On the way to a much-deserved bath, I picked up an old writing book and flicked through it. (The problem with having an e-reader is the lack of bath-time reading material).

The book I chose The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman is an advice guide on beating the rejection pile.

In an aside, he states:

'Even if the formatting is perfect, there are other odds and ends that can cause a preliminary dismissal. Perhaps the single biggest one is the question mark. Ninety-nine percent of the time it is misused, especially when it appears early and often. Usually finding one of these is enough to dismiss a manuscript...'

Why?

In my first-person POV manuscript, my MC asks questions in her mind, as well as in dialogue. There aren't reams of mental questions, but they are there and no one has ever said they shouldn't be: 'Why wouldn't Josh look at me?' 'Why did I miss the hen party?'.

Lukeman spends a line or two more on the subject, advising that care should also be taken with the exclamation mark and for a lesser extent parenthesis.

But why would a question mark in the first five pages be 'enough to dismiss a manuscript'?

The only obvious misuse I can think of is things like this, where it's very tempting to put a ?, but all of these are wrong:

Would she really go to the police, he wondered?

Would she really go to the police? he wondered.

Would she really got to the police? He wondered.

(Well, the last one might be right if "He wondered" isn't a speech-tag, IYSWIM, but a separate action.)

I should be

Would she really go to the police, he wondered.

or

Would she really go to the police? He wondered if things had got that bad.

If internal-type questions are currently out-of-favour, then I'll give up now. But as your book, Sharley, is old I'll carry on with them. But, I do see his point with exclamations. For me, it's ineffective striving for punch, when the words alone should do it. And, yes, overuse puts me off any MS.

Regarding the examples, Emma, why use 'he wondered' at all?

Would she really go to the police? He wondered if things had got that bad.

If I was to slot that into my wip as a thought of my MC, I would certainly just have:

Would she really go to the police? Have things got that bad?
(It's present tense, and staying that way. I don't care if it's not the fashion. Haha.)

So, where would I use 'he wondered'? That makes me think. How about where the psychic distance is not close?

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Now, the plot thickens.
I'm doing an edit, and I've just found this in my MS, despite what I said earlier.

I wonder why she didn't tell me the name of the hospital in her message ...

If I remove the 'I wonder', it changes the nuance; the thought takes on a more harping tone, which I don't want in the context. 'I wonder' makes it reflective, and kinder, which is appropriate, given the MC feels warmly towards 'she'.

Does anyone disagree? This is subtle stuff.

Thanks for your comments.

I make use of internal questions - often without the 'I wondered', as I assumed it would not be needed if we are in the MC's head and it is obvious she is thinking.

Rereading the quote again, I can see that I misinterpreted his comment and he meant that if an agent spotted an incorrectly used question mark early in the WiP, it could mean rejection. Last night I read this as spotting a question mark could mean rejection!

Maybe I should keep my evening reading matter to Janet and John books.

Would she really go to the police? Have things got that bad?

With almost any thinking, you're working with the choice of directly quoting it - where it would have "" in old-fashioned typesetting - and integrating it with the narrative.

Sod fashion (besides, if anything I'd say present tense is TOO fashionable, in that it gets used where it shouldn't be, as well as where it should. See David Jauss), but one reason I think present tense does have drawbacks is, precisely, that you can't nearly so fluently use the different between narrative tense and the present-tense of directly quoted stuff, and still keep things clear.

But on "wondered" etc. sometimes you do need a "speech tag" (I'm putting it in "" because of course it's not speech said aloud) to make things clear. It depends a lot on the surrounding sentences, whether its clear or not - and, indeed, on how experienced your readers are (see how many readers found Wolf Hall hard work), without a flag like that.

If I remove the 'I wonder', it changes the nuance; the thought takes on a more harping tone, which I don't want in the context. 'I wonder' makes it reflective, and kinder, which is appropriate, given the MC feels warmly towards 'she'.

Yes - exactly. There's an important difference between:

I said nothing, just kept cutting the bread. Why didn't he want to go to America?

and

I said nothing, just kept cutting the bread, and thought about why he didn't want to go to America.

Which is why I get so cross with the simplistic idea that you should always cut "he thought" "she wondered" and so on. It's the bastard, tyrannical offspring of a sensible idea that readers are experienced and intelligent and don't always need this kind of flagging. But sometimes it's not flagging for the reader, it's part of the dynamics of character-in-action.

Which is why I get so cross with the simplistic idea that you should always cut "he thought" "she wondered" and so on. It's the bastard, tyrannical

I'm so glad I didn't immerse myself in 'how-to-write' books. Any 'rules' I did accidentally pick up, thankfully, are being left by the wayside. I'm not saying 'how-to' books are pointless, but they are going to imbed (subconsciously or not) rules, and following those rules is not necessarily in a writer's best interest, in the same way a would-be artist shouldn't slavishly follow a 'how-to-draw' book. Perish the thought. I don't want to draw like Mister Follow-the-rule-book, and I certainly don't want to write like him.

I agree - too many tyrannical bastards around. Put them in the stocks, I say - then throw their rotten rules back at them.

Now, I may be putting a few 'I wonders' back, to go with my equally rebellious 50+ word sentences.

Anything else makes you spitting mad, Emma?

I have to say that I'm not sure how-to-write books per se, are always the culprits, in that usually they manage convey that it's not as simple as that, and so on.

It's the subsequent narrowing of what they say into tidy "rules", by teachers and writers who aren't on secure ground themselves - who don't (sometimes for good reason) - trust their own intuition, and so need to feel that there's Right and there's Wrong, and that it will be possible to learn the difference. And that's before you get into over-narrow-minded descriptors in marking CW assignments. (And that's not because there's anything inherently wrong in such things: it's entirely possible to be wholly un-narrow-minded, for example in the descriptors for the Open Uni course I teach.)

I blogged about that impulse here:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2007/12/messes-clones-a.html

which was actually prompted by a right barney Kate Long and I had with another member, here on WW...

Anything else makes you spitting mad, Emma?

"Show don't Tell"

"Don't change point-of-view"

"Don't use adjectives and adverbs"

The One about "Was" - and I haven't blogged about it yet but its close cousin, The One About Had.

I could go on...

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"my equally rebellious 50+ word sentences."

Oh, and "Don't use long sentences".

Talking of How-to-Write books, John Gardner has an exercise which asks you for three 250 word sentences...

I blogged about the joys of the long sentence

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2008/09/in-praise-of-the-long-sentence.html

including two of my own, one which of which is only getting on for a mere 100 words, the feeble creature.

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Hm - I think the anti-"wondered" etc. stuff is what Janet Burroway apparently calls "filtering". Gardner, too, talks about how getting rid of them makes things tighter, which is often true - I've been pointed towards this blog post:

http://writerleigh.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/filtering.html

But as you've pointed out, Alan, it's not nearly as simple as that!

But as you've pointed out, Alan, it's not nearly as simple as that!

No, it isn't, and as I read and reread, and re-edit, and get exasperated with what I did earlier, I see that subtlety is essential in creating credible characters, and making sensitive scenes work. And, God knows I have those aplenty in this wip.

I ask this - of anyone - how does a male writer write convincingly about the interaction between two women, without being acutely aware of the nuances of dialogue and internals?

I've heard it said that women are too complicated for male authors to 'do'.
I think that's poppycock.

Hey! This thread is about question marks. Stop hijacking.

how does a male writer write convincingly about the interaction between two women,

There's always what you might call the reverse-Jane-Austen option ... just don't write it.

Or try and be aware - sit in the corner? observe? read women's fiction written by and for women?

Also, get women to check it out on WW or wherever.

There are subtleties of language which go both ways - I remember a man in a workshop saying of one woman writer's male character, "He wouldn't say 'there was blood on my thighs', he'd say 'there was blood on my legs', and all the other men round the table nodded.

So I think the subtleties may be different, not more. Although there is an argument that, cumulatively, subordinate groups tend to be much better at reading nuance and subtext than dominant groups are.

get women to check it out on WW

And now the whole-MS-swap group is on the go, there's more chance of that.
I haven't been lambasted when I've put passages up on IC, but a whole MS is a different matter.



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And:
"There's always what you might call the reverse-Jane-Austen option ... just don't write it"

Hmmm ... that's contrary to my whole-way-of-thinking.
Better to put your foot in it, and say you've tried, then turn your head away and not achieve anything.

I don't think Reverse-Jane-Austen is so easy an option these days, when the spheres of the sexes aren't nearly so separate. But it is interesting to realise it can be done. You're absolutely not aware of it when reading the novels, and if you point it out to someone who's never noticed, they're amazed.

WIlliam Boyd's Restless is a female-pov novel which he doesn't quite pull off, I reckon. He successfully strips out everything male from his MC, but she didn't feel female either, ISYWIM. Haven't read Nick Hornby's Being Good, which would be another example of the genre.