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Agency for Literary Review offers unpublished authors and first-time writers the opportunity to have their work assessed for free.

Free Advice and Assistance for the Novice Writer

Agency for Literary Review

A How To Guide for New Writers

It's hard to begin a paragraph to follow that heading.  You have likely heard that writing is as individual as fingerprints.  If that's the case, then it is not likely you will get much help from any source.

Writing is as much a skill as an art form, but you need neither skill nor artistry to actually be a writer.  All you need is something to write on and something to write with.  

It's the same if you want to be a woodcarver.  You need a piece of wood and something to carve it with.   If you wish, however, to become a cabinetmaker, you must acquire the skills and knowledge of the woodworking craft.

Let's talk about you.  You are on this page (unless you were re-directed here) because you are looking for information on getting your work published.  There is really no other reason for you to spend your time writing unless you hope, eventually, to be published, to be an author.  Some people do have very pedestrian reasons to fill notebooks with their jottings but they don’t spend their time searching the Web unless they want something more.  And that is probably why you are here.

“Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand—a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.”  Willa Cather (1876–1947), U.S. author. “On the Art of Fiction”.

You are either young or old.  Forgive me if that seems a little patronizing, but the point I am making is that the problems and the visions differ for each of the two generations.  And that makes prescribing a one-size-fits-all methodology very difficult.  When we opted to create this site from the different perspective of our parent site, we envisioned writing it to cater for several levels.  That is just too mammoth a task.  We gave up.  And I am afraid you will suffer the result.

If you fail to see how the age factor applies, then consider how your generation views current affairs and social values and how the other generation perceives them.  Apply this factor to how the two generations view romance, war, historical event, humour, sex, religion, dress codes, music, politics and every other facet of daily life and society.  Specifically, the young person just hasn’t been hanging around long enough to gain the different (and usually more advantageous) perception of the older person.  This is reflected by the shallow depth of their writing (story telling) and has the myopia of immaturity about it.  

That is not taking a longbow point of view, for it is obvious if you visualise years as being stairs, that a seventeen year-old standing on the seventeenth stair cannot see as far or as wide as the person standing on the fiftieth stair.  Yet the seventeen year-old is closer to the action and therefore views the world with somewhat more dynamism.  The writing style of each group reflects their vantage, and trying to adjudicate good or bad is pointless.  The only test is whether somebody wants to buy it, the commercial incentive, the commercial viability.

What skills do you have and what skills do you need?  You are reading this, so that is all the skilling required if you just want to write.  However, if you are looking to achieve commercial viability then you must also have command of the language, an understanding of the need for syntax.  It doesn’t any good come of writing if no persons can’t bother understanding it, you know?  Do you get the point?  You have a problem if you didn’t excel in English, and it will show up within the first few lines of your text.

Spelling and grammar tools that come with most reasonable word processors are a definite boon (though also a liability at times, and you are hard-pressed to win an argument with one no matter how much you swear at it) but they will only help you out, they can’t do it for you.  Writing it like you would speak it doesn’t work because speech patterns give clues as to meaning.  You have to put these clues into your written word or no one will know if you are, for example, being sarcastic or making a joke.  That takes skill

If your education is not as valid as you would prefer, don’t give up, there is a way around.  Someone in your family or some one of your friends may be substantially more literate than yourself.  Give it to them to make corrections or suggestions.  However, do not dump the whole book in their lap expecting them to provide major syntax surgery.  That won’t happen unless they have been significantly mentioned in your will. Make your approach before you start writing, as people are often eager to lend a hand to a project in the making.  And they tend to rebel a little at being called in to clean up the mess.  Get him or her to agree by using every subtle ploy and tactic in your armoury to read and correct a few pages at a time, preferably not long after you have finished writing them.  Oh, and you are going to have to smile a lot.  

There are professionals out there who will do it for a fee, a big fee, a very big fee.  A problem is that you might find the need to revise several paragraphs and pages as errors in your research come to light, or you work to make some of those clumsy passages flow better.  You run the risk of incorporating new grammatical errors, and those professional services don’t generally extend to cover rewrites.  You might remember though that you pay to have a mechanic look at your car if it needs fixing.

All that you need to gather from these past paragraphs is that your skill levels dictate your comfort zones and reflect the end result of your efforts.

Other definite skills that you do need are better discussed under the heading of tools.