4 (or 10) Most Common Manuscript Mistakes and How to Fix Them

I mentioned earlier that jennifer_dunne and I had improvised a talk on common manuscript mistakes for the START Your Engines Writers Conference. Over the next 10 days we're going to take turns giving a short recap of each of the key discussion points.

The talk was divided into four sections, and the points are listed below.

1) Prevents you from getting in to the story
- Formatting, grammar, spellcheck (Patricia)

2) Prevents you from connecting with the characters
- Starting in the wrong place (Patricia)
- Telling, not showing (Jennifer)
- POV (Jennifer)
- Character Motivation (Patricia)

3) Interferes with story sustainability
- Dialogue (Jennifer)
- Scenes without points (Jennifer)
- Weak conflict (Jennifer)

4) Destroys an otherwise good story
- Sloppy/inadequate research (Patricia)
- Overpolishing (Patricia)

Look for the first point to be posted later today.

Formatting, grammar, spellcheck

Lesson One. How to shoot yourself in the foot, before you even get it in the door.

Standard manuscript format is important. The overall basics are:
- Bright white paper
- 1 inch margins all around
- Double-spaced
- 12 point Courier (preferred) or 12 point Times New Roman font

Yes, Courier is a boring font, and Times New Roman isn't much better. But these fonts are readable, and in particular Courier works well for those involved in the editing and production stages of the manuscript.

When you send in your manuscript printed in Brush Script on scented purple paper, you are not making your manuscript stand out from the pack. Instead you are sending the signal that you don't understand the industry, or worse that you do understand the rules but have decided that they don't apply to you. In either case, the editor/agent will take away the impression that you are going to be difficult to work with. These are busy people with lots of demands on their time. If your manuscript is hard for them to read, then they won't bother.

Once they've started reading, you need to keep them reading. This is where spelling and grammar come in. When the reader encounters a misspelled word, it can jerk them out of the story as they pause to try and decide what the author meant to say. Just running spellcheck isn't enough-- spellcheck won't catch the difference between who's and whose, their or there, or allusion versus illusion. Run spellcheck, then carefully edit your manuscript before running spellcheck a final time to make sure you haven't introduced new errors. Frequent spelling errors are a sign of a sloppy author, or someone who doesn't care enough about their story to invest the time needed to clean it up.

The same goes for grammar. Poor grammar is a red-flag for "this author doesn't know her craft" and can often prevent the reader from following the storyline. Only your mother or best friend are going to take the time to struggle through your bad grammar to try and figure out what you meant to say. An editor or agent is simply going to toss your manuscript aside.

To explain it in a different way, it doesn't matter if you're the next Stephen King or Nora Roberts. No one is going to discover your talent if you can't convince them to read your story. Give yourself the best chance possible by taking care of the details so your manuscript makes a good first impression. Format, spelling, grammar should all be clean so there's nothing to distract from your writing.


Tomorrow, I'll talk about starting your story.