Unless You’re a Robot, Don’t Do This

I started reading a book yesterday. I also finished reading it yesterday.

It wasn’t because I was transfixed. I put it down after five pages because I was bored.

I picked it up because I was in the mood for a thriller, because the title caught my attention and the description seemed compelling. It’s by a fairly famous author who I’d heard about before but never actually read.

If you’re into the thriller scene, I’m sure you’d recognize his name if I wrote it here.

I’d say he doesn’t deserve such recognition, but I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that, maybe, the novel I bought was an off-book for him. Maybe he’s normally just as thrilling as his reputation says he is, and this was an anomaly.

Problem is, even if that is true, I won’t ever be picking up another one of his stories again based on this one example. That’s what happens when an author employs:

·         Stilted sentence structure

·         Clipped conversation

·         Too many “main” protagonists

·         Over-detailed descriptions

·         Gratuitous explanations of obvious world issues, like readers are idiots who live in caves

·         Not a single contraction!!!!

Here’s the thing about that last point… People don’t think or speak in picture-perfect grammatical sentences. They slur their words together with contractions.

When you’re chatting with a friend, you don’t say, “I am sorry I was not able to go to your party last night.” Or if you’re discussing a project with your boss, you don’t explain, “I am sure this will not work unless we assign Casey to it.”

You don’t talk like that because that’s how robots talk, and you’re (hopefully) not a robot. So you instead say, “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to go to your party last night” or “I’m sure this won’t work unless we assign Casey to it.”

As fact goes, so should fiction. So the same applies to character creation. Unless they’re robots – or readers are supposed to roll their eyes and toss the book aside after five pages – the personalities depicted in novels should use contractions when they’re speaking. And so should the writer.

Trust me: It’s just the right thing to do.