In writing and in life, there are always gray areas. Knowing the ground rules is the best place to start. How should you market your book? It depends on the type of book, your audience, and the marketing tasks you enjoy. How should you structure your writing day? That depends on your personal energy peaks and valleys, your other responsibilities, and your priorities.

Let’s focus on the content of your story—how it flows, if it all makes sense, if the tone is appropriate, and if there are any questions we didn’t answer that readers might have. I like to call this “defensive editing,” much like defensive driving. Good authors are in teh driver’s seat, taking control of where they are going.

After taking a good look at the macro editing, get into “micro editing” for the nitty gritty of editing for mechanics and language issues.

Sometimes it can seem like writers have just too many hard decisions to make; knowing the rules, avoiding mistakes.

Writing problems occur when:

  1. You use clichés and jargon.
  2. You assume that you know more than your reader knows.
  3. Your writing is forced.
  4. Your sentences are (on average) longer than nine words. (This means some sentences will have 13 words and others will have two.)
  5. Your reader has to wade through unnecessary adverbs, adjectives, modifiers, and qualifiers.
  6. You use foreign words and unorthodox spelling.
  7. Your writing is old-fashioned.
  8. Your words are the longest you can find.
  9. Your words are (on average) more than six characters. (This means some words will have nine characters and others will have three.)
  10. You preach.
  11. Your sentence structure is repetitive. [Read The Importance Of Varying Sentence Length]
  12. Your reader feels as if you are using them as a sounding board for your pretensions to literary greatness.
  13. Your reader feels you are judging your subject matter.
  14. Your write (on average) more than three sentences per paragraph.

 

Unleash the novel inside you

with compelling characters,

intricate worlds,

and fine-tuned prose.

“Linda has published twenty books. She blogs about the publishing world, posts useful tips on the challenges a writer faces, including marketing and promoting your work, how to build your online platform, how to get reviews and how to self-publish. She has mentored many authors and edited their work.” 

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