Last week, an author who used WritAnon’s editing service sent me this (paraphrased) question:  Do all aspiring authors see this much red on their edited manuscripts?

This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten this question.  However, this is the first time I’m writing a public message about it.

The short answer is yes.  And it’s not limited to aspiring authors.  First drafts from established authors will often have the same amount of “red” markups–changes, suggestions, or problems within the manuscript.

Theoretically, there could be someone who wrote a manuscript that was perfect in every way before they send it off to a publisher.

I’ve never seen one.  If I did happen to come across a perfect submission, I’d happily tell the author that there was nothing I could do to help improve it.  I’d then wish them the best of luck as they either seek another editor or choose to start querying agents or publishers.

For most writers, though, getting an experienced set of eyes is a must.  Some people can get this from a talented writing group, but there are many who don’t have access to the right level of feedback.  For these writers, editing services like WritAnon’s can be a valuable tool to get the right feedback they need.

What mistakes do aspiring authors make?  Here’s a short list in no particular order (I’ll expand on these in an upcoming post):

• Grammar, spelling, and sentence fragments
• Inconsistent characters
• Plot holes or inconsistencies
• Dialogue that doesn’t sound like something the characters would say
• Run-on sentences
• Overly complex sentences (using 10 words to say what could be done in 5).
• Overuse of adjectives and adverbs (not everything needs to be described in intense detail–you’ll fatigue the reader)

No manuscript of any significant length (more than a page or two) comes out of a writer’s mind perfect to unleash upon the world.  Personally, I go through at least three drafts before I let anyone else read my stories.  Even then, my critique group generally gets it first.  Once it passes their approval, then I feel more comfortable with sharing it with the rest of the world.

Writers should not find this discouraging.  The person who first said this has likely been lost to antiquity, but it still remains true:  “The art of writing is rewriting.”  Persevering through this challenge (and, when appropriate, seeking editing help) is what separates the aspiring author from the published author.

Take your time and work through any critiques you receive.  You may not change everything that’s recommended, but you’ll often end up with a much stronger manuscript.

We’re all in this together.  Keep writing!

The entries are generally short, but do an excellent (and often humorous) job of pointing out mistakes that writers are making when they query.  Any writer who’s working on a query letter should read through to help avoid typical errors.

From the agent’s perspective, what’s the most common error?  Based on what I’ve read, it’s the use of rhetorical questions.

Other things to avoid:

• Being overly familiar (don’t call the agent “dear”, “honey”, or any other nickname)
• Creeping out the agent
• Thinking too highly of yourself
• Thinking too low of yourself
• Mentioning anything outside the scope of the query (brief intro to the author is okay)

Don’t make the same mistakes.  Read SlushPile Hell or (your query will) die!

1.  Show some personality

Read your last three emails.  Do they sound dry?  Do they talk only about the problem at hand?  Why not show a little reaction to what’s going on?

I’m not saying that you should be completely off the cuff, or that you should tell your boss exactly what he can do with that unexpected problem, but a little reaction is usually okay.  For example, instead of saying:

The printer encountered a DSX00034 error again.  Can someone from IT come down and fix the problem?

You can add a little personality to show why it’s important.  You might be able to get a more permanent solution.

The printer encountered a DSX00034 error again.  Each time this happens, we lose at least an hour of productivity.  This frustrates us and makes it harder to focus on getting our jobs done.

Can someone from IT come down and fix the problem?  Is there a more permanent solution?  Is there something we can do to avoid the error?

In the first email, the problem will likely get fixed (for now).  The second email shows a bit of personality, and asks the IT department for a bit of brainstorming from their experience.  IT is also likely to see the requester as a person rather than a problem.  This makes them more willing to help.

2.  Add a quote that shows your personality

This one comes with a caveat:  make sure it’s appropriate for your business.  I love to use one from Mark Twain:  “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”

When people can relate to your quote, they’re more likely to want to help you.  I enjoy Mark Twain’s quote because it speaks to my creativity in solving problems, as well as my passion for writing.

My mind’s always running, and I don’t mind sharing that with people.  If I find some aspect of work boring, I’m always looking for ways to make it fun.

3.  Praise people where possible (and appropriate)

Everyone loves to see praise with their name in the place of honor.  When used carefully, this can do a lot to build relationships across your team.

Plus, it’s cheap, costing only a few moments of your time.

Even better, most people, after being praised, start to look for something they can praise about someone else.  It’s contagious.  When people look for positive things at work, they’re more likely to enjoy life there.  Most of us spend a third of our lives working — shouldn’t we enjoy it?

As a side benefit, if you’re known for giving praise, people are more likely to read your emails and respond to them more quickly.  Even if there’s no praise there, they’ll be hoping that the next email contains some praise.

Even something as simple as saying “Wow, that was fast, Bob!” will go a long way towards making sure it happens again.

4.  Use your recipient’s name

This goes hand-in-hand with #3.  People are drawn to their name, and using their name will have additional impact.

However, be careful with this method.  Use it only if you’re asking for specific action or giving praise, and only rarely if giving criticism.

When giving criticism, you should actually avoid using your recipients name to avoid making the criticism personal.

DOs:

Bob was instrumental in getting this fix out the door in the fastest possible time, while maintaining a high level of quality.

Bob, do you think you can have an answer back to me by 5pm tomorrow?

The fix was late due to missing information on the XYZ component.

DON”Ts:

Bob’s failure to respond caused the fix to be late.

Remember, you should be trying to give life to your emails, not kill morale at the office.  While the DON’T sample might be temporarily satisfying, it’s going to cause a ton of friction between you and Bob.

5.  Share interesting (and related) news articles with your team

Most people who use the Internet and email to do their work do take short breaks to surf.  Use this time productively to find interesting articles related to your business and help your company succeed.

As an example, let’s say that you find a story that talks about a more efficient process to perform task XYZ at work.  If you pass this information along to your team, you might be saving your company thousands or millions of dollars.  All employers love lower costs, so by doing your part to help this, you may very well be helping your own career along.

6.  Invite debate

This one’s a tricky one.  Often, it’s best to pick a direction and proceed, and people do respond to positively to decisiveness.

However, for medium to large decisions that affect multiple people, it’s often good to propose one or two solutions and  invite constructive criticism.  You’ll often receive a better product in the end, and people will see you as a team player.

As a side benefit, you also get a better understanding of the people you work with.  You may find that people just go along with whatever’s proposed — perhaps because it doesn’t matter, or perhaps because they don’t care about the final solution.

However, more often, people love to voice their opinion, especially when faced with two or three choices.  When you get to choose how your work affects you, you’re often more happy with the decision, even if it results in (gasp!) more work.

In the spirit of this last tip, what do you think?  What other ways do you add life to your emails?

These writers knew one thing:  if they threw an attempt away, they had the confidence to write something even better.

I found myself thinking about this romanticized vision of a writer as I worked on my current novel this week.  I’d been struggling with a particular section for almost a week — rewriting it over and over, trying to see if I could get it to work.

Suddenly, it came to me:  the reason that I was struggling was that the piece didn’t fit.  I was trying to put a square peg in a round hole.

I pulled out a few of the elements that I wanted to capture with that section, and sprinkled them into the sections before and after.  After I then cut out the trouble section, everything suddenly fit.

Since then, I’ve only felt better about the decision.  Never have I felt so good about throwing something away.

The moral of the story is:  if you’re really struggling with a section, ask yourself if it’s really necessary, or if there’s another way to incorporate the ideas into your story.  The reason you’re struggling might be that the piece simply doesn’t fit.

The website is currently in beta, and allows you to intuitively organize books, characters, settings, and items.  LitLift lets you organize your thoughts for your novel while staying out of your way in order to allow you to focus on the business of writing your book.

I’ve been using LitLift to organize my thoughts for my current novel — where I am approximately 25% complete with the first draft.  Having access to my character data from anywhere is a useful feature, especially since I’m not always at home when I have my next idea.  Some of the next planned features will make it even easier to write my story wherever I happen to be.

Since LitLift is in beta, there are new features being added often.  New users will be able to request additional features, and help guide the development of this software so that it’s as useful as possible.  For writers to have this level of influence on new software is a rare opportunity.

iwl.me — short for “I write like” — is designed to give people an idea of what authors have a similar style to the writing that’s submitted. It uses this through a technique called Bayesian classification.

However, don’t think that you can get a good comparison just by submitting a few sentences or paragraphs.

A Bayesian classifier looks for word and phrase frequency, and to get a good comparison, you’re going to need a longer sample than just a paragraph. If you submit a long enough sample (at least a couple of pages), you’re more likely to get useful feedback.

It’s kind of like a blind person tasting a chef’s salad in a single bite. If you dig in on one side, you might say, “Oh, this tastes like egg and lettuce.” If you dig in on another side, you might say, “No, this tastes like tomatoes, cheese, and lettuce.” If you dig in yet another side, you might say, “this tastes like ham, chicken, and bacon.”

However, if you eat the whole salad, you get a delicious blend of flavors. With just a paragraph, the algorithm is like the blind person taking a small taste of the salad.

Sorry, guys. As I write this, it’s nearly time for lunch. I’m looking forward to it.

I submitted several sample chapters of my novel-in-progress, and received back a fairly consistent result of James Joyce. I’m actually glad that it has a consistent style — it shows that the book at least is internally consistent.

While this can give you some useful feedback, I wouldn’t rely on it as the only source for finding similar authors to your writing voice. While this does look for word choices, sentence structure, and sentence length, it doesn’t take into account genre or topics. Make sure to read some of the author’s work before bragging too much.

And, for the curious, this blog post sounds like Cory Doctorow (likely because he’s a famous blogger). I can live with that.

Interested to find out who you write like? Check out iwl.me!

My old desk was a hand-me-down from my parents, and I’ve used it for over ten years.  While the desk served me well, there were several things that have been bugging me for a while:

• I’m taller than the average bear, which means my knees were often jammed into the keyboard tray.
• The desk was made of pressboard, which tends to be damaged more easily than hardwoods.
• The hutch on the desk often got in the way rather than helping me out.
• I occasionally like to work standing up, which was nearly impossible on this desk.

Of course, the desk was free, so I couldn’t really complain.

While we were shopping for a new couch, I thought I’d take some time to go investigate the office furniture to see what might be available.

There were also desks perfect for my work standing up.  They were designed to be used sitting at a stool.  Using the stool, I found my knees to (again) jam right into the bottom of the desk.  This got me closer (at least I could type comfortably standing up), but still not close enough.  I tried a standard office chair and found that my knees fit, but my hands were just a little too high to be comfortable.

In other words, these desks were too big.

I also found plenty of desks at a standard height, and all of them — even the $3000 wonder I sat at for a moment just to see how it felt — had the same problem.  My knees jammed into the bottom of the desk.

How frustrating.  All of them were too small (err.. short).

Then, with a spotlight shining with a heavenly gleam, and the music over the speakers reaching an awe-inspiring tone, I spotted the Portland Loft Architect’s desk.  Hallelujah!

The desk was at the perfect height for my hands when I stood up, and also had a nice pull-out drawer that folded into another table — this desk was perfect for work standing up and sitting down.  Even better, my knees didn’t jam into the bottom of the desk.  I’d stumbled into one of the few stores in North America that actually carries this item in their store, and even the guys who delivered it said they had never seen one before.

And that’s not all.  Beyond the primary features of not jamming into my knees and allowing me to work standing up, the desk top lifts up, which can allow me to adjust my keyboard to a more ergonomic position.  This is also useful if I get more seriously into drawing — another hobby I’d love to get better at.

The desk arrived last week, and when fully extended, it takes up a good portion of the wall.  As I started working, I ran into my next problem.  Working standing up meant that my head was tilted down to see my laptop screen, and I could feel that it was going to end up straining my neck in the long run.

Luckily, as a computer guy, I have a second monitor I often use as an extended display.  I decided to try taking advantage of a second lucky feature of my split-level house–a built-in shelf on the bottom floor.  This shelf is the perfect height to place a monitor.

New Desk in Standing position

Success!  I’m now comfortable working both standing up and sitting down.

In other words, this desk is just right!

If you have the same problem I do, consider investing in an architect’s desk.

Vampires, like all creatures of fiction, are based in reality–real events, real symptoms, and real people.  Without access to today’s wide resources (like the Internet), everyday people tried to explain these events–giving birth to the tale of the vampire.

The legend of vampires came from:

• Rabies symptoms
• Burying people who were not dead
• Animals that easily catch/transmit rabies

I came up with this theory on my own, but found that dozens (if not hundreds) of other doctors and scientists beat me to the punch (including Dr. Juan Gomez-Alonso in 1998).  It’s far from the first time this happened, but it’s still satisfying–those dozens or hundreds of people provide support for my opinion.

While Dr. Gomez-Alonso’s inspiration came from the Dracula movie, my inspiration came from an episode of House that describes a woman who has rabies symptoms.  Among the rabies symptoms shown in the film were:

• Aversion to light and water
• Aggression–biting and drawing blood
• Immunity to pain
• Bats flying away from the affected woman’s living space

These symptoms (and others) combine to create an understandable image of the modern vampire.

Biting/sucking blood

Vampires are perhaps best known for their tendency to bite victims and suck their blood.  Occasionally, this will turn those victims into vampires themselves.

Rabies is often transmitted via a bite from an infected creature.  After a sufficient incubation period, the victim will then demonstrate rabies symptoms themselves.  By the time rabies symptoms are present, the victim is not treatable with today’s technology.

Creatures of the night

Vampires are traditionally known to attack during the night.  Their victims, often asleep, are at their most vulnerable.

Rabies victims experience photophobia (fear of light), which often causes them to turn away from the source, hissing and with bared teeth.

It’s easy to imagine a vampire movie at this point, with Dracula (or some other vampire) turning away.  I’d also imagine that the idea of using a cross to defend oneself against vampires was accompanied with a bright torch–and this would certainly cause the rabies victim to turn and run.

Garlic and Holy Water

Traditional defenses against vampires include cloves of garlic and holy water.  These defenses actually would have worked.

Rabies victims experience hydrophobia (a fear of water) and a hypersensitivity to strong smells.  Garlic and water would have certainly repelled any perceived vampires.

Transforming into Bats

Bats are often associated with vampires–vampires are said to have the ability to transform themselves into bats and fly away to escape capture.

Bats are also known carriers of rabies infections.  It’s easy to imagine coming upon someone sleeping, only to see a bat flapping away into the night.  With other rabies victims (or vampires) already known in the area, it would have been easy for someone to get confused and assume that a vampire transformed into a bat.

Super-human strength

Vampires are known for being impervious to pain.  This is why the “only” way to kill a vampire is to pierce its heart with a wooden stake.

Rabies victims also become immune to pain as the disease progresses.  In the House episode above, the victim is hit with a taser, and feels no pain.  For people who had more primitive weapons, it’s easy to imagine that a rabies victim would have appeared to have superhuman strength.

Rising from the dead

Vampires, of course, are known for being undead (more active than zombies, but still sustained by human blood).

As described in this Wikipedia article, some of this is explained by the natural decomposition process, which can make it appear as if a body is fuller and have blood around the mouth.  This may also be partly explained by someone who was accidentally buried alive, which, horrifyingly enough, did happen from time to time.

For you as a writer

As you can see, though vampires are fictional, there’s a basis in reality.  If you’re looking to create a new creature, it may help to take symptoms of a disease and use it to guide the creation of a new race.  These traits can also help you to create believable trends, and will help guide you in creating more realistic characters.

If you happen to write about vampires (as it seems many people are), then you may want to consider researching rabies to guide your story.

If you liked this, you may also be interested in: Real-Life Fantasy Creatures

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Two of these repetitive methods are called tricolons and antithesis.

Tricolons where the same phrase structure is used three times in equal, growing, or shrinking fashion to hammer home a point.

Some examples of tricolons are:

• Veni, vidi, vici. (I came, I saw, I conquered.) – Julius Caesar
• I would not eat them here or there.
  I would not eat them anywhere.
  I would not eat green eggs and ham.
  I do not like them, Sam-I-am.  - Dr. Seuss
• “… that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” – the US Declaration of Independence

Using these same structures can help you to create something that draws your reader’s interest, such as:

• You must crawl before you walk, walk before you run, and run before you leap.
• Start small, start early, and start now.
• I fell down on my luck, fell on the couch, and fell asleep.

Antithesis, on the other hand, works a bit differently.  Instead of simply repeating the same structures, you use contrast to make your point.

A few examples:

• Many will enter, few will win. - virtually every radio contest
• Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. – John F. Kennedy
• If pro is the opposite of con, what is the opposite of progress? - Author unknown

You can then use these same structures to create something interesting in your own stories.

• So many arrows, so little time.
• Don’t hide away from your fears; fear that which you hide.

What examples of tricolons and antithesis have you used in your writing?