This is great, and writers should get excited about what they are doing. The problem comes when the writer gets so excited that they forget to become their own critic.

Here are five mistakes that new writers often make.

Telling, Not Showing

This is arguably the most important advice any novelist will receive. You never want to simply tell a story. Telling is boring. An author often makes the mistake of “telling” because they understand their characters so well. They know the scenes and how the characters react in certain situations. The reader does not know this.

Showing comes from the characters themselves. The story is told through their eyes and ears. This is what truly makes a reader fall in love with your story. Don’t just tell them that your character is scared. Show them how the character is scared.

Not Reading

Every good writer is a good reader. It sounds odd, but it is true. Reading is much more important than one might think. It helps you know what is popular or trending for the market in which you are writing. It lets you know what stories are not being published, and gives you an idea of which stories will then take more effort to get publishers to consider. Best of all, reading helps you learn how to write. Pay attention to how other authors start their stories and end their stories. Look at the words they use and how they phrase things. These can be used as learning tools to help you discover your own way of creating words that matter.

Imitation

We all have one author that we admire. They are the person we hope to someday be. We look at their words and aspire to be able to create that same magic ourselves. As much as you admire that author, remember not to imitate them. Imitation might be considered flattery in some professions, but in the writing world imitation can be considered a form of plagiarism. Every author should have their own unique voice. Maybe you don’t know what yours is yet, and that’s fine. If you keep writing and experimenting, you will find it.

Submitting Too Soon

In the excitement of finishing a new novel, some writers send out their story way too soon. Step away for a while and let your piece rest. Go back later and take another look at it. Find a critique partner or a beta reader to give you some pointers. Never jump the gun and send your work out when it isn’t ready. If you do, the chances of rejection are higher. This isn’t because the piece is necessarily bad. Maybe it just needs more details and some reworking. Take the time to make your story the best it can be before you submit.

Giving Up!

Getting published is not an easy task. For some authors it can take years to get published. Don’t be surprised when you get a stack of rejections in the mail. It’s the nature of the business. Rejections are hard to handle, but look at them as a learning experience. Keep writing. Keep believing in your ability to tell a story people want to read. Most of all, don’t give up.

(This a guest post by Mary Ellen Quigley. Mary is a paranormal romance author from Indiana, who got the writing bug as a child in the fifth grade. She started writing her first novel “Nocturne” in 2006, which is yet to be released. In 2009, Mary began writing “The Wild Side”  which was released in the summer of 2011. You can read more of her posts on her blog.)

(Image courtesy: Avolore from sxc.hu)

You think that you have come up with a great story, and your friend accuses you of Plagiarism. There are very few things in life, let me tell you, that can irritate you more than such an accusation.

I, naturally, asked my friend about the part of my story that sounded copied.

“All of it,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. Then he continued to tell me how my story was a copy of the so many stories he had read before.

“Your story has a hero, who gets into trouble with a few bad guys, and in the end manages to solve all of his problems easily. Isn’t that how all stories go?”

For a while, I was troubled by what he said, because what he said was true.

I had to ask myself how my story was different from the so many others that have been written before me.

Eventually, however, I saw light, and realised that the search for uniqueness is something that may have ended many a writer’s careers.

The Fact is: There is almost nothing that has not been written before.

Maybe, if you keep writing long enough, you may be able to write something truly unique, but till then you will have to make do with whatever you can write. If you keep waiting till you come up with something unique, your wait may well last forever.

Stories are like finger prints.

On the face of it all fingerprints seem alike, but the reality is that the six billion people on our planet have unique fingerprints, and no two people have the same finger prints.

Similarly, the basic ideas behind the stories we write may be similar, but each story becomes unique when we add our own touches to the story. These touches are a result of our life experiences, and our reaction to these experiences. All of us come across different situations in life, and the way we deal with these situations is also different.

When we begin to use these experiences in our writing, our stories start becoming unique. We may take a familiar plot, and add to it our own style, and the result would be unique.

An excellent example of this phenomenon can be seen in James Cameron’s Avatar. The basic premise of the movie is nothing special – the rogue hero infiltrates the enemy camp, falls in love with the enemy, finds true love, has a change of heart and, in the end, good defeats evil.

However, anyone who has seen the movie will definitely agree with me when I say that the movie was something that none of us had ever seen before.

So, stop worrying about trying to be unique, because whatever you write in your own style will automatically be unique. Wouldn’t you agree?

(Image: 7rains from sxc.hu )

Now, why one would want to be read is a question whose answer may vary from one writer to another, but, whatever one’s reason for wanting to be read may be, there is another question that needs to be asked by every writer:

“Why should someone want to read what you write?”

If we look at blogs, it is easy to see that some of our favourite blogs are those which educate us, in addition to entertaining us. In today’s world, there are more than enough sources of entertainment, but the sources of education are few and far between. Most blogs that are popular today are a great source of knowledge for people who want to educate themselves about the subject the blogger writes about.

In that sense, every writer is a teacher.

Different teachers use different techniques to hold the interest of their students, and so do different writers use different styles to keep their readers engrossed. But, however stylish your writing may be, it won’t attract readers unless you add substance to your style.

Adding substance to your writing is a matter of learning. Before you can teach others, you must first learn yourself. This is the reason why most writers, even fiction writers, research the subject of their work extensively before sitting down to write.

As Richard Bach has said, “You teach best, what you need to learn most.”

I couldn’t agree more with his words. So, if you want to be an effective blogger, you need to have a strong passion for the subject you blog about. If, like me on this blog, you, too, blog about writing, you need to have a strong desire to keep learning and practising.

You will only be able to teach well, if you, yourself, are willing to learn. Wouldn’t you agree?

(Image courtesy: cobrasoft from sxc.hu)

Most of the times we either have too much of a thing, or too little. We hardly ever have the right amount of anything, even words.

A writer’s job is to write. But, how many words are needed to describe an emotion, a scene, or an event is arbitrary. I may do it in a thousand, you may do it in a hundred.

A piece of advice given to all writers is, “Omit Needless Words”. But, every word that you have written, is there for a purpose. So, where do you find these “needless” words?

Needs, anyway, are relative and arbitrary. One man’s needs may be another man’s luxury.

As a writer, it is your job to find the balance between too many words or too little. If there are too many words, the reader may get bored; if there are too few words, the reader may feel cheated. Like most things in life, therefore, you have to find a balance where the reader feels that the time and effort spent in reading your piece was worth every bit of it.

Are you able to strike this balance?

Image: Colin Harris

One may, therefore, wonder, why did A C Doyle kill Sherlock Holmes -  the character that won him a place in the hearts of millions of people across the boundaries of space and time.

This may come as a surprise to many, but A C Doyle never considered Sherlock Holmes to be his most “important” work. In fact, he had grown very weary of Holmes, and wanted to devote more time to writing historical novels.

So, to rid himself of Holmes, he decided to kill him in his story,  “The Adventure of the Final Problem.”

Subsequently, however, A C Doyle had to bow to the pressure of the huge fan following Sherlock Holmes had garnered, and he had to bring Sherlock Homes back. The public loved the revival of Sherlock Holmes, and A C Doyle continued to write about Sherlock Holmes for many more years.

The question that needs to be asked then  is, “Was A C Doyle wrong in killing Sherlock Holmes?”

I think he was.

I think most people tend to discard what comes easily to them, simply because it has come easily. This is true for creative people too. A painter who can draw excellent portraits may feel that  it is painting landscapes  that makes one a real artist, while painting faces is something that anyone can do.

To overcome this feeling, an individual must be able to look at his work objectively, which is, of course, not an easy thing to do. He must, however, do it so that he knows what he does best, and thus continues to do that.

This is not to say that a creative individual must not pursue other interests. If A C Doyle wanted to write historical novels, he should have definitely done that – as he did too– but he should not have killed Holmes, because that resulted in almost eight years of no Holmes stories.

Who knows, maybe, because of these eight years of no Sherlock Holmes stories, the best Sherlock Holmes stories never got written?