10 Solutions to the Most Common Writing Mistakes

This week, AC is pleased to share with you a guest post by full-time writer and blogger Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen. Laurie created and maintains a series of Quips and Tips blogs: Quips and Tips for Successful Writers, Quips and Tips for Achieving Your Goals, and Quips and Tips for Couples Coping With Infertility. She’s also the Feature Writer for Psychology Suite101.

10 Solutions to the Most Common Writing Mistakes

These ten solutions to the most common writing mistakes apply to all types of writing: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, copywriting, technical writing, etc. Writing tips like these can make you a better writer and self-editor—and increase your chances of getting published!

But first, a writing quip:

“Don’t write down to your readers,” said Jack Bickham, author of 75 published novels. “The ones dumber than you can’t read.”

His point is that writers need to park their arrogance at the door and write directly, openly, and honestly to readers. Bickham gave this advice in The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them). Below are several of his solutions to ten common writing mistakes, plus a few tips I’ve learned in my freelance writing and blogging career…

1. Dropping alligators through the transom. Instead of engineering comets from Venus or aliens from Mars or “alligators through the transom” to kill or paralyze everyone in town but your protagonist and her lover, make sure you stick to “logical but unanticipated disasters.”

2. Describing sunsets. To describe something in detail, you have to stop the action. Readers don’t like inaction, so try to stay in flow as much as possible.

3. Warming up your engines. Instead of clearing your throat before you get to the good stuff, start with an earthquake and work up to a climax.

4. Not letting your characters think. Scenes are peaks, and sequels are valleys. The sequels are quiet times that show what your character’s reaction is, what she’s doing next, etc. In The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes, Bickham recommends a “Emotion—Thought—Decision” formula.

5. Lecturing your reader. Let your character or interviewee remember info, or seek it out, or be told it, or read it. Don’t insert huge chunks of info in your novels, articles, or poems.

6. Worrying about being too obvious. Exaggerate your character portrayal, goals, plot development. Spell out everything. “Obvious is mandatory. Your reader is busy, distracted, etc—what seems obvious to you may be obscure to her,” writes Bickham.

7. Letting things “just happen.” To motivate them to make logical (and yet still surprising) choices, make sure your characters have the right background (experience, upbringing, information).

8. Forgetting sense impressions. You’ll keep your readers oriented if you share what the characters see, hear, smell, or feel.

9. Hiding from your emotions. “Strong emotion must be at the center of your stories, Walk on the edge of too much,” says Bickham.

10. Chasing the market. The best books, magazine articles, and blog posts are those that aren’t chasing trends. Rather, they establish them. Hard to do? You better believe it.

Fellow scribes, these solutions to the most common writing mistakes apply to novels, magazine articles, poetry, and even textbook writing! If you have any comments or questions, please fire away below…

Resource Roundup ~ December, 2009

As I look back over 2009 I'm, once again, so thankful to God for His wonderful blessings. He's brought our family through this year without any major health issues, my 97 year old grandmother is still with us, and my first book debuted this past summer.

I love the freshness of a new year. I'm excited as I look ahead. Last year I resolved to use my calendar more - be more organized. (And I did improve a lot - yay!) This year I'd like to also be more intentional about my writing time.

I pray you will be able to look back on 2009 and find the blessings in it and that this list will be of help to you with your New Year's writing resolutions.

Writing Software:

MasterWriter - http://masterwriter.com/creative_writer/index.html
SnowFlake Pro - http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/info/snowflake_pro/96b.php
Check out TopTenReviews' comparison of ten creative writing software programs - http://creative-writing-software-review.toptenreviews.com/

Helpful Blogs for Writers:

Agent Rachelle Gardner - http://cba-ramblings.blogspot.com/
Agent Chip MacGregor - http://www.chipmacgregor.com/
Advanced Fiction Writing - http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/blog/
Agent Nathan Bransford - http://blog.nathanbransford.com/

Places to discuss books with other bibliophiles:

Look for a local book club on - http://www.meetup.com/
http://www.shelfari.com/
http://www.goodreads.com/
http://www.librarything.com/

Dictionary and Thesaurus Links:

Find both a dictionary and a thesaurus at - http://dictionary.reference.com/ (also has an encyclopedia and a translator.)
Visuwords - http://www.visuwords.com/
Etymology Dictionary - http://www.etymonline.com/

Thinking of Starting a Website, but Don't Have a Clue Where to Start?:

The SiteWizard has some great information - http://www.thesitewizard.com/gettingstarted/startwebsite.shtml
Free WYSIWYG Editor - http://net2.com/nvu/

Miscellaneous:

Fun name generator site - http://www.inkalicious.com/alchemist.html

Check out this cool pen - http://www.livescribe.com/







Do you have any writing resources that you would like us to include in our monthly Resource Roundups? Please let us know by emailing us using the contact box to the bottom right of the blog.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

10 Methods to Find More Time to Write

Time is a precious commodity in the life of a writer. Demands on our time come at us from every direction these days. We’re expected to market our work, hobnob on the Internet, maintain an active web presence, research, edit, clean the house, make meals, keep up with family and friends, buy groceries… and, oh, yes, write. How can we possibly find time to write amid all this other stuff that needs doing? In lieu of a magic machine that generates an extra hour in every day, following are 10 tips for making sure writing doesn’t get pushed to the back burner of your busy life.

1. Prioritize your time. If writing habitually ends up at the bottom of your priorities list, you can hardly expect to accomplish much. In the December 2009 issue of The Writer, Karen M. Rider wrote, “Unless it’s life or death, remember that chores can wait or be delegated but ideas are fleeting—so writing can’t wait.”

2. Schedule. Once you’ve figured out your priorities, lock them into a schedule. Make a list of everything you need to accomplish in your day and put a time to it. Writing out a to-do list can help you use your time to its full extent.

3. Cull the unnecessaries. It’s easy to waste all kinds of time on unnecessaries: email, Internet games, TV, phone calls, etc. As fun as these things may be, discipline yourself to recognize what’s unnecessary—and cut it ruthlessly.

4. Get organized. Organization takes a little extra effort, but once you have a system in place, it saves untold minutes you might have spent hunting down research notes, sorting through scribbles to find your latest burst of inspiration, or running searches through your computer’s hard drive in pursuit of that outline your wrote last fall.

5. Plan ahead. Writing time is too precious to waste on anything but writing. When you sit down each day at your scheduled writing time, make sure you’re ready to go. Have your scene outline, character sketches, and research notes ready to grab at a moment’s notice.

6. Use your non-writing time creatively. Instead of pondering plot holes during your writing time, use the time during “brainless” activities (such as folding clothes, washing dishes, or mowing the lawn) to multi-task. Plan your next scene in your head before you ever sit down to write it.

7. Get/stay up an hour earlier/later. Borrowing an hour of sleep is an easy way to add an extra hour to the day. Plus, by writing when the rest of your household is in still in bed, you gain the added benefit of peace and quiet.

8. Write in multiple small chunks of time. If carving a solid hour or two from your schedule is too daunting, try grabbing fifteen minutes four times a day. Squeeze a little writing time in during your lunch hour or while in you’re waiting in the car at your child’s piano lesson—or even dictate into a tape recorder while driving to work.

9. Delegate tasks. You don’t have to do everything yourself. Learn to delegate tasks. Hire a secretary, a babysitter, a maid, or a publicist. Your time is sometimes more valuable than the money necessary to hire help.

10. Encourage others to respect your writing time. This starts with you respecting your writing time. If your writing doesn’t matter enough for you to make time for it, why should others respect it? Make it clear to family and friends that you can’t talk to them during writing time. They may need to be told firmly several times before understanding, so stick to your guns. If all else fails, you can always do what I do and keep a machete and a flame thrower in your desk!

Plump Up Your Characters

Characterization is everything. You can have a compelling plot, but if your characters have the depth of a paper doll, no one is going to read it. You can write incredible action, gruesome murders, swoon-inducing romance, but without character emotion to intensify the scenes, you might as well write a discourse on the art of tatting doilies.

Instructional books on writing, if not entirely about characterization, have sections devoted to it. We recommend studying everything you can get your hands on about it, beginning with this interview of a couple of new authors.

<-- Suzanne Hartmann, author of the prepubbed novel, The Race that Lies Before Us, blogs about the craft of writing and tips on how to polish and present your novel to catch an agent's or editor's eye at Write at Home, and offers a critique service.

Lynda Schab, a freelance writer and award winning author, writes for Examiner.com, among other sites, and offers a full range of services on her site LyndaSchab.com. -->

AC thanks them both for generously sharing their time and tips.


AC: About your writing: are you an outliner or a seat-of-the-pantser?

Suzanne: Before reading your questions about characterization, I would have said with confidence that I am an outliner. But as I read through, I came to realize that I'm only an outliner when it comes to plot. With characters, I'm definitely a seat-of-the-pants writer. I discover my characters as I write the story.

Lynda: Definitely a pantser, but I do plot rather extensively in my head. I tend to brain-plot chapter by chapter. At some point, I do stop and put together a loose outline or at least a general synopsis of the entire story. And I just purchased Snowflake Pro software by Randy Ingermanson, and excellent program for both pansters and plotters.

AC: Do you use a character bio sheet? Walk us through it–what do you do? Or, if you don’t develop a bio before writing, share with us what you do.

Suzanne: As I said, I generally get to know my characters as I write my story. The closest I come to using a bio sheet is to create a separate file for each character. I store details like eye color and a brief description of hair color/style and physical description that I will need to remember (I usually forget at some point during the story). Beyond that, I usually only add backstory information to the file when I have the urge to slip in a backstory dump. That way I can store the information until I find a place to slip in the absolutely essential backstory in bits and pieces.

Lynda: Again, Snowflake Pro offers an excellent character template and is an easy way to keep track of characters. However, I haven’t used it extensively yet. Up until now, I’ve written down bits and pieces but have spent a lot of time sludging through pages of story to check facts (does this character have a sister or a brother? Green or brown eyes?) That won’t be necessary once I get the profiles set up in Snowflake Pro. It will take some time initially to enter all the information but will save me time in the long run.

AC: So whether you keep up with your character by your own method or a separate program, some form of character bio is important. What about personality types? Do you have a way of designing your characters' personalities?

Suzanne: Since I’m a character SOP writer, I usually end up pigeon-holing my characters as I write. In my novel, The Race that Lies Before Us, for example, conversation between the main characters was heating up and one of the minor characters stepped in to soothe ruffled feathers and make sure everyone remained friends. As I wrote the scene, I realized that Neil was a peacemaker.

Lynda: No method in particular, but here’s a link to a site I have bookmarked that gives an in-depth description of sixteen different personality types: Personality Page

AC: What makes for a heroic or sympathetic protagonist? What makes for a memorable antagonist? Protagonist?

Suzanne: The hero and heroine must be people the readers can relate to. This means they must have flaws because no one can relate to a perfect character.

For the protagonist in particular, the main thing is to make him or her someone the reader can relate to in some way. To make them truly memorable, however, they need to have or do something the reader would like to do so the reader can live vicariously through the character.

Making the antagonist passionate about what he does, even though it might be wrong or for the wrong reason, makes him memorable. Humor often makes a character memorable for me as well, either the protagonist or the antagonist.

The antagonist needs to have some type of redeeming quality. Even the worst of characters can be “the villain you love to hate.”

Lynda: I’ve been told a couple of times that my main character was not sympathetic enough and have had to rework my story to make readers feel more of a connection or a reason to cheer for her. One character in particular was sarcastic and cynical. I ended up keeping her edge, but had to work harder at showing the reason she developed such an attitude. Readers don’t necessarily have to like a character, but they do need to be able to understand why she is the way she is.

On the other hand, characters that are too perfect will turn off a reader just as quickly. Who wants to read about perfect people? Quirks and flaws not only add flavor, but also come across as more real and endear the character to the reader.

I have an antagonist in my novel, Mind over Madi, that could be considered a character cliché. But despite her many negative attributes, I try to give her some sympathetic qualities, as we discussed earlier. Let’s face it – we all have terrible tendencies and do horrible things sometimes. So even if the antagonist’s faults are dramatized or are higher on the “evil scale” than ours might be, we can still relate in some way. And no matter how evil or obnoxious someone is, there’s always something good in there, somewhere. It’s just that sometimes you might have to dig a little deeper.

AC: Some authors have the magical ability to bring even minor characters to life. How do you fill out your minor characters?

Suzanne: Even minor characters need to have their good side and bad side. They need to be fully fleshed out characters just like the hero, heroine, and antagonist even though they don’t get as much time in the book. Since we aren’t in their POV very often (if at all), we need to show their personality by how they relate to the POV character and what that character thinks of the minor character.

Lynda: I try to make my supporting characters do just that – support the main character. I love a good secondary character who might steal a scene but can then once again blend into the background a bit, so as not to overshadow the main character. It’s all about balance. If I feel a character is becoming too strong, I might try to scale him or her back. On the flip side, if a character is too far into the background, I consider whether I should enlarge his or her role or possibly even delete the character altogether.

Thank you both so much for the insight you've given us about characterization. You've provided so many good points to ponder!

Don't Make Amanda Mad!

How I wish I had a picture of Amanda!

(Originally Posted: 25 Nov 2009 11:04 AM PST and reprinted with permission from agent Chip MacGregor)

I'm Amanda -- Chip's assistant at MacGregor Literary. I've been handling the over-the-transom queries sent to the office for the past few months. It's been enlightening. Below are a few strange yet horrifically common trends I'm seeing with queries. They'll make you laugh, they'll make you cry, but hopefully, they'll make you check over your queries to see whether you're among the guilty. So, without further ado, I present:

Three Things Currently Annoying Amanda

1) People who don't do their homework. Within a week's span, I saw about five different queries from self-professed psychics who wanted to take the next step in their career by publishing a book. Now, I've taken great pains to resist the urge to chastise them for wasting my time when they could just as easily have consulted their special powers and foreseen my inevitable rejection.

But I'm too nice. Furthermore, their failure to use their powers to their advantage isn't the core problem. The core of the problem is this: Authors seeking an agent don't do their research. A bit of poking around at macgregorliterary.com would have thrown up obvious red flags and told authors such as this that Chip typically represents Christian authors. He's probably not interested in anything that has to do with special powers.

2) Relentless submitters. It's one thing if an author truly polishes their work and queries it again. It's another if they're on query number 77, having ignored the first rejection that came after query number 06 (yes, this has happened).

Another pet peeve is the authors who get antsy and resubmit a pending submission. My only piece of advice to these people is this: Don't get offended if this results in your work getting rejected twice. You submitted it twice, after all. It's only fair.

3) Friends of the Archangel Gabriel. Believe it or not, I've seen queries from more than one person, claiming that the Archangel Gabriel visited them, told them super-sensitive information, and now it's up to me to see to the fruition of God's will in the form of a 90,000-word work of nonfiction.

That's right. The fulfillment of God's will is dependent upon me. Me. (And you thought your job was stressful . . .)

Now, if only I could make them believe that my rejection is a sign from God as well . . .

Creating Characters That Live

This week, AC is pleased to share with you a guest post by novelist Terri Tiffany. Terri counseled adults, owned a Christian bookstore, and now resides in Florida. Her work appears in anthologies, Sunday school take-home papers, and magazines such as Chicken Soup for the Soul, Hearts at Home, Cross Times, Come to the Fire, Cross and Quill, Guide, Standard, and more. Please visit her blog here.

Creating Characters that Live

“Your characters sound flat. Round them out—develop them.”

Ten years ago, a publisher sent me these comments tucked inside my very first rejection letter. I didn’t have a clue what she meant so I took the romance novel I’d written nights in my back bedroom and stuffed the whole thing in a drawer.

What did I know about developing characters? Not a whole lot. What did I know about people?

Much more than I thought.

When I worked as a mental health counselor, I spent years analyzing motives and understanding my clients’ behaviors. It helped me discover their real character. Whenever I met new people, I immediately tried to find out everything I could about them—their likes, their dislikes, their attitudes—so I could better understand them. I loved learning about people and discovering the person behind the face.

But I didn’t know how to show it on paper.

After a few years, I tried my hand at writing again. Soon I noticed my characters began to exhibit true-to-life emotions and feelings. They behaved the way I might or someone I knew might in any given situation. My confidence grew and I started submitting my work. No longer did the publishers call my characters paper dolls.

I’d finally found a way to make people I wrote about feel and behave like real people.

How do you turn boring characters into ones that readers will cry and laugh with throughout an entire story?

1. Write about familiar characters. I write about mothers, daughters, and friends—people with lives I understand—not ones with occupations I know nothing about unless I’m willing to do the research. Forget writing about an archeologist or math teacher unless your fascination with them runs a lot deeper than mine.

2. Imagine the scene. Quite often, I seclude myself in my office and try to act out what a character might say; what body movements she might make. I think about what her motives might be and then I ask, “What if?”

3. Taste the dialogue. Is your character speaking with words and phrases someone might actually use? If your answer is yes, then bump it up a notch to make the scene even more interesting. Is your character someone I might eavesdrop on at a party? (Admit it—we all do that.) What is she saying that draws me in? How is she saying it? Get out from behind your computer and spend a day around people to observe how they really act.

4. Show the emotions. Most writers think they understand the writing concept of show don’t tell. But do they really? Think about your character who is crying because her boyfriend jilted her. Do her tears cause her to choke on her words? Does her voice quiver from fear of being left alone? Use specific physical actions to illustrate the emotions.

5. Give details. But don’t give the usual boring descriptions. Avoid height, weight, eye color, hair style to describe your character. Most readers can’t remember the color of their cat’s eyes let alone all three people in your story. Instead show them with your strong words how the woman slams her office phone down after her boss orders her to work overtime and she has a hot date waiting. Show how she trashes her week-old sneakers into the back alley dumpster when her boyfriend’s puppy chews them like a rawhide bone. Show how she breaks down into sobs when her next door neighbor brings over a chicken casserole a day after her grandmother dies. Your character will come alive and your readers will feel they personally know her. Better yet, they will connect with her.

While I’m writing any new story, my character accompanies me everywhere I go. If I shop for meatballs, she’s buying turkey burger right alongside me. If I stop at my hairdresser for a quick trim, she gets her hair highlighted in the next chair. By the time I get to the final pages—I know the person I’m writing about better than I do my husband. But the real test comes when I close the computer at the end of writing the story. If I feel a slight loss, a definite tug on my heart, then I know I did my job.

My character lives.

How to Find Your “Voice”

Voice is one of the most ambiguous, confusing, and highly sought after elements of writing. “How do I find my voice?” is a common question of young writers. And one that even experienced authors aren’t always quite sure how to answer. Everyone seems to have his own opinion on just what voice is. Is it our subject matter? Is it the way we construct sentences? Is it the instinctive tenor of our words—or is it something we have to learn?

Your voice is something that is inherently you. It’s rather like a literary fingerprint. No one of us, no matter how similar our personalities or geographical or social upbringing, will ever put words on paper in exactly the same order. There will never be a second Hemingway (though many lit students like to attempt it), a second Austen, or a second Vonnegut. Even better, there will never be a second you. Therefore, the answer to whether or not voice is something you can learn is both yes and no. Yes, in that your voice will change, mature, and sharpen as you study and grow in the craft. No, in that it is something inborn within all of us. Katherine Anne Porter wrote, “You do not create style. You work and develop yourself; your style is an emanation of your own being.”

In light of this inherency, it’s surprising how many young authors worry about finding their voices. Many of us go through growing spurts in which we attempt to shape our writing to the pattern of one of the masters—and therefore try to force our own styles to conform to his. We think that if we can learn what worked in the voices of classic writers, we can reach the same level of success. But the best and truest way to find success is to embrace our own voices. Allen Ginsberg and Janet Burroway, respectively, agreed:

To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard. Renounce that and you get your own voice automatically. Try to become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness, and you won’t worry about being heard in The New York Times.

Voice and point of view are closely intertwined; therefore, it’s the hardest thing to teach. What I mainly do is say, “Don’t worry about it. Don’t look for your voice; just say things as clearly and as vividly as you can say them, and that will be your voice.

To first discover your voice and then perfect it, the best thing you can do is simply tackle writing head on. Start putting words on paper, start figuring out what works and what doesn’t. But, more than anything, be true to yourself. Dig down inside and don’t put your fingers to the keyboard until you can write from a place of deep honesty. If you can read back over what you’ve written at the end of the page and admit that every word of it is you, then allow me to congratulate you. You’ve found your voice.

Flutter: The New Twitter

Let's Talk Publicity ~ Part 2: Is Your Best Face Working for You?

Okay so on Monday we talked about what not to do - especially before you get that first contract. Today, let's talk about all the things you can do with publicity after the contract and how to tell if they are working, or not.

Remember our little song from Finding Nemo:


Just keep swimming...
Just keep swimming...
Just keep swimming...

Let's face it, there are a lot of ways of getting word out about your writing. With the plethora of free social-networking sites now available on the internet, there is no excuse (for even the poorest among us writers) not to be doing some publicity.

I won't go into details on all these sites. Katie did a nice series a couple months ago that quickly overviewed several sites and how to use them. You can see those posts here, here, here and here. But I would like to give you a list of sites and methods that I have found beneficial in my publicity efforts for Rocky Mountain Oasis.

Shelfari, Goodreads, Tag My Book, Facebook, Shoutlife, Twitter (I hesitated to list Twitter because, admittedly, I'm one user who is on the fence about the awesomeness of Twitter. But I do have an account and post to it occasionally), my blogs, my website, several forums that I frequent (I recommend that you get in on a forum that you really enjoy and make friends there. Amazon also has forums.), book signings, post-card mailings, blog tours, and interviews.

I have done a little or a lot with each one of those methods. It takes time! What I want to encourage you with today is to: Just. Keep. Promoting.

It can get tiresome. Especially since, often, promotion is done before a book is even out in print and we don't have a way to measure how sales are doing - ie. how that particular method of publicity is working. Even after the book is out, many authors don't get royalty statements but twice a year, so it is still hard to measure the effectiveness of certain publicity methods.

My suggestion is to make a plan. Depending on your personality it might be to work on publicity for a few minutes each day on multiple sites. Or it might be to work on one site for a week and then move on to another site in rotation. I'm not sure what will work best for you. But if you write down your plan, stick to it, and keep getting the word out about your book, you won't be sorry.

So how do we tell how well our publicity is working? Well, I'm not sure there is an answer to that other than your twice yearly sales statement. There is the elusive Amazon sales rank, which is an okay measure. There are also reviews that start popping up of your book. Sometimes the reviewer will say why they bought your book and then you will know which particular piece of publicity worked to make them buy it. But mostly...

Just keep swimming...

Just keep swimming...

Just keep swimming...

Let's Talk Publicity ~ Part 1: Putting on Your Best Face

What does Publicity have to do with Finding Nemo?

Do you remember the song from Finding Nemo that Dory-the-crazy-blue-fish kept singing?

Just keep swimming,

just keep swimming,

just keep swimming...

Yeah, publicity is a lot like that. You just need to keep at it.

Sometimes you will feel like you are the only fish swimming upstream, while everyone else is swimming down, but you just need to keep swimming. Keep pressing on. Keep putting yourself out there - but make sure you are swimming in the right direction.

I realize that many of you may still be in the stages of looking for a publisher or agent. I want you to stop and remember that everything we do, whether we are thinking about it or not, is publicity. For the good or for the bad. (To keep with my analogy, all us little fishies are contstanly swimming, whether we are going in the right direction or not.) The Internet is a vast place, but with the ability of search, it shrinks right down to small-town-barber-shop size. BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SAY ON THE NET. (And at writers conferences, and to agents and publishers you may talk to. Because if the Internet is barber-shop size, the writing world is even smaller. And agents and publishers do talk to each other.)

I read several agents and publishers blogs and I can't tell you the number of stories I've heard about an agent or publisher being interested in an author until they went on a Google hunt and started discovering some things the author had said.

Put yourself in an agent's shoes for a moment. Let's say they get two promising queries. Query A is from Suzy Sweetwater. She always has nice things to say on her blog about the industry, agents, and all things publishing. Query B is from George Grumpypants, who is contantly griping and complaining on his blog. Which person do you think the agent is going to request more information from? Of course it is Suzy Sweetwater because the agent doesn't want to risk the fact that they might be a subject of one of Mr. Grumpypants' tirades in the future. Not to mention that any future publishers will probably also check him out and the bad attitude might prevent them from offering a contract, which will keep the agent from getting paid.

Now this doesn't mean that you have to say nice things about something that just drives you crazy. But the old addage "sometimes it's better not to say anything at all" will serve you well. And if you just HAVE to say something, make sure that you say it in a respectful, thought-out way, or it just might come back to haunt you.

These principles apply whether you are brand new to the industry, or have just signed your 20th contract.

Okay, so let's say you are doing the best you can to make sure you are at least started in the right direction, by being careful to present a professional appearance each time you swim into the writing world.

In the next post we are going to talk about how to know whether your publicity is working for you, or not.

Oh, and if you enjoy our site and would like to nominate us as one of the 101 best places for writers to hang out on the net, we'd be honored. Please see the Writer's Digest section in the upper left side-bar.

Fabulously Fun Friday: Query-Letter Rejection

Review of Writing Short Stories for Pleasure and Profit by Marian Gavin

If the heart of this slim volume could be summed up in one phrase, that phrase would be Just write! The details of how to write a successful short story are rather scarce in Gavin’s ten chapters of smooth prose. But what certainly is not lacking is a wealth of ideas and encouragement. After closing the back cover on the final page, I didn’t feel so much empowered to write a story, as I did inspired.

After an introduction that was more essay than anything else, Gavin gives her readers one hundred and two story starters to start the creative juices flowing. The next three chapters, in which are found most of the meat, are made up mostly of excerpts from the author’s own short stories, used as examples of what she terms the three types of stories—the personal experience story, the personal emotion story, and the out-of-nowhere story. The rest of the book contains a smorgasbord of writing information, everything from common story patterns to troubleshooting and revising.

I was pleased with her attitude that a story should have a deeper meaning than the dollars a writer is paid or even the interest of a reader. To paraphrase what she insists all throughout the book, a story should be written only because it must be written.

Certainly, Gavin is not the final word in writing short stories, but I think her brilliance comes from the fact that she never claims to be.