Ten Styling Mistakes

Over at Holt Uncensored a few days ago was a fantastic article on Ten Common Mistakes made by all writers». The beauty about these mistakes is that they are all very common, easy to spot once you know what to look for, and by fixing them the quality of your writing will improve immediately.

Moving on, I also wanted to share a link to Writtenwyrdd where today writer D. Lynn Frazier discusses the impact something as simple as Concrete can have on World Building» (puns not intentional).

On the home front, I'm busy working on my next story for my writing group. We have a simple system: 1 short story a month, 3 to 5 thousand words in length. Ideally in a few months each member should be starting to build a collection of short stories that have been peer reviewed and would be suitable for submission to editors and magazines.

See that's ultimately the goal of this group. To write and submit our stories in pursuit of publication. To some writers it's about finding personal meaning in stories, and developing their craft or art. All very literary, and a great use of 6 years of university. I get it,and I could spend years at my desk writing things that make me happy. Of course by ignoring the current markets desires then I would have little chance of being published. Happy, but unpublished, and that's not for me.

So back on the topic of mistakes, here are three common mistakes made by members of a writing group:
(I have made all of these mistakes!!)

* Didn't Finish the Story. Members with an incomplete story that drags on for months (with edits, additions, rewrites and changes) will bore the other members of the group and have nothing of value to use for submission. Finish the story and move on. If you want to edit, fine, but don't resubmit the edited piece the next month and the next month, ad nauseam. The converse of this is the member who submits the first part of a different story each meeting without ever submitting the second parts (or even finishing the second parts oftentimes). They likewise short change themselves. There is no market for half written stories, nobody publishes a book of chapter ones. In the meantime what value is the critique of half a story?

* Didn't Edit the Story. It should be as obvious as the nose on your face that if you write something for publication that commas, periods, paragraphs, and other correct uses of punctuation are expected. To submit unformatted stories, riddled with punctuation errors, to the writing group is a waste of time. Nobody can effectively critique the work because they have to struggle to read it. The writing group isn't there to fix errors that should have stopped in Grade School.

* Submits Story Late. Deadlines are hardly deadly in an informal writing group, and the story may be better for the extra time spent on it, but a late story is less likely to be read and critiqued. Not everybody has a schedule that allows them to read late stories in the hours before the meeting. Which is exactly why many writing groups have stories due days or even a week before the meeting. This allows everyone time to read the story and prepare a critique.

The nice thing about these mistakes is that they are easy to avoid. Just write and finish what you write. Don't delay, don't dwaddle, just DO IT. And on that note: Time to get back to my own writing.