T.D. Severin - Award-Winning Medical Thriller Author

  I found this article at  On Writing , and felt it was very well done. Another nice set of tips to add to the Ten Point Revision Strategy. More Common Mistakes Writer's Make. I'm guilty of quite a few of these myself. 1) Spelling. We all rely too much on the spell checker. Nothing cries out amateur more than gross misspellings in a submission. The spell checker only finds words that are misspelled from its vocabulary, which may have no relation to how they're used in your sentence. The misuse of there/their and they're is a great example. One I make too often. 2) Grammar. It's important to maintain consistency in your use of grammar. I tend to write with quite a few sentence fragments, which is my style. Others write with run-on sentences as a style. Neither is good or bad, just be aware of grammar rules. Break them only when you know them. The On Writing article stresses maintenance of tense also. Can't argue with that. 3) Homophones and similar looking words....

  Nothing in your book will work if you don't get that all important first chapter off the ground. No agent will read it if you make mistakes right off the bat. So, as we're heading into our  final revisions,  here's somethings to watch out for to avoid that first chapter clunker. 1 ) Description : Don't start your book off with page after page, or even paragraph after paragraph of description. Not even sentence after sentence. Don't describe the characters in detail, or the setting, or the mood. There's time for all that later. Introduce the characters, preferably in action, at or just before a big moment. Then you'll get your story off the ground. Description can come later, but even then, with modulation. There's no room in today's writing for endlessly, long, leisurely descriptive passages. I skip over reading those. Don't you? And no matter what else you do, don't start your book with descriptions of the weather. 2)  POV : From the get-g...

A nice little tidbit that I picked up the other day. I've always know this, seen it in my own writing, but never actually put it down as a strategy point before. So today we're going to rectify that. Here's our new point to consider in our revision strategy. Eliminate Feeling Words. Now what does that mean? Quite simply, eliminate the words that we use to describe our senses, but not the words that describe the sensory experience. This process will tighten your writing, force you to choose better verbs, tighter sentences, better descriptors. So what's an example? How about this? He felt the cold barrel of the gun pressed against his temple. Now remove the "sense" word, and it becomes. The cold barrel of the gun pressed against his temple. Which one do you feel is tighter? Which one conveys more drama? Which one seems more sensory? I'm back adding a paragraph here, based on the excellent comments this post has received, but the points brought up are too imp...