Nothing can be of more benefit to the tyro writer than a wide exposure to excellent writing. Eschew the material on the "best sellers'" shelves at your bookstore and go to the classics section. Read Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Willa Cather. If you want more contemporary works, read John Barth, Saul Bellow, Annie Dillard, John Irving, and T. Coraghessan Boyle. For example, note how smoothly the words flow in Irving's Garp; I also recommend Boyle's Water Music and Pat Conroy's Prince of Tides.
You will want to have on your writing desk a large dictionary, a thesaurus, and such classic reference works as Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, Margaret Shetzer's The Elements of Grammar, and Arthur Plotnik's The Elements of Editing - A Guide for Editors and Journalists.
Also get a copy of Karen Elizabeth Gordon's The Transitive Vampire--A Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed.
Any of the grammar checker programs--RightWriter, Grammatik, (tm) etc,-- may be of use to you. Remember, such programs give suggestions, not gospel. Good writers break the "rules" only when they have a sound reason for doing so; bad writers violate the rules out of ignorance.
Get a copy of Wilson Follett's Modern American Usage.
Get a copy of Karen Elizabeth Gordon's The Well-Tempered Sentence--A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed.
Running your text through a spelling checker is not sufficient for material to be published. You also have to check it manually. (If you intend to type "the," but actually type "he," a spelling checker will not flag it as an error.) On-screen checking is usually not as efficient as checking a paper copy.
Sol Stein's creative writing programs, WritePro for Novelists and Short Story Writers (tm) [$150] and FictionMaster (tm) [$179] contain a great deal of sound advice about character development, descriptions, dialogue, and plot. Although the WritePro programs are relatively expensive, they may help turn rejection slips into royalty checks. (WritePro Tel.: 914-762-1255)
Do not give your work to friends to read, give it to your enemies! If your enemies like your work, then you know you have a winner. (Your friends may be too polite to tell you that you have written a dud.)
Try reading your material into a tape recorder, then listen to how smoothly the words, ideas, and actions flow. If things seem jumpy to you, then edit and reedit until you get the desired effects.
Seek professional help: If you keep getting rejection slips, show your manuscript to an English teacher and ask him or her to point out the errors in your first chapter. Ask not only "what is wrong," but "why it is wrong." Then fix the entire manuscript. (Also, pay your teacher for the consultation!)
Make sure that the publisher to whom you send material wants your kind of manuscript. Do not send erotic stories to a religious publisher, for example.
Go through your manuscript page-by-page, paragraph-by-paragraph, sentence-by-sentence, and word-by-word. If a publisher finds errors in your first page, he may not read beyond that point. Make it perfect!
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Last revised: 3/9/2001
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