If you’ve ever trawled the waters of the internet for fiction prose, you know there are vast depths of it out there, most of it terribly written, much of it morally degrading filth. The filth can be thrown out, ignored; we’re not worried about that today (and generally just ‘don’t write to excite your vicious passions’ will guide you clear of that path). Today, we’re going to address some problems I’ve seen a number of times, problems of formatting and grammar, as well as some of the trickier parts of formatting, like dialogue.

Basics of Grammar

Grammar comes first. This may seem simple, but be warned. I’ve seen writers otherwise competent (if not startlingly so) who stumble when it comes to grammar. Readers will bear with an occasional typo, but bad grammar, even just sprinkled into the story at long intervals, can easily send them packing. After all, if the author didn’t get the grammar right, he probably didn’t get the story right. The story can survive this by being otherwise excellent, but you’re going to lose readers, even just to the fatigue of trying to puzzle through bad grammar. Besides, there’s no reason to make it harder for yourself. Grammar is obviously too big of a subject to finish off here, so instead of trying to cover the whole thing, I’m just going to touch in on a few points and lay out some basic advice for how to learn it.

Punctuation and sentence structure are two areas where it’s easy to go astray. Punctuation involves capitalizing what you should, putting commas where you should, ending your sentences with a period, and all that jazz. Pay attention to commas particularly; if you don’t know how to use a comma, go look up the rules. If you do, go look them up anyway. Comma rules in English are many and varied, and more than likely there’s an edge case or more obscure rule that you’ve forgotten because you only encounter it once every fifty pages of writing. The rule of thumb for commas is to put a comma in the sentence if it sounds like it should have a pause (though I imagine this is tricky if English isn’t your first language); even this rule, though, is flawed, prone to forgetting some commas and putting others where they shouldn’t be. Another guideline is that commas (and ‘–’ dashes, which are commas stretched long), when used to set off a parenthetical section of the sentence, operate like parenthesis: one to open, one to close. This rule is flexible, though; one comma may close for two occasionally (though at risk of clarity), the presence of a conjunction might remove the first comma (a parenthetical phrase immediately following a coordinate conjunction between clauses, one with a comma preceding it, only has a comma at the end), and a period overrides all other endings, removing the need for conclusory commas.

Once we leave commas behind, we reach the questions of sentence structure. Sentence structure is much more fluid in fiction than in academic writing, but you must understand it before you can break it. The bread and butter of the story is the subject-verb-object sentence, garnished with subordinate clauses, phrases, adjectives, adverbs, and other modifiers. Learn how to use coordinate and subordinate conjunctions; learn the semicolon. Especially learn to distinguish the semicolon from the colon.

How to learn, though?

I recommend two different, complementary ways of learning. The first is to read with care and discretion. If you’re worried about your grammar, immerse yourself in stories that have good grammar. Read the classics (especially the ones originally written in English), read well-written books, and immerse yourself in the outcome of good grammar. They won’t teach you the rules, but they will make it so you don’t need to conscious remember the rules a lot of the time. Furthermore, they will give you an intuition on grammar that will help warn you when you need to go look up the rules. This method is particularly helpful for sentence structure, as it will teach you both what a proper sentence looks like and where you not only can but should break from that pattern.

The second way is to learn the rules. Don’t just read and memorize them, though. Apply them. Apply the rules you’re learning to your writing until they become second nature, stop being something you think about. Sometimes you’ll need to forget them for a while, while you’re still learning them, in order to get a first draft down on the page. That’s fine. Go back and do a grammar edit of what you wrote; it’ll be painful, but it will teach you to do better next time.

Paragraphs

The next step of basic comprehensibility is paragraphs. Your story needs to be intentionally divided into chunks of text. They may be short; they may be long; they should probably mix and match between the two, proportions dependent on what type of scene you’re writing, on pacing and tone. Whatever you choose, the divisions must be made intentionally. You cannot simply forget to add line-breaks in; you cannot just plop them in ever few sentences when you get bored or think the paragraph looks pleasingly lengthy.

Each paragraph should be a progression of ideas, from one point to another. Sometimes, a sentence will suffice. If so, start a new paragraph after that single sentence. It’s not academic writing and there is no minimum length. Sometimes, multiple sentences, long and short and varied, are needed; keep those sentences together. Remember, though, that the longer a paragraph is, the more difficult it is for the reader’s eye to track. Don’t make it unnecessarily hard. This doesn’t mean making every paragraph short, either; that looks choppy and is its own sort of pain to read. Here too learning from other writers’ practical example will help. Read various authors, imbibe their logic for paragraph divisions both consciously and unconsciously, then practice. Over time it’ll move from a mechanical process to a part of how you convey meaning, how you group and associate ideas (and a significant part of editing if, like me, you often end up consolidating or splitting paragraphs on the second or third look at them).

Dialogue

The next concern is dialogue. Mis-formatting dialogue can ruin a story, make it un-readable, because dialogue, more than many other parts of writing, is reliant on its formatting for its meaning. In the vast majority of cases, dialogue needs who is saying what to be crystal clear, even if the who is ‘unknown voice’ and the ‘what’ is philosophical gobbledygook. Formatting is essential to communicating that.

Never have two people talking in the same paragraph. Every change of speaker must have a change of paragraph, must have a corresponding line-break. The line-break, very often, is what tells the reader that somebody else is talking, even before the dialogue tags (very important, these are) kick in. Sometimes a character yammers on long enough to need multiple paragraphs; in these cases, use the line-break, but be careful that it’s clear the speaker is the same as the previous paragraph, using dialogue tags or context.

Dialogue should be set off from normal prose with quotation marks. I’m not getting into all the rules here, but I will give an overview:

• Always set dialogue off with quotation marks; use “_”. If you need to nest dialogue into dialogue- a character quoting another character, for instance-, use the smaller quotation mark (‘), as in “Susy said to me, ‘I don’t like pickled peppers, not even by the peck.’”
• Capitalize the first word of the sentence inside the quotation.
• If the sentence is interrupted or you start with a ‘…’, don’t capitalize the first letter of the speech. (“I was hungry,” she said, “and I ate a sandwich.” / “… was hungry, so I ate a sandwich,” she said.)
• When the dialogue and the sentence it’s in end at the same time, periods go inside the quotation marks. Exclamation points and question marks go with the part of the sentence they’re intended for (though this varies between Britain and America).
• If the dialogue tag cuts into the dialogue, set it off with commas. (“I ate a hot dog,” she said, “with ketchup.” / “I ate a hot dog,” she said, “I ate it fast.”)
  • Note the second example. The two parts of the dialogue are complete, independent sentences; if I were to leave out the dialogue tag, I’d put a period after ‘dog’. Here, though, the comma takes its place. Technically I could use a period, but I’d have to capitalize ‘she’, as it’d become the start of a new sentence.

Don’t neglect your dialogue’s formatting. Improperly formatted dialogue confuses and frustrates the reader, and it can be incredibly opaque. Understanding improperly formatted dialogue can sometimes even be impossible- who said what gets lost in the mix, and the story suffers as a result.

Fiddly Bits

Scene transitions (scene-breaks), font, and thought-dialogue are all parts of writing that don’t have exact rules except this: be clear, be consistent, have a reason. Scene transitions can be signaled many ways: an extra space between paragraphs, a page break (uncommon and usually reserved for chapter divisions, which are technically a type of scene break), or a dividing line. I use five asterisks, spaced out and centered on their own line. You may have your own convention. Just remember: figure out what you’re going to do, make sure it’s intuitive to the reader, and stick to it inside that story. Remember also that if you use it enough people will start to expect it; changing it from story to story may confuse a reader who follows you from one to the next.

Font is a fiddly thing. I write in Calibri 11-point when I’m drafting fiction- the default Word font setting. I have, at other times, written in Times New Roman. I published my book in Palatino Linotype, with, if I remember correctly, Calibri line breaks because I preferred five point asterisks to six-pointers. When you’re drafting, choose the font that works for you. When you’re publishing, consider it carefully; if you’re publishing on a website, you may not have a choice, or the reader might have the choice. When you’re publishing as a book though, even an E-book, you have a choice of fonts (and other parts- margins, etc., to a degree). I recommend that you, like me, do some research. Look up fonts, figure out what serif v non-serif means, and check out the industry or genre standard. Look at your book shelves too, and find a book that you like the look of, that you want your story to look like (one that gives the impression you want your readers to get¹).

Thought-dialogue is a peculiar species of near-dialogue. I am aware of no formal rules of grammar for it, so again I’ll state the principles that guide us here: clear, consistent, intentional. Choose a format and stick to it, after making sure your format makes sense. Adopt it from somebody else, if you want; that’s often the best course of action with these things. I treat it essentially as dialogue, except I italicize it instead of setting it off in quotation marks. I don’t have to worry about dialogue tags because I write single-perspective scenes where only one person is capable of thought-dialogue. If you have multiple persons thought-talking at the reader, you’ll need to consider dialogue tags more seriously (‘he thought’ becomes your new ‘he said’).

Of course, by italicizing my thought-dialogue, I remove my ability to use italicization for emphasis (unless I want to emphasize by making it a thought). I can’t use the same markers for two different reasons; that’d be like having one flag signal mean both ‘tornado’ and ‘earthquake’. As it happens, losing that tool doesn’t really bother me; I prefer to use my words, not my formatting, for emphasis, on the principle that it works better anyway.² If I really wanted to, I could use bold, or maybe all-caps, though I doubt I will. It does mean also that I had to find a different method of setting off another species of text: the in-universe text that is reproduced on the page, al a listening to a character read from a book or letter. I chose, if I remember correctly, to use underlining instead; I’m happy with that choice. You don’t have to make the same choice, but you have to remain consistent. Clarity is the daughter of consistency, mixed with a healthy dose of literary convention.³

A Final Warning

One element, not quite formatting but not quite style, needs here to be addressed: word choice, specifically the tendency I’ve seen across the internet, in videos and comments and written work, to choose a word that’s close but not correct. It’s writing ‘relative to’ instead of ‘next to’; it’s using ‘loose’ instead of ‘lose’, ‘among’ instead of ‘between’, ‘lay’ instead of ‘lie’, ‘historical’ instead of ‘histrionic’. As you can see, the similar can be in meaning or in sound. ‘Among’ sounds very little like ‘between’, but it means almost the same thing; unfortunately, the shades of difference here often matter. ‘Historical’ sounds quite like ‘histrionic’, if you’re unfamiliar with the second word and trying to remember it in the moment, but they mean radically different things. This problem may seem absurd, here written out in clear contrast, but I’ve seen truly skilled writers make this mistake. If you don’t know a word for sure, look it up. Here too reading will help you distinguish the shades of meaning, will give you the warning feeling that the word might not be right, that you need to look it up or replace it with something whose meaning you know for sure.

Conclusion

Formatting is a basic of writing, but one that we absolutely must master. In terms of painting, formatting is to writing as getting the canvas taut is to brushwork. Failure to format will warp the story, will make it harder for the reader to understand or enjoy, will reduce the quality of the communication- which is what written story ultimately is, communication. We need to learn our scales before we play Rachmaninoff, and we need to get our p’s and q’s in order to tell our stories. Thankfully for us, the means we have to fix the problem are generally pleasant- reading more good books- or already part of our routine- writing a lot. The grammar rules are less pleasant, at least if you are like me, but they are necessary, and nobody ever said medicine would taste good. The end results will be worth it.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – This is marketing, like the cover and so much else in publishing. David Stewart is a good resource on this in general; his videos (channel here) were quite useful to me.

2 – In the past few years, I only remember one instance where I had a struggle as to whether I could use italicization for emphasis.

3 – In other words, the more avant-garde you are, the less comprehensible.