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STYLE: CHECKLIST FOR FICTION WRITERS

As you begin to develop your outline, and then the actual text of your novel,
you can save time and energy by making sure that your writing style requires
virtually no copy editing. In the narrative:

1. Do any sentences begin with the words "There" or "It"? They can almost
certainly benefit from revision. (Compare: There were three gunmen who had
sworn to kill him. It was hard to believe. or: Three gunmen had sworn to kill
him. He couldn't believe it.)

2. Are you using passive voice instead of active voice? (Compare: Is passive
voice being used?) Put it in active voice!

3. Are you repeating what you've already told your readers? Are you
telegraphing your punches?

4. Are you using trite phrases, cliches, or deliberately unusual words? You'd
better have a very good reason for doing so.

5. Are you terse? Or, alternatively, are you on the other hand expressing and
communicating your thoughts and ideas with a perhaps excessive and abundant
plethora of gratuitous and surplus verbiage, whose predictably foreseeable
end results, needless to say, include as a component part a somewhat
repetitious redundancy?

6. Are you grammatically correct? Are spelling and punctuation correct? (This
is not mere detail work, but basic craft. Learn standard English or forget
about writing novels.)

7. Is the prose fluent, varied in rhythm, and suitable in tone to the type of
story you're telling?

8. Are you as narrator intruding on the story through witticisms,
editorializing, or self-consciously, inappropriately "fine" writing?

In the dialogue:

9. Are you punctuating dialogue correctly, so that you neither confuse nor
distract your readers?

10. Are your characters speaking naturally, as they would in reality, but
more coherently?

11. Does every speech advance the story, revealing something new about the
plot or the characters? If not, what is its justification?

12. Are your characters so distinct in their speech--in diction, rhythm, and
mannerism--that you rarely need to add "he said" or "she said"?