Most authors probably wish they had a gauge of some kind to stick into the pages to tell them when their book is done. It’s not just new, inexperienced writers who have that wish. Most published authors I’ve posed the question to say the same thing: it’s hard to know when to put down the virtual pen.
Write with purpose in mind. Edit with purpose in mind. Polish with purpose in mind. Use it as your criterion for chopping (or lack of it) and gauge your satisfaction against it. When 100% of your words are charged with meaning, your book is done.
In a conversation, "crutch words" give you an extra second to think of what to say. In writing, they are glaring annoyances that destroy your writing style.
When writing a travelogue or any piece of descriptive copy, sight is the most obvious of the senses to invoke when depicting a scene in your written work, but your visual descriptions will benefit when you incorporate your other senses to enrich your writing.
Every one of your readers has his or her own preferred way of learning a new thing. If you don’t account for these disparate learning methods within your blog post or business book, you’ll be turning a chunk of readers off without even realizing it. Each of us has our own personal bias when it comes to learning, which can lead you astray when it comes to writing for a broad audience.
There is so much writing advice and knowledge accumulated over the ages, yet no one seems to fully agree on what makes outstanding writing. It is more that we just know it when we read it. Think about the fact that we all have different favorite books. Whether it is Meyer’s Twilight saga or Dante’s Inferno, some books just stand out head and shoulders above the rest.
Jocelyn Pruemer joined the BookBaby Twitter Chat to talk about finding and fixing the weaknesses in your language and sentence structure to improve your writing.
