First Word

  What are common mistakes writers make?   Mistake #1 – Self-doubt : Oh, this one can actually kill careers. Self-doubting writers lack confidence in their work. Projects get scuttled even before they can be finished. The anxiety and fear that their work will fail before it even sees the light of day holds many writers back from finishing what they start.   Mistake #2 – Not studying writing itself . Key mistakes get made out of sheer lack of education. An overall story can be really fantastic but so poorly executed that it’s unreadable. Mistakes like overwriting scenes and focusing on minutia versus pushing a story forward (and it’s all equal when it comes to fiction or nonfiction) can bog down your manuscript. You can hire a copy editor to clean up those minor mistakes, but the writing itself needs to be solid.   Mistake #3 – Writers who lack grammar skills and make their work almost impossible to read . Editing is a profession in and of itse...

I had this great writing class in college. I will never forget this excellent exercise. The professor taught us how to "trim the fat" to tighten our writing. The major tip is to look for the excess and unnecessary words. It will sharpen your writing, and it makes it easier to read. I'm going to show you an example of how it's done.  This sentenced is pulled from my own newsletter (you can sign up at www.3LPublishing.com ... look for the First Word button).  Exercise: Trim five words from this sentence: Speaking of warmth, let's discuss what isn't particularly warm, but perhaps slightly "cold" and maybe even bad for business. Speaking of warmth, let's discuss what isn't warm, but "cold" and bad for business. You can clearly see how much better that sentence is. Now here is why I didn't write it that way in the first place: voice. The "excess" "fat" in that sentence conveys my voice. In a person...

You're an aspiring writer. You already write, but you want to improve. You just didn't know what I'm about to share LOL ... okay, all qualifiers done now. Here are three tips to improve your writing. Words, words, everywhere too many so let's spare the air (see I'm feeling humorous today) . Wordiness! Wordiness bogs down your work. Wordiness makes your sentences longer. And wordiness makes your editor have to bring out a major chainsaw to hack your work down to the message. Here is an absolutely fantastic exercise. Take a paragraph from one of your works. Look at how many words could be easily deleted. Delete them. Now repeat. Keep going until you have only the "bones" of the sentence left. Now read it. How much easier is that to understand? The biggest offenders tend to be too many adjectives and adverbs. Dialog or Shakespeare . I see so many writers who write their characters' dialog like it's a Shakespearian play. The formalism makes it soun...