You can have the best story in the world, but if it’s full of grammatical
mistakes it will be unreadable and certainly unsaleable. I once taught a
college course in which I required the students to write a three page paper.
Three pages seems pretty short to me, but it was the first assignment I had
given and I wanted to get a feel for what my students could do. Oh, how they
whined and complained about it! When I received the papers back, I was appalled
at the poor quality of writing. Appalled! There were fragments, run-on
sentences, misspelled words, sentences that didn’t make any sense at all, and
more. How did these people graduate from high school, I wondered? Don’t they
even know how to use a spell checker?
If you want to write for a living, then write. But if you know you are bad
at grammar, spelling and usage, then get a friend to proofread your work before
you ever show it to anyone.
7. Don’t Be Illogical
Did you see the movie, Magnolia, with Tom Cruise? Well, it’s a good
movie, but when you get to the end, suddenly frogs are raining down on everybody.
Honestly, it doesn’t make any sense at all and really sort of ruins the movie.
In your writing, don’t rain down the frogs. Illogical or surreal events can
ruin a story. Don’t have your murderer be a character that doesn’t pop up until
ten pages before the ending. Don’t let your character suddenly shoot off into
space for no apparent reason. Give clues as you write, build the suspense, let
the reader have a chance at guessing the outcome.
8. Giving in to Self-Doubt
Writing is a very isolating practice. It is very easy to get critical of
your own work and think it’s all just crap. What you have to realize is that
writing is a process. You can’t turn a rough work into a professional one if
you have wadded it up and thrown it away. Take your original writing, crappy
though it may be, and polish it. Tweak it. Reword sentences, move them around,
play with it until it makes more sense and reads more smoothly.
It’s natural to worry about your own work, to wonder if anyone else will
like it. That’s okay, just don’t let it hinder you from doing what you really
want to do.