10 January 07 - 04:18Writing Tips? Or Am I Ranting Again?
Ok, I got an email from someone the other day recommending a story. I was told that I would enjoy the story. Well I don't know if I would have enjoyed it or not, because I couldn't get past the first chapter! The entire thing was a jumble of words and punctuation that made little to no sense. Now of course I could have suffered through all of that to figure out if I liked the idea of the story or not, but who wants to spend a spell of lazy reading editing a story just so they can read it? I don't. So from this experience I have put together a little list of things that I believe are horrible things to do in a story. The list follows:
1. Make sure that you can find the end of one paragraph as well as the next. Don't confuse the reader!
2. When you write dialogue, each person speaking should have a new paragraph! If everyone is talking in the same paragraph the reader will be confused and give up.
3. If you start the story with one character as narrator (1rst person narration) keep that character as the narrator for the duration of the story! Don't switch back and forth between first person and third person either! That's annoying and confusing.
4. Make sure that when you write dialogue whatever was supposed to be spoken is inside quotations marks!
5. Punctuation is VERY important. Believe it or not, a capital letter is not the clearest signal that a new sentence has started!!
6. I don't know why anyone would do this, but you shouldn't capitalize each word in the sentence. What is that, anyway?
Ok that's all I can bark about after attempting to read that story. I only listed the problems I found while attempting to get through the first of fifty chapters of the story that was recommended to me. I know I'm probably being picky, but there it is.
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