niedziela, 18 marca 2012

Common Mistakes Of First Time Novelists

By Harvey Warner


People who gives fiction writing a try would fall prey to certain avoidable and normal mistakes with their first book.

A lot of these novels are considered grand experiments. Without advance direction or character notebook, chapters would unfold and there are a lot of point of view shifts and a desire to try to pack as much into the story as possible.

One of the key difficulties for new novelists is to track down inconsistencies in their work. An example would be mentioning Chicago as your character's hometown later in the novel if you mentioned before that your character grew up in Ohio. This can be a somewhat innocuous detail in the book and most people will probably missed it, but the inconsistency is there nonetheless and may detract from the flow of the story is the reader questions the veracity of the claim.

Most authors believe that because the work is fictional the details are less important, but as an author you are creating an entire world for your readers and that world has to become as real as the world in which they live. Having a unique escapist quality in them are novels and shutting down your reader's link to the book because they are stumbling over inconsistencies is the last thing you want to happen.

The addition of gratuitous violence or other points of gratuity is another point where first time novelists get into trouble. The author often wrongly believes that if they can shock the reader it will cause the book to be more memorable for the reader.

A means to mask a weak storyline is what many readers simply see this as. This is not to say that there is no place for violence in a novel, but it must be in context of a superior storyline - not as a means of increasing the chances that your reader will recommend the book to their friends.

When it comes to gratuitous elements, most readers see them for what they really are and providing an instant turn-off factor is this knowledge. If you have someone who is willing to read through your manuscript ask him or her to check for anything they consider gratuitous and any inconsistencies they may encounter.

Avoiding a couple of significant potholes on the road to publishing your first novel will provide an advantage with both publisher and reader alike.




About the Author:



Brak komentarzy:

Prześlij komentarz