Little niggles in manuscripts – Paeony Lewis

Sending out a new-born manuscript can be a bit scary. The person who reads the story will have his or her own likes and dislikes. These preferences might be major and there are even editors who don’t like animal characters in picture books or don’t like rhyme.

Perhaps very occasionally a dislike of
animals and rhyme could be justified?

There might be things a particular editor sees too much of, such as cute alliteration, stories about worms, or even stories that include the word ‘moon’ in the title (when I heard this complaint I gulped because I’ve written a story that contains the ‘m’ word!).

Then there are the smaller niggles. I cringe when I read the word ‘special’. A lovely editor once reprimanded me for having a mature character say ‘Oh dear’ – it was one of her niggles. She felt it was a stereotypical, ageist phrase that writers only use with older females. Yikes, I say ‘Oh dear’ in everyday life which is why my character said it. Well I suppose I’m an older female…

Finally we have little niggles and they tend to be grammar. I know I’m not perfect when it comes to grammar. Despite this, when I critique picture book manuscripts there are often little grammatical errors that bug me. I won’t discuss the use of apostrophes – those have been done to death. For me it’s muddled capitalisation that bounces around on the page. Why should this matter? Surely if your manuscript is accepted for publication an editor will tidy the grammar?

I spotted this opposite the University of Hull.
It made me smile, though if apostrophes was
one of my niggles then it might drive me nuts.

It’s all about appearing professional and ensuring an editor focuses on your story and not little niggles. Of course a wonderful story will be accepted for publication, even if it’s splattered with grammatical errors. However, if an editor is in a grumpy mood and wants to get through a pile of manuscripts, the wonderfulness of your story might be missed.

I hate to admit that nowadays the walls of primary schools include posters of grammatical terms that are alien to me. It’s embarrassing! My education is from the era when grammatical rules weren’t taught in primary or high school (we learnt by reading and knowing what ‘felt’ correct). Therefore, although I’ll try to explain how to fix my little grammar niggle, I won’t use grammatical terms and instead I’ll show you by example. So here’s my number one little niggle:

CAPITALISATION! (Yup, I’m pathetically petty.)
Capitalisation of ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ often catches people out when they first start writing for children. I solve this by telling myself that ‘Mum’, ‘Dad’, ‘Grandpa’, ‘Grandma’, etc., are capitalised when the word is being used as a 'name'. The examples below illustrate this (imagine if substituting a name would work grammatically):

He stared at what Dad had done to the dog.

He noticed his mum watching him.

“I wish my mum would stop watching me.”

“I wish Mum would stop nagging me to eat cauliflower.”

“Hurry up, Dad, it’s time to wash the dog,” said Holly.

“Will you remind your grandpa about the snail race?” asked Joe.

“Will you remind Grandpa about the snail race?” asked Sam.

Just occasionally this rule can make a sentence look a little peculiar, as can be seen in this excerpt from the glorious The Whales’ Song (an old favourite in our family):

“People used to eat them and boil them down for oil!” grumbled Lilly’s uncle Frederick.

If the Lilly was removed it would read …grumbled Uncle Frederick, though we wouldn’t know he was Lilly’s uncle.

So now you know how to avoid my pathetic little niggle. Though that’s not all. Here’s another little niggle…

ELLIPSES are often used in picture books and an ellipsis is only three dots. Not five dots..… Not seven dots……. It’s three dots…

I do have some other little niggles, but I think that’s enough or you’ll start to think I’m neurotic. So go on, tell us your writing niggles. We all have them and we hope we don’t accidentally include an editor's niggle in our manuscript. Perhaps one of your writing niggles is in this blog post? I know my grammar is far from perfect!

Of course, an incredible story is what matters most. 
Happy niggles, happy writing.

Paeony Lewis
www.paeonylewis.com