Let the passive tense be used*

The door was being knocked on. Olivia was getting up, walking across the room and stopping. A hesitation was being performed by her; a doubt was surfacing in her mind. Her head was having the thought who is it? running through it. This knowledge was not in her possession.

Slowly, the key was being turned in the lock by Olivia. The handle was being pulled and the door was swinging open. Outside, the space where she might have expected a person to be was not currently occupied by a person.

‘That’s odd,’ her voice was saying. ‘I could have sworn...’ The swearing that she could have been doing was having to do with the hearing of a knocking sound previously to the moment which was currently passing. Suddenly, a shadowy figure was looming in the doorway. A surprise attack was taking place. A screaming sound was being emitted by Olivia as she was being murdered.


* As has been pointed out by my erudite readers, this passage has a mish-mash of present-participle and past progressive tenses, a passive voice and a steaming pile of gerunds for good measure. Please see the comments section below.

Qualify every description

Standing on my feet on the floor of my kitchen in my home in Glasgow, I looked with my blue eyes out of the double-glazed window which sat in the middle of the wall like a clear panel of carefully-engineered plastic in the middle of an interior wall. The rain was falling from clouds and through the air, down towards the ground, where it landed, making wet puddles of water on the grey pavement far below where it had started from.

I was hungry in my stomach. Scratching the back of my head with the fingers of my left hand, I opened the door of the fridge which stood next to the window on the opposite side of the room from the tall oak door. An electric light inside the fridge came on inside the fridge and illuminated the inside of the fridge. With my right hand, I picked up the Davidstow mature cheddar cheese which sat next to a brightly-coloured plastic tub of butter-substitute vegetable-oil-based spread. I also picked up the vegetable-oil-based spread. I would have a sandwich to eat with my mouth.

If you find a phrase you like, keep repeating it

Needless to say, I was fully aware of the behind-the-scenes machinations which, needless to say, would ultimately result in my departure from the executive board of VoxMagic Enterprises. The VP of Product Interface Experience who was, needless to say, a close personal friend of mine, kept me fully informed of who was saying what to whom and when – needless to say, this involved me needlessly hearing a lot of what people had to say about me, which, needless to say, was not all of a positive nature.

Needless to say, this period of needless nay-saying was brought to a swift (although, needless to say, temporary) end by the introduction of our revolutionary predictive transcription system, VoxMagic Ultra, which, needless to say, changed the whole face of voice recognition technology, allowing, as it did, the pre-emptive conversion of spoken sound to text. Needless to say, it was an exciting time for the whole industry, no matter what anyone might needlessly say about the needs of, say, the consumer and, it needs to be said, I was at the forefront of this (needless to say) revolutionary paradigm-shift. For the first time, we had produced speech recognition software so advanced that we had eliminated the need to actually say anything.

Write in a way which will not age well

Toying with his Tamagotchi, Steve fretted silently. He was thinking about the same thing he had been thinking about for months now –  the Millennium bug. Would it mean the end of civilisation as we know it? Would governments collapse? He had read enough to know that planes would fall out of the sky – that was a given – but what other, less easy to predict effects might it have?

He rocked back and forth on his in-line skates. What if The Matrix was true, and all of this was just a simulation? When the Y2K bug hit, would he wake up in a pod full of jelly in a futuristic power station? It was as likely as anything else. Resolving to shake off this worrying line of thought, he turned and set off for home, his hungry digital pet beeping plaintively from his pocket as, in the sky above, the sound of jet engines suddenly stopped.

If the plot gets out of hand, simply synopsise large chunks

Penelope turned away from the mirror and looked her husband directly in the eyes for the first time in two months.

‘Martin,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘You don’t...’ He stopped, breathed, clenched his fists. ‘You don’t, do you?’

’No.’ She turned back to the mirror. ‘I don’t. You see, after Michael left that evening, I found your notebook – the one you had tucked under the corner of the carpet.’ There was silence for a few seconds.

‘And?’

After the ensuing argument, Penelope filed for divorce, although the process proved more costly than she had anticipated and the loan she took out to cover her legal fees would have bankrupted her had it not been for Michael’s intervention. This, though, brought its own set of problems, as Michael’s wife assumed (wrongly, as it happened) that Michael’s interest in Penelope’s wellbeing was a result of something beyond merely friendly concern. This led to an estrangement between Michael and Susan which, although not as rancourous as that between Penelope and Martin, nonetheless took its toll on all concerned. So it was that both Penelope and Michael found themselves, some months later, nominally single; it is at this point that we resume our tale...

Use semicolons because you think they look good, not because you know how they work

Then; as if by magic; the curtain fell and the entire theatre erupted into applause. I was of course delighted the reception was more than I could have hoped for I felt pride swelling; in my chest. Turning to the director; I said

’They love; me they really love; me!’

He winked; and motioned to the centre of the stage. I took my place and felt the whoosh of ;hot air; as the curtain swept up again. Clap; clap; clap; clap; clap; clap; clap; clap. Went the crowd.

Get as much detail into your opening sentence as possible

No more than three feet away from Julius (but certainly more than two feet away; perhaps thirty inches – or, in the system preferred by Helen, Julian’s wife, of whom more later, seventy-six point two centimetres – although needless to say, it seemed less) a dog which seemed to be a cross between a doberman and some kind of beagle – its appearance certainly seemed to fit the original meaning of the Old French word “beegueule” (literally, open-mouthed) from which “beagle” is derived – was barking in the key of E-flat and pawing the air in a way which, had there been an invisible miniature piano beneath its claws, might have produced a melody not dissimilar to a free jazz composition of the early sixties or, more likely, a discordant jumble of sharps and flats which, had this been the case rather than being merely a fanciful possibility (which is what it was), would have put Julius’ teeth on edge in a way which the dog’s barking, in the absence of the more musical set of noises just touched upon, was already managing to do.

Treat genre as a replacement for ideas

With a manly flick of his muscular wrist, Captain Dash Gallant engaged the space drive and accelerated into the darkness of the Cloud Nebula. His destination was Mysterion IV, the uncharted planet which, as space-legend had it, was home to the quasi-mythical race of psychic aliens known as the Klar’Voyates.

Suddenly, his heroic concentration was shattered by the wailing of the DangerAlarm-9000. He glared masculinely at the scan-screen and space-cursed under his breath at what he saw – a Mhal-Evol’Unt warship off the starside bow. Flicking open the communication channels, he manfully barked an order to his inept yet adorable robot sidekick Fumblebot.

‘Prepare all weapons for an epic battle,’ he gruffly intoned. ‘And fire up the Annihilatatron-X.’ He narrowed his steel-blue eyes at the blackness of space. ‘You never cease to amaze me, galaxy,’ he whispered heterosexually.