Monthly Archives June 2014

Almost since this series began, I’ve been discussing things writers, especially new ones, have trouble with. This article is the last of that string. Next time I’ll begin a short series on how critiquers should respond to things a writer did well. Positive critiques are at least as important as corrective ones, so that’s a set of subjects we shouldn’t avoid.

Formatting a manuscript is a simple and almost purely mechanical process, yet it’s one new writers may not have had any training on, or they may have been trained on formats that aren’t appropriate for fiction manuscripts.

This might seem like a minor point, yet if an author intends to follow the traditional publishing route and submit their work to literary agents or directly to publishing house editors, an impr...

Like the rules of spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, the rules of grammar are meant to help make a writer’s meaning clear to the reader. Unfortunately, there are even more grammar rules than there are about spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, which means that many more opportunities for a writer to mess things up.

Whole books, college courses, and web sites are devoted to these rules, so there’s no way I’m going to replicate even a tiny fraction of that material here.

Novice writers often have trouble with the basic stuff, like putting a plural form of a verb with the singular form of a noun (“she say” rather than “she says,” for example), or not being clear on who (or whom) a pronoun is referring to...

Perhaps as much as spelling, punctuation can be a wonder and a mystery to a lot of novice writers. Schools try to teach their students all sorts of punctuation rules. If you really dig into it, there are hundreds of them—and of course they all have their exceptions and caveats. After a while, many students just give up, and it shows.

I thought I had a good, workable handle on what to use, when, and how until I went to one of my friend Harvey Stanbrough’s seminars, and then the light bulb really came on. One of the best things you as a reviewer can do is buy yourself a copy of Harvey’s ebook, Punctuation for Writers. It’s available on Amazon for the Kindle, Barnes & Noble for the Nook, and Smashwords for ev...

This article begins a series on mechanical errors in writing, and with it, we’ll finish all the ones on the errors writer make. After that I’ll discuss the kinds of things a reviewer should address when the writer does well. Critique is not criticism, after all, and especially not negative, destructive criticism. It’s important to point out a writer’s successes, too.

Before I get to that, though, I need to discuss speeling, grammer, puncturation, CapitOlizaTtion—I mean, spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization—and other usage problems, and manuscript formatting.

Spelling words correctly is a basic requirement for every writer. There’s simply no excuse for getting words wrong, unless, like I did in the paragraph above, you’re doing it intentionally...

Let’s be clear from the beginning about what point of view (POV), or viewpoint, is. Simply stated, it means whose eyes and other senses the reader is experiencing the story through. Said another way, if you think of the reader as being the proverbial fly on the wall, where is that fly? That sounds simple enough, but there are four main POV options, and many variations of each.

Four Main Points of View and Some of Their Variations

Omniscient

The word means all-knowing, and in this case, the fly really is on the wall. In this POV, the narrator stands back from the characters and reports on their actions and statements. But it’s also a telepathic fly: the author can tell the reader, as well as show him, what a character is thinking or feeling...