Improving Your Creative Writing Style

Semicolon or comma? This can be a sticky question to resolve but here are some tips that we hope might help you to decide.

Love it or hate it, the semicolon is here to stay. George Orwell hated the semicolon so much that he refused to use it in one of his books - coming up for air, written in the year that the second world war broke out, does not have a single semicolon. George Bernard Shaw despaired of Lawrence, who used colons, commas and full stops but hardly ever a semicolon.

What is your opinion? Do you love it, hate it or do you have no strong feelings either way? See the poll at the bottom of the page (if the Sqidoo HQ error that is preventing me from setting it up has cleared of course)

It can be used as a join, it represents a pause somewhere between a comma and a full stop. If you find that you have written a gramattically correct long sentence, stretching over multiple lines, a proofreader might suggest that it be split into smaller sentences. Smaller sentences make the written word more readable. However, you as a writer have the last word and should you decide that a long sentence is about a single subject and you want it to remain as one long sentence, you can use semicolons instead of full stops. Thus grammar, your proofreader, you and the reader are catered for. This also would apply to long sentences suffering from a plethora of commas to separate clauses; swapping some for semicolons keeps the effect but is easier on the eye and potentially less confusing for your readers.

In some sentences, it is necessary to present the reader with a list. Normally, list items are separated by commas, however, with complex lists, a comma may be found within a listed item; the semicolon can then be used to impart a greater clarity.

A semicolon is also required both grammatically and rhetorically before adverbs. When using words such as moreover, nevertheless, however, consequently and so on, adverbs that imply some sort of reflection about the following idea, a semicolon before them is often needed in place of a comma.

Since it represents a longer pause than a comma, the semicolon can be used to introduce a mild shock ot to bring in the puchline of a joke, Groucho Marx style.

So all in all, I believe that it is an extremely useful piece of punctuation.

Henry Fowler summed up the colon in a rather businesslike fashion, saying (more or less) that the colon delivers the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words. Or put in a more down to Earth fashion, the colon states 'wait for it, here it comes'. Latterly, the hyphen is taking over that role but there are still many places where the colonshould be used by preference.

It should be used to introduce a list, a task that the hyphen is definitely not up to , for example:

Inspector Hawkins surveyed the scene of the crime and took it all in: the body, the broken jardiniere, the cigarette butts on the floor...

That is probably the most used instance of the colon.

It is also used to introduce a conclusion, so if the aforementioned Inspector Hawkins had arrived at one it would look like this in the book:

After much thought, Inspector Hawkins had arrived at a conclusion: this was no ordinary murder.

It is similarly used to introduce explanation, a subtitle, a quotation or even a question. It can be used as a conjunction and to link two contrasting statements.

It is a no-brainer really. You need to tailor your style to your audience. It is no use writing long introverted sentences if your audience is the teen market. They need short sentences and street terms plus poor spelling, minimal grammar and text message speak if you are to truly reach them! Most proofreaders of such work would probably end up apoplectic! If you are writing a short story or for a magazine, you must make every word count, space is at a premium. The structure needs to be very tight and every sentence must deliver something, waffle that leads the reader nowhere is a definite no-no for short stories.

Creative writers also write for children. It is often perceived that writing for children is an easy option but it isn't. They are a very unforgiving lot! Here is what Sam Pearce, managing director of Words Worth Reading has to say about creative writing for children ... as a published author, she knows very well the issues involved.

It is often thought that storylines can be much more simplistic than adult fiction, that language can be unelaborated and that characters don't have to be particularly three-dimensional. And in many ways this is true. Storylines for children's fiction do not have to be as complex as those used in adult fiction, language must be construed relatively simply, and characters do not need to come with all the baggage and background life stories that adult literature demands. But what is forgotten is the complexity of the reader for which one is writing for when they write children's literature.

A child sees the world in a very different light to most adults. That world needs to be captured and represented in children's fiction. To represent such a world through fiction is hugely challenging, and I take my hat off to all who do it successfully!

As with any form of writing, there are several steps that you need to follow when planning and writing a children's book. You need to do your research, you need to develop a storyline or plot, you need to create the primary characters and you need to ensure that the ending of the story will be satisfactory to the reader. Alongside these key steps, there are two additional areas that need to be thought about when creating children's literature:

Language

The mark of a great writer - their ability to use brevity successfully!

Children's novels are, by their very nature, short. A picture book will be carrying a few hundred words as a maximum; a book for a six year old reader will be coming in with a word count of around 1,000 words. Such a small word count leaves you without any room for error - EVERY WORD COUNTS. Let me say that again, EVERY WORD COUNTS! Every use of punctuation or grammar, every description, every sentence uttered by a character, every sigh, breath, movement, decision or thought has to be 100% correct. When you are working with a word count of 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000 words, EVERY WORD COUNTS.

Contemporary Setting

The need to understand and potentially use a contemporary setting for your storyline does not mean that your children's book has to be set in the 'here and now'. Children's stories based in Medieval Times or in Out of Space (for example) are still hugely popular and successful. But.., a storyline should maintain a contemporary feel. Perhaps the easiest way to achieve this is to focus the text around a contemporary issue that affects 'Today's Children'. Think about divorce, same-sex families, bullying, step-families, illness, the internet, drugs, alcohol, sexual relationships, violence, or modern technology, and see how each of these key issues could be brought into the make believe world of your children's fiction piece.

Thanks for sharing that Sam.

How often do you find yourself describing an experience as 'good' or 'interesting'? Or maybe a person as 'nice'? In everyday conversation we repeat the same words out of habit, and so it is only natural that our oral language style is the first to flow from our pen (or wordprocessor!). Since social emails and online messaging are merely a written form of the way we speak, repetitive words and phrases in this context play a positive role in conveying our personality.

However, when the purpose of your writing is for professional gain - to win reader loyalty for example - repetition becomes a negative feature, draining your work of originality and eloquence and reducing the readability and interest.

So how can you avoid repetition in your writing? There are several things you can do both during and after the writing process.

Use a thesaurus

If you find yourself forever typing 'useful', then nothing could be quicker than simply consulting an online or paper thesaurus for all the synonyms under this entry! Depending on the context (which should be considered when making your choice), you'll discover 'worthwhile', 'beneficial' or 'practical' as possible alternatives.

Vary the use of names

Perhaps the same organisation is cropping up frequently in a story and its full title at every mention is weighing down your text. In this case start by writing it out in full and then you can introduce your reader gradually to other versions such as an abbreviation; one of your characters could introduce a nickname for the organisation and so on. You can also make use of demonstrative pronouns, writing 'this organisation' at an appropriate point.

Sentence structure

Even when writing in the first person, it is possible to avoid beginning everything with I. Take a break and read your work aloud after each writing session in order to see if you are stilting your style by repeating the same structure. Cumbersome phrases or words making too regular an appearance are more likely to jump out at you after a break.

Ideas

Repetitive ideas can rankle a reader just as much as words, and often arise when you have a specific word count to reach but few things to say. Even a small amount of topic-based research in this instance can do wonders in helping you to enhance a previously wordy text with fresh inspiration. And you might just learn something in the process! Once you have finished writing, any repetitiveness is easier to spot if you put your text to one side for a while before reading back over it. Reading out aloud is a good way of spotting this kind of repetition as you will hear the repetitions more easily that read repetitions.

Professional Proofreading

Getting your text checked by an external proofreading company is therefore highly recommended as an effective way to eliminate unnecessary repetition, especially if you don't have time to go back over a text yourself.

Many people see the semicolon and colon as being similar in that they both create pauses, however, that is not so, they serve very different purposes in creative writing and both can benefit style. Sometimes and erroneously, writers begin the clause after a semicolon and a colon with a capital letter. This is wrong, the only exceptions are words like names and proper nouns that would normally have a capitalised first letter wherever they appear.

I hope this helps, enjoy your creative writing.