Fun — If you don’t have fun creating your story, your reader isn’t going to have fun reading it.
Overwhelm – your characters ( not your reader with too much info too fast). If fiction is about life magnified—a better experience that we all want to escape into—then you’re going to have to create sympathetic characters who face and conquer overwhelming obstacles.
Cut — Don’t be afraid to cut even your best-loved lines if they don’t really move your story forward. More will come. It’s like in that old movie: if you build it they will come. Well, if you keep writing, more will come. Of course, save those really, really good lines—maybe you can use the gist of it in some other context where it’ll serve a greater purpose than just to show off how clever you are.
Understand your audience — If you’re writing in any specific genre, there are “givens” in each that your reader expects. In a mystery or suspense, the bad guy will be stopped, the good guy will win. In science fiction/fantasy you’ll build a unique world where good still overcomes evil, at least temporarily and at least in the lives of the protagonists. In chick lit, the heroine will learn something or grow in some way that she otherwise wouldn’t have except that this happened to her. And of course in a romance the boy will get the girl—or vice versa.
Self-confidence — Realize your power of communication. Go through your manuscript and make sure you’re not saying the same thing twice, just in slightly different ways. This happens micro and macrocosmically in lots of books. Whenever a writer tells something he or she has just shown (thus repeating herself) it’s unnecessary. Some repetition, for effect, can be useful but try to eliminate unnecessary repetition. Have the self-confidence that what you’ve written is clear, valuable, and powerful enough for the reader to be touched by it and get it without being told a gazillion different ways.
You’ll notice the above acronym spells out the word FOCUS. This is perhaps one of the most important elements in the mechanics of writing. Does each scene move your plot forward and within each scene do actions and words move that scene forward? Evaluate your book and see if there is one forgettable scene, or one weak scene. Then like a surgeon fix it or cut it out so the rest of the body won’t be disabled by it. Make sure every scene, paragraph, line and word are moving your characters forward through a plot that doesn’t stumble or stall but is immersing the reader on a focused journey to the end.
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