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Craft of Writing

Lon Prater

The Five Most Costly Mistakes You Can Make—
Before You Even Begin To Write

Every year, a few hundred articles are published warning new writers away from mistakes that range from overuse of the passive voice and lack of sensory elements to odd dialogue tags and the presence of weak verbs. Few of these articles seem to be aimed at helping the newest of the new avoid the most common traps which they may encounter. In this article, I hope to remedy this situation by setting up warning flags over the most hazardous and showing the most efficient routes around them.

MISTAKE #1: Deciding to leave grammar and proofreading to the pros

This is one of the hardest hitting mistakes there is for a new writer, and not just financially. For that reason, I'm putting it first, and giving it a bit more discussion than the other mistakes.

Leaving all those misspellings and grammar violations to someone else. . . . Sure sounds seductive doesn't it? Just write down your story, have a ball with it and when you're done, stuff it in the mail, knowing that any good editor will see right through the tarnish of your typos to the silver shining beneath. Don't bet on it. The weary submissions editor will be delighted to see your first page or two, all right; that'll be enough for him to know he need read no further and thankfully, he will stuff your form letter into the SASE and move on to the next contender.

Where this mistake can get costly in terms of your checkbook is the point at which you decide it's worth it to pay for editing services. While there are no doubt many reputable editors out there willing to work for you, there are also many sharks in those waters. In select cases, it may be worthwhile to have your manuscript professionally edited before submission; but in my opinion these are fairly rare. If you simply must, make sure to do your homework before you start signing checks, and be realistic about what you hope to get in exchange for your money.

But even if you have an overstuffed wallet and the cost of professional editing is no more than a piffle compared to your dream of getting published, there's still a cost: your own improvement as a writer. To paraphrase author Stephen R. Donaldson: There's only one way to write—or be a writer—and that's to figure it out for yourself. Having someone else repair your ailing manuscript robs you of the opportunity to learn what you needed to do better in the first place. If you ever want to advance in your own development as a writer, you need to be willing to do the hard work of learning what all those grammar and style rules are, not just so you can correct them, or keep from breaking them in the first place, but so that you can recognize when something is working despite whatever the conventional wisdom is. When you can break the rules and know deep in your gut that your prose still works for this story—for this instance—that is when you realize just how much leaving the editing to someone else will cost you.

MISTAKE #2: Not realizing that your magnum opus needs to be in Standard Manuscript Format before any legitimate editor will consider it

From time to time, I hear of aspiring writers who have filled up a dozen spiral notebooks with their work. When the reality of having to type the whole thing up again washes over them, they sometimes report feeling overwhelmed at the prospect, and the excitement of writing the story dwindles and fades at the prospect of spending so much time laboriously keying the whole thing in. Some successful writers do work in longhand, don't get me wrong. (Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling come to mind.) But writers like these know—plan actually—that they'll be rewriting the whole book to get it into SMF, so it's doubtful that they get swallowed up in despair every time they finish a project and see the stacks of pages.

To be clear, here: The mistake is not writing in longhand, it's failing to take into account that the work will have to be put into SMF, and the costs are time, possibly money (if you simply must pay a typist) and the emotional affect of staring down a couple of spiral bound notebooks and assorted scraps of paper which you must convert into a novel of who knows how many pages. Which leads us to. . .

MISTAKE #3:  Not considering the market you're writing for

This mistake can be hard to recover from. Suppose your Middle Grade mystery novel is filled with violence, runs only 8,000 words and relies on an adult to do all the actual sleuthing? Or what if you really want to see your 4,000 word memoir of growing up in the 1980s attached to a byline in Reminisce, which rarely runs features longer than 700 words, and isn't interested in anything after the '60s? Or what if, like two different writers I know (and Tolkien before them), you find yourself with an enormous novel that tells a fantastic story but just doesn't seem like it can be cut into smaller pieces without much wailing and gnashing of authorial teeth? To paraphrase one of these writers: I wish someone had told me how hard it would be to sell something this long before I wrote it.

Without a doubt, there are some aspects of the writing marketplace and its conventions that every new writer needs to be familiar with. Most writers know what they want to write, be it fiction, articles, or a collection of limericks. The smart writers make darn certain that they familiarize themselves with what publishers of the things they want to write are expecting to see. What's kosher and what's verboten within such a work. There are few hard and fast rules here, but it behooves the new writer to figure out where the guidelines are—and how much wiggle room they offer—before the serious writing begins. And if, as in Tolkien's case, the tale grows in the telling? Well, that's okay, too. But at least now you know exactly what it will cost you in terms of revision time and sales difficulties.

MISTAKE #4: Considering the marketplace too much

Sound like I'm contradicting what I said in the section above? Well, I'm not. Just like it's possible to rack up big costs in time and tears by not knowing enough about the broad general expectations publishers will have, it's just as bad to put too much stock in the conventional wisdom about what's selling and what isn't. The biggest literary successes sometimes come to the author who dares to push back the edges of hidebound tradition and write something new, something that breaks the rules in never before seen ways. A writer too skittish of breaking any rules will pay for that fear with every calculated risk that goes untaken and every breakthrough piece that they never write.

MISTAKE #5: Thinking success comes easy

If you are unprepared to do the hard work of creating the best content you can and then improving it a hundred times, unprepared to cut your favorite passages when they do not serve the story, unprepared to spend hours writing when other things scream for your attention and unprepared to face rejection over and over again and still keep at it, then you stand to lose the most. Writers surprised by the effort it takes to reach publication are the most likely to surrender their dreams when the going gets tough.

Your dreams. A high cost indeed. If you can avoid only one costly mistake as a new writer, let it be this one.


About the Author
Lon Prater lives and writes just a two-minute walk from getting his feet wet in the Gulf of Mexico. His fiction has been Honorably Mentioned in Year's Best Fantasy & Horror and placed as a Published Finalist in Writers of the Future XXI. He maintains a small but pleasant web presence at www.neverary.com/notes.htm.