As I’ve said I’m a new author writing a first novel but it wasn’t until I started writing that I realised I should’ve paid more attention in school to grammar and punctuation. It’s not like I haven’t written anything over the intervening years since my poor English teachers tried their best to impart their knowledge into me. However that was always to do with work so was factual and straightforward in the punctuation. Suddenly I found myself having to grapple with conversation and trying to format my work so that it looked how you would expect it to look when you opened a book.

I’ve never studied how a text is put together before. Clearly I’ve just taken for granted that everything will be where I’m expecting it to be when I open a book. This is a moment that for me is always accompanied by eager anticipation. Always in the hope that I’m about to start reading something that’s so gripping it’s impossible to put down. Whose characters and their trials and tribulations will follow me in my thoughts until the next time I get to open it.

Now however I found myself looking through many different types of books to try to get a handle on how to get it right. Only to find that there are many varying ways of formatting and I’m sure being a newbie to all this that it’s as much to do with current fashions and trends in publishing as anything else.

As it was at this time the words were flowing, though not necessarily, when I read it back, in the right order, or for much of the time it seemed even in the right tense! However I decided to plough on, with the words tumbling out of me and me doing my best to arrange them appropriately. The initial aim being to get the story down and then go back to rework after – how naive I was then about how many times I would be doing that!

Georgia

Currently reading ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’ by Robert Galbraith

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