Tips For Beginners

Start writing.  I know that sounds obvious, but many people (myself included) struggle to begin because our inner-critic bullies us into quitting before we start.
Choose to believe that there is just as much possibility that you will succeed as there is that you will fail.  If you don’t try, how will you ever know?

Keep writing.   Once you have begun, that loud-mouthed inner-critic will tell you that everything you write is sheer rubbish and there’s no use continuing. Choose to believe that there are ways to improve your skills.  Everyone has to start somewhere and, after all, it’s only the first draft!

Finish. Don’t stop until that first draft is finished. The only sure-fire way to fail, is to fail to finish.  Besides, don’t you want to know how it all turns out?

Revise

1. Use your spell and grammar-checker, but don’t trust it to pick up everything.  “Here” is spelt correctly but you might have intended “Hear” instead.
2. Go through it carefully and check for spelling mistakes and typos the computer missed.  Also look out for missing full-stops, quotation marks etc.
3. Read it out loud and listen to it.  Make sure the words convey the meaning you intended.
4. Get rid of 70-80% of the adjectives and adverbs. See if you can use a stronger verb that says what you want without needing an adverb to explain it. Same with nouns and adjectives.
5. If a conversation between two people lasts for more than a sentence or two each, stop using ‘He said/she said” and just let the conversation flow.  The appropriate use of quotation marks and other forms of punctuation should make it clear who’s saying what to whom.
6. Look out for Show and Tell.  Try to show the reader what you want them to know, rather than just tell them.

   For Example:
   TELL = The towering monster was the ugliest thing she’d ever seen.
   SHOW = Snarling with contempt, the creature towered above Jennifer. One of its fangs had a broken tip, damaged in an ancient brawl, and the other was slick with drool. Viscous snot dripped from the monster’s left nostril.

Rewrite. Now that you have discovered areas for improvement, rewrite the story. Try to reduce the word-count by about 10%.  Leave it alone for a few days, or longer, and then re-read it.  You may find that you need to repeat the process. (I usually do.)

Be Brave. The temptation will then be to bury it in some dark forgotten file, so that it never sees the light of day again. Don’t do that. Get some feed-back from someone you trust; someone who will be honest.  As much as your ego wants to hear you’re the next Stephen King, John Grisham or Margaret Attwood, let’s be real, shall we? You’re not.  Well, not yet. You need someone who will help you grow.

I recommend you try to join a writers’ support/critique group. This helped me enormously. Workshops and/or classes are especially beneficial.

Submit. Now bite the bullet and send it out there. The worst thing that will happen is that it will be rejected.  If it is, re-read the story. Could it be improved? (Remember, the story has been rejected, NOT YOU.) If not, would it better suit another magazine, e-zine, journal, newspaper… If so, send it out again.  I had two and a half years of continual rejection before I finally got myself in print.  DON’T GIVE UP.

Start again. Start another one.  Keep writing. If you are a writer, you are probably doing it somehow anyway; even if it’s only in your head.  You might as well give those ideas a life apart from you.  Go for it!

Watch this space for other up-coming handy hints.

Please Note: I am sorry, but I do not have the time to critique anyone’s manuscripts so please don’t waste your time and money sending them to me.

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