Some useful advice from marketing expert Penny Sansevieri via Chris the Story Reading Ape. A reminder to me to a) get more proactive about marketing, and b) to get that next book out. I’ll go work on that now!
on Book Works:
Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware follows up with her account of how she got Internet Archive to take down her copyrighted books. In her case, as in mine, it took a stern comment on their web site to get action, since the standard notices received no response. Her post includes a discussion of how the Archive’s actions in scanning books without permission and in some cases reformatting them differs from the actions of a regular library, which buys its books. She raises the issue of why copyright is worth protecting—and is not just a matter of greed on the part of authors.
I received a series of comments on this issue that introduced me to the Marrakesh Treaty, which allows authorized sites to provide books for print-disabled readers without author permission. You may find this news enlightening, as I did.
Check out the latest in this ongoing situation. Victoria Strauss’s original post provides information on how to see if your books are affected and how to take action.
Filed under business of writing, Copyright for writers, Free Books, Writing, writing novels
Here, from Life in the Realm of Fantasy via Chris the Story Reading Ape is an extremely helpful article about something that DRIVES ME NUTS.
Not whether to hyphenate, but why so many indie writers don’t use hyphens when they can be of so much help.
Connie Jasperson has pulled together a wonderful, easy-to-follow (note hyphens) guide to when and why to use hyphens in compound modifiers and expressions.
Check it out! Then get a box of hyphens to use in your own writing. They cost only a few cents at the dime store. 
I’ve often found great advice on Anne’s site. This post about what readers are likely to find when they click on that “Look Inside” invitation on Amazon echoes one I recently did about the first page of your book and why it matters, except that Anne goes into more detail and offers excellent examples of how you can make your “Look Inside” sample sing.
I especially want to endorse Guidelines Nos. 2 and 3.
No. 2 tells us to “start with conflict, not crisis,” advice I’ve encountered before, and which has ranked up there as the most useful advice I’ve ever received. As Anne points out, who cares if bullets are flying and bombs are going off if we don’t know the characters and couldn’t care less about them. “What the reader wants is emotional conflict,” Anne writes. And you get that by putting characters together in a demanding situation and finding out what they do about it—basically Anne’s Guideline No. 5.
No. 3 tells us that any opening scene that consists of some character musing away about some off-stage event is a huge turn-off unless you have an incredible voice and a mesmerizing character. While we’d all like to think we can produce such prodigies of characterization and style at will, the evidence suggests otherwise. You don’t have to create a character worthy of the ages in a Nobel-prize-winning style if you place your readers at the heart of a conflict, right there, in the middle of it all.
An additional turn-off I’d personally cite for “Look Inside” samples is more subjective: I respond to voice. Yes, I’ve got to have conflict; things have to happen for me in those first pages. But even if I’m thrown into the middle of conflict, a pedestrian voice stuffed with clichés and unimaginative or, for that matter, forced description can kill my buying urge. Lure me with a voice that breathes with the magic of language used in new and illuminating ways. If you can’t, make your conflict mesmerizing and original. Ideally, do both.
“Grammar rules” can look like this!
I came across this nice post from Deborah Lee Luskin over at Live to Write—Write to Live that lays out the rules governing various kinds of clauses and the conjunctions that attach them to each other.
What this post supplies is “meta-knowledge”: knowledge ABOUT knowledge, that is, about the kind of knowledge writers need. We also need an inner grammar that allows us to construct functioning sentences instinctively in a language that is our native tongue. Growing up with a native tongue allows us to internalize the ways sentences work in our linguistic world. (When we learn second or third languages as adults, it takes a while to develop this internal grammar because our minds are pre-programmed to acquire grammar when we are very young, from listening to and interacting with those around us.)
This inner grammar serves us for speech, even if we don’t know “the rules” from book-learning—all the names of the things we’re doing. It functions less effectively for writing.
Why is this so?
First, writing is not a pre-programmed activity the way spoken language is. Writing is a LEARNED activity. Stanislas Dehaene argues in Reading in the Brain that vision and sound operate in different parts of our brains; our synapses have to remodel themselves to make the connection between visual symbols and the sounds that carry meaning.
Second, the punctuation that connects sentence parts varies between arbitrary conventions like putting a comma after the name of a state and important signposts for meaning like using commas to set off nonessential elements. Both the conventions and the signposts have to be overlaid on our spoken language awareness, requiring new coordination between parts of the brain.
Finally, written language demands a big burst of cognitive energy, especially when we haven’t had a lot of practice and have to think about every period and every modifier.
All these issues separate writing from speaking. They make the process of learning to convert our native language to writing into a secondary process more burdensome and harder to learn than simply learning to speak.
On the one hand, I think every writer should know the information in Deborah’s post: the parts of a sentence and the ways they work together. On the other hand, after twenty-five years of teaching college writing, I believe what the research into the acquisition of grammar “rules” tells us: people don’t learn these skills from lists of rules. Even the ability to recognize “a complete sentence” has seemed unteachable more often than not. A writer either has it or she does not.
Ironically, every indication is that we learn sentence structure and the conventions and signposts the same way we learn to talk: from being widely exposed to written language from a very young age. Reading comes first. Practice in writing to communicate is also vital. When we start trying to use writing to express needs or ideas we want taken seriously, we revise and work until we develop multiple strategies for making ourselves understood. That means acquiring a lot of rules.
To be fair, teachers can never tell just how much effort any given college student has put into learning the strategies for successful “grammatical” writing. This kind of knowledge is notoriously boring. Yet I have seen isolated examples of people who seemed almost illiterate and then somehow just figured it all out (for example, a young man I knew who joined the Army and emerged a totally different writer).
Does all this mean I think aspiring (and successful) writers shouldn’t learn the information in the post I’m sharing? Not at all. But just as important: keep reading. Watch how the writers you admire use clauses, conjunctions, and punctuation. Copy their styles to see what your book would sound like using their methods. Play.
At the risk of angering indie authors everywhere, I suggest you look for your best examples of these rules applied correctly in books, articles, and essays that have been traditionally published. Lord, no, editors in traditional houses aren’t right all the time, but more eyes have examined the writing and the more egregious errors have been winnowed out.
And don’t rely on Grammarly or other so-called editing bots. (Yes, I can start a sentence with “and,” thank you.) They don’t know what a complete sentence is, either.
Or when it’s okay not to use one. The grammar you can ignore if you want to, and why—that’s the kind of knowledge you really need!
Filed under College writing, correct grammar for writers of fiction, Editing your novel, grammar rules for writers, indie publishing, Learning to write, Myths and Truths for writers, punctuation for writers of novels, self editing for fiction writers, Self-publishing, style for writers, Teaching writing, Writing, writing novels
Paddy and his mom!
Just Can't Help Writing 