Websites

Podcasts

Video

Craft Books

Fiction

Contact

Introduction

More than 90% of what gets submitted to editors—both fiction magazine editors and publishing house editors—is rejected as soon as a reader sees it, often because it doesn’t meet basic standards of competence in presentation and language use. This book gives you a guide to meeting those standards.

Meeting them will help with self-publishing too, since discerning readers also reject books that don’t meet them. A review, or, even worse, multiple reviews that mention basic errors in your prose can do a lot of harm to your sales.

Even worse, you may be missing out on sales because you’re making simple mistakes in your blurb, and putting people off before they read a word of your book. I can’t count how many books I’ve dismissed sight unseen because an error in the blurb suggested that the book would contain many more distracting errors. A blurb is a job interview. It pays to dress nicely.

Beyond just getting past the gatekeepers (including readers and reviewers), developing the skill of communicating clearly with correct punctuation, grammar and usage will help you become a better writer. A musician plays notes; a great musician knows why those notes, in that relationship, work together, and what effect that will have on the audience, because a great musician thinks about the notes, and plays only the ones he or she means to play. For us as writers, words are our notes.

I review a lot of books, and I see the same easily corrected errors over and over. In fact, I have a habit of marking the errors I see as I’m reading, and since I do this on my Kindle, I have a record. Since I first got a Kindle in late 2011, I’ve noted more than 25,000 errors in close to a thousand books, most of them published (some I read before publication in order to review them), a good many of them traditionally published. I worked it out once at more than two dozen errors per book, on average, which I’ve noticed on a casual read-through, ranging from one or two or even zero errors at one end of the quality spectrum to well over 100 at the other. And as part of writing this book, I’ve analysed them to figure out which basic problems are most common. Many of the examples I’ll give come directly from those books, with character names and other identifying details anonymized; I’m not setting out to name and shame the authors, just because they don’t know a rule.

A lot of available guides that are otherwise useful are either in blog format, providing somewhat scattershot advice with no overarching plan, or else are too comprehensive, giving advice on every little thing so that you have to sift through it to find what’s relevant to your needs. I aim to hit the Goldilocks zone between the two.

So here’s some of what I plan to cover in this book:

Style and voice, and why I’m setting out to help you write invisibly.

The most common errors I see fiction authors making, and how to avoid them.

Understanding how a sentence fits together, so you know how to punctuate it.

How to use the various punctuation marks correctly.

The special conventions of dialog and its punctuation.

The most common word confusions, typos, and other errors, and how to check for them.

Names, words and research and avoiding common factual and continuity errors.

When it comes to punctuation, I’ll work in two directions. First, I’ll talk about how the structure of the sentence tells you how to punctuate it. Then I’ll go through the different punctuation marks and talk about when to use each one. That will involve some repetition, but repetition is good for learning, and presenting the material in two different ways will, I hope, make it clearer and easier to grasp.

Note that this book isn’t about writing the actual story, which is another set of skills above and beyond these. It’s about meeting the basic standards that will get your story read in the first place.

The aim is to provide just enough information to help you look competent, so I won’t go into the finer details in some cases. For example, there are some arcane comma rules that are really only known or understood by advanced editors and grammarians, and if you don’t observe them, nobody but a serious pedant will dock you points. I’ll point to places where you can find details about those rules if you want—if your comma usage is generally good already, knowing these rules will make it excellent—but if you struggle with the basics of commas, you don’t need to confuse yourself with these more advanced rules.

Does every editor care about these things? No—as poorly-edited books from major publishing houses demonstrate—but most will. Does every reader? No—as five-star reviews for books that are full of errors demonstrate—but some will. If you want to communicate I am basically professional so that people who read your writing won’t be distracted by simple language mistakes and can concentrate on your story, this book is here to help you achieve that standard.

There are several good grammar sites around, most notably Grammar Girl (http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl), but they do tend to focus on theory and get deep into the detail, and they’re for a wide audience, not just writers of fiction. The famous Strunk & White is, I’m afraid, overcomplicated, outdated, and doesn’t always follow its own (sometimes bad) advice. Other guides are mainly oriented towards business or academic writing. This guide is written by a fiction writer—one who’s also a former book editor and technical writer, and a current book reviewer and beta reader—as a practical tool for other fiction writers.

I use grammatical terminology throughout, not in an attempt to make your eyes glaze over, but for two practical reasons. Firstly, having a term for something helps me to talk about it clearly, and secondly, if you want to look up more information on a rule, it helps to know the formal name for it. Don’t worry about learning the terminology; there isn’t going to be an exam. Use it if it helps, ignore it if it doesn’t help.

Very few places appear to be teaching these skills, so it’s no wonder so few authors have them. Certainly, my degree in English language and literature didn’t cover basic writing mechanics, and based on the state of a number of books I’ve read by people who have creative writing degrees, creative writing courses don’t either. I’ve even seen several books written by high school English teachers who make very basic errors, which suggests three things to me: firstly, this material isn’t in the curriculum, or they’d know it; secondly, if students are making the same errors, the teachers don’t know enough to correct them; and thirdly, they’re modelling incorrect practice to their students. It’s therefore not surprising that I see these errors cropping up over and over in published fiction. Nobody ever taught the authors how to do it correctly.

I’ve used the word correctly there, and that needs some discussion. Like most people with formal education in the subtleties of the English language, I am more what is called a descriptivist than a prescriptivist. A descriptivist describes how language is actually used, and a prescriptivist attempts to prescribe (lay down the law about) how it should be used, sometimes making up rules that few people actually follow. Descriptivists acknowledge that language changes as usage changes.

However, even a descriptivist can regard some usages as mistakes, such as when two similar words are confused, or when the normal punctuation conventions that most people observe are not followed. Being a descriptivist doesn’t mean that any usage at all is considered correct usage. Only usage that is widespread and general is considered correct usage. What I am setting out to teach you in this book, then, are the widespread, general standards of English usage.

Also, if usage determines correctness, I want to do all I can to encourage usage that makes sense, that preserves the distinctions between similar words so that our vocabulary remains rich and flexible, and that is easy for readers to follow.

Conventions

Throughout the book , wherever I give an example, unless I embed it in the sentence describing it, it will be indented from the left margin. If the example is of something that’s incorrect, it will be marked with a strikethrough , so you’re left in no doubt that you shouldn’t do it.

I’ve marked each error based on how common it is, as follows:

**** Extremely common. Even some people who make few errors sometimes make this one.

*** Common. I see this error all the time.

** Uncommon. I see this error occasionally.

* Rare. I’ve only seen this error once or twice.

You might wonder why I bother to even mention the rare errors. There are two reasons.

First, if one person has made the error there are probably others.

Second, rare errors, by definition, are the ones where most people know the rule. This means that the one- and two-star errors are ones that most readers will notice, so it’s especially important not to make them. If you make a four-star error, many editors won’t even notice (though some definitely will).

Three-star errors—the ones that many people make, but not the people who really know what they’re doing—are probably the most important to focus on, though. There’s a high likelihood that you’re making them, and getting them right will lift you above the crowd.

Style and Voice

In order to explain the main purpose of this book, I need to talk about style and voice.

Style is about the choices you make between valid alternatives. For example, do you use parentheses, dashes, or commas to set off a clause that interrupts the main sentence, or do you not put such clauses in at all? All of these are valid choices, and if you make one particular choice consistently, it becomes part of your style.

Voice is largely, but not completely, made up of the sum of all your style choices. It also takes in point of view, word choice, and a few less definable qualities. This is what tells us that we are reading Ursula K. Le Guin rather than Neil Gaiman, however similar their writing might be in some ways.

Voice is also something that belongs to characters, as well as authors, and one of the skills that raises authors above mediocrity is the ability to give their characters distinctive voices. Again, point of view, the things they notice and talk about, has a lot to do with it, but so do stylistic choices. I often make my characters sound less like me by having them choose a word which wasn’t the one I first thought of.

George Orwell, in a famous essay, spoke about language which, like clear glass, was there for people to look through, and other kinds of language which were like stained glass: designed to be looked at. In fact, there’s a spectrum of style, which Jeff Vandermeer sums up well in Wonderbook. (I recommend that book, by the way, which is about all the writing skills that I don’t cover here: how to find ideas and develop them into stories. You’ll find full details in the Other Resources section at the back of this book.)

Vandermeer mentions four levels of style, which, as I’m sure he’d be the first to acknowledge, are points on a spectrum rather than distinct steps.

Minimal or stark style has hardly any detail or description, leaving a lot to the reader’s imagination. Done badly, it’s dull and unengaging, emotionally distant and ploddingly literal. Done well, it has the beauty of simplicity and purity.

Invisible or normal style aims to disappear, like Orwell’s clear glass window. It’s the most common style of writing, particularly for commercial fiction. Although it doesn’t sound the way people actually talk, because we’re used to fictional conventions we think of it as sounding like the voices of real, ordinary people. Done badly, it’s mediocre, bland and lacklustre. Done well, it lets the reader focus on the story.

Muscular or conspicuous style uses more sensory detail, more metaphors, and more complex sentences than ordinary people tend to in real life. It draws a little attention to itself. Done badly, it seems too clever and gets in the way of the story. Done well, it feels rich and vivid.

Lush or ornate style draws a lot of attention to itself, like a beautiful woman dancing in a sequinned dress. Extended metaphors, long sentences, passages of pure description, language tricks borrowed from poetry, unusual word choices and a layering of detail give an overall richness to the prose. Done badly, it’s like wading through treacle, and produces impatience in the reader who just wants to know what happened next. Done well, it’s glorious, a work of high art.

The commonest style, and the one that’s easiest to read and easiest to write, is invisible style. My advice in this book is aimed at helping you to write invisibly, because if you use the basic tools of language correctly, nobody will notice that you’re using them. Using them badly draws attention to your writing, for all the wrong reasons. It’s like you’re a cabinetmaker, and you’ve left tool marks on all your surfaces and your joints don’t fit well. People will notice that you’re incompetent with your tools, rather than noticing the piece of furniture and forgetting that it was made with tools at all.

Myself, I wouldn’t advise attempting anything other than invisible style until you can write invisible style competently and smoothly. I see far too many people trying to write in a lush style like authors they admire (most commonly Jack Vance, Lord Dunsany or H.P. Lovecraft) without the basic grasp of language and style that those authors possessed. In particular, if your vocabulary isn’t as large as you think it is (and most people’s isn’t), you’ll embarrass yourself by using fancy words that you don’t really know the meaning of. I see this all the time in books I review. If you’re going to use a fancy word, look it up and make sure it means what you think it means.

The more you depart from normal or invisible style,