BY MERILYN OBLAD
All right friends, it’s time to pull up a chair and listen to some tough love for writers. I’m going to talk about the problem with dismissing mistakes and constructive criticism too easily. Mistakes jar a reader out of a story, whether they’re small errors like typos or the wrong homonym, or large mistakes like faulty plot construction or poor character development. What this boils down to is either lazy or bad writing.
An author’s job is to tell a story in such a way that they draw the reader in, keep them there for the duration of the story, and give them something to take away from the story once it’s done. Mistakes (careless, accidental, or blindly stubborn) cause a reader to stop and mentally step away from the story. Frequent mistakes make it hard for the reader to continue to follow the story. Some of these are purely accidental (typos and such), some are just careless writing (not following grammar rules when you should), and some are sheer stubbornness (insisting that parts of the story are strong when they’re really weak and calling it “voice” or “artistic interpretation”).
Accidents you just have to deal with. Read carefully, get someone else to read carefully, make sure your grammar- and spellchecks haven’t been disabled, and if you’re really worried about it, go old school on yourself and read the story out loud like you’re in first grade again, following along with your finger. You’ll be surprised how well this works. If you can’t make a sentence make sense when spoken out loud, you can be sure it doesn’t make sense while being read internally. Reading aloud also helps you puzzle out how to improve a passage. Go forth and try.
The stubbornness factor (a.k.a. bad writing or big mistakes) you need to work out with your editor. Try it their way. See if their advice and direction doesn’t make for a stronger story. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t, but do give their guidance a try before you dismiss it because they “just aren’t getting” your story. Swallow your pride and don’t automatically assume your editor doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
If you don’t have an editor, then find yourself a friend or acquaintance who will give you an honest opinion and not just support you because they want to be nice and don’t want to hurt your feelings. Nice is nice, but it won’t help you get published if your story’s weak. Let constructive criticism help you grow as a writer, because that’s what it’s intended to do for you.
That leaves careless mistakes (a.k.a. lazy writing). You’re busy trying to weave your story and you’re not paying attention to details, substituting words that are homonyms (words that sound the same but are spelled differently), ignoring basic rules of grammar that shouldn’t be ignored, or repeating yourself too much. Now, breaking grammar rules can be quite (not quiet!) effective (not affective!), but you have to know them before you can break them.
Here are some of my grammatical and writing pet peeves:
- misuse of apostrophes
- intermixing there, their, and they’re
- substituting words that look similar but are wildly different like definitely and defiantly
- constructing an impossible timeline
- and the one that makes me want to beg for a fork so I can jab my eye out: using “could care less” when you actually mean “couldn’t care less”
I have to stop and explain the last one. If you could care less, that means you care to some degree, great or small. It might only be a little bit of caring, but it still exists. If you couldn’t care less, that means you are out of caring. Your care-o’-meter is flat-out empty. There is nothing left to even remotely register your interest or concern. So don’t tell me you could care less when you clearly couldn’t.
Here are some other quick fixes: nix the double hads and thats. If you’re really stuck on two hads or two thats and just can’t see your way around not phrasing it that way, then put that section of story away and come back to it later. You’ll probably see that one had or that works great. (Sometimes you really do need two, but this is rarer than you might think.) And avoid “off of,” please. You don’t need the “of.” At all. So drop it. Just put the phrase down and walk away, because it’s wrong.
Why am I issuing all this blunt advice? Because I want you authors to succeed and grow in the craft of writing. Mistakes mean fewer sales. Seriously. The more you drive a reader from the story, the less likely it is that same reader will want to come back and give your stories another try. Plus, they’re less likely to recommend your books to their friends. In fact, they’re likely to actively NOT recommend your books.
So please don’t stomp off in an offended huff, just go back and fix the mistakes. Make your stories memorable for the amazing tales they are and not because you messed up the telling. Well-written stories will entrance your readers and keep them coming back for more.
Want an example? Look at Katherine Kurtz. Her first few books were okay, but lacked depth and detail. Her characters were flat and hard to relate to, but she had a great idea for a story. She just wasn’t telling it as well as she could. Fast forward through her career and you see her abilities as a writer grow exponentially until a fellow author gave the highest compliment I’ve ever seen of any one writer’s work: “[Ms. Kurtz’s Deryni novels are] an incredible historical tapestry of a world that never was and of immensely vital people who ought to be.” What higher praise can be offered an author than that he or she created so rich and detailed a world and characters that they should be real? That’s what we’re aiming for here: immensely vital characters in compelling stories. This is what happens when you weed out the mistakes.
Or, to put it another way:
Thank you, Mr. Yankovic, for putting it so succinctly.
A lover of all things historical, MeriLyn Oblad (pronounced Mary Lynn) has both a BA and MA in History, the former from the University of Nevada, Reno and the latter from Brigham Young University. She brings more than a decade of document analysis, an eye for fine detail, and seven years of writing local histories to the Xchyler table.
MeriLyn currently proofs our 2014 paranormal anthology, slated for release in September, and will start plowing through fantasy short story submissions in a couple of weeks.