In Writing, How Long is a Pause?

pausing in writing coffee-3456215_1280My main difficulty when I switched from writing plays to novels was my use of pauses. It took me a long time to figure out that the time sense of a person conversing in real life or watching a play is very different from the time sense of someone reading prose. And that has repercussions in novel writing and the use of punctuation.

What’s Happening in Life?

In plays, movies and the reality they are imitating, a pause happens because something else is going on. Someone is thinking, reacting, showing emotion, waiting for attention or performing some task. Often the pause is used to heighten the emotion while we wait for something important to happen (see ‘Earned Pauses’ at the end of this article). Continue reading “In Writing, How Long is a Pause?”

Those Pesky Punctuation Marks




Dialogue: Punctuation







Introducing the Seasonal Apostrophe

I mentioned my mad summer wasping job last month. I have no particular excuse for doing bonkers things for a living except that sometimes they provide good fodder for books, but I wasn’t expecting this one to introduce me to a whole new concept in punctuation. Maybe being an apostrophile means that you find such joys everywhere but I have to share this one. Here is the story of the seasonal apostrophe.

This is the third summer I have spent killing wasps for a living. And it’s the third year The Boss and I have debated the seasonal apostrophe, proudly invented by The Boss himself. It amuses us but it also creates an annual row about my van’s livery. Continue reading “Introducing the Seasonal Apostrophe”