50 Mistakes Beginner Writers Make: Mistakes Writers Make, #1

By Alex Gazzola

Do you want to learn how to write articles for newspapers, essays for magazines, and non-fiction for websites? Have you been trying for some time without success? Could it be your mistakes which are holding you back?

In this, the first book in the 'Mistakes Writers Make' series, writing tutor and author Alex Gazzola takes you through 50 of the key errors new and aspiring writers may be making - and guides you towards putting them right.

All the fundamentals are here: how to generate ideas, approach editors, research your market, craft an article, revise your work and submit it professionally.

'50 Mistakes Beginner Writers Make' tackles the myths, points out the stumbling blocks, highlights the important aspects you may not have even thought of - and most of all reminds all writers that it's ultimately important to make mistakes ... provided you learn from them!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex Gazzola
• Release date: Dec 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393913405

Book preview

50 Mistakes Beginner Writers Make

By Alex Gazzola

Text copyright © 2015 Alex Gazzola

All Rights Reserved

Dedication

One sentence in one mistake is for Kelly.

Everything else is for my students.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Mistake #1: Mistakes are bad

Mistake #2: It’s going to be easy

Mistake #3: I’m going to get rich!

Mistake #4: Going solo

Mistake #5: It’s all writing

Mistake #6: It’s fiction and poetry I really want to do...

Mistake #7: I can’t wait to tell the world what I think...

Mistake #8: I can do better than that!

Mistake #9: People think I won’t make it!

Mistake #10: Entitlement

Mistake #11: Trusting all advice

Mistake #12: Not reading

Mistake #13: Not reading writing books

Mistake #14: Reluctance to invest

Mistake #15: But I know nothing about dogs, hair or yachts!

Mistake #16: So I’ve seen a copy of the magazine...

Mistake #17: I can’t find a market which is quite me...

Mistake #18: But I’ve looked in the newsagents ...

Mistake #19: Wanting to know it all before you begin

Mistake #20: I have no ideas!

Mistake #21: I’m a hermit and a recluse and I really have no ideas!

Mistake #22: I can’t bother the editor!

Mistake #23: They’re going to steal my idea!

Mistake #24: Sending an article to an ideas editor

Mistake #25: Sending an editor an article you shouldn’t send ...

Mistake #26: How-are-you openers

Mistake #27: Something for everyone

Mistake #28: Forgetting the reader

Mistake #29: ‘But I digress ...’

Mistake #30: Writing to show you know

Mistake #31: Writing is rewriting

Mistake #32: Utilising a polysyllabic lexeme ...

Mistake #33: Taking familiar words for granted

Mistake #34: Fancy punctuation

Mistake #35: Isn’t it pretty!

Mistake #36: Is that it?

Mistake #37: Writing is writing

Mistake #38: A sprint finish

Mistake #39: ‘Dear Editor ...’

Mistake #40: The Digest has one reader

Mistake #41: Frozen by impatience

Mistake #42: Writing every day

Mistake #43: Only brilliant writers sell

Mistake #44: So much for waiting ...

Mistake #45: Giving in to phone fear

Mistake #46: They stole my idea!

Mistake #47: You stole my idea!

Mistake #48: I. GIVE. UP!

Mistake #49: When can I call myself a writer?

Mistake #50: Honouring all good advice

Introduction

If I were the author of a new weight loss guide and this were its introduction, I would probably tell you that this is the diet book to end all diet books, and that all its competitors are flawed, faddy and don’t work. Desired results are guaranteed .

But I’m not. I’m the author of a new writers’ guide, and I like to think that we writing advisors are a more modest lot. I wish you every success with it, but I can’t promise you that this book – or any of the many which will follow in the ‘Mistakes Writers Make’ series – will get you to exactly where you want to be. Neither can I claim that competing writing guides have now been made redundant, because a lot of them – and I really have read a lot of them – are excellent.

But a comparison between these two disparate book worlds does strike me as appropriate in another sense.

This is because bookshops these days are saturated with diet books – they sell in vast quantities – and yet we still have a global obesity crisis. For some people, the weight loss guides on the market don’t appear to work.

Similarly, the book market boasts a healthy share of writers’ guides – and yet it seems to me that there have never been so many people out there looking to break into writing, be published, or make a living from their words. Could it also be true that, for some writers at least, the many published writing guides don’t appear to work either?

I think it’s possible. And there’d be no point in my further weighing down the already groaning library shelves (albeit virtual shelves, in this case) unless I thought I could offer an alternative and worthwhile addition.

What makes the ‘Mistakes’ philosophy different?

Other writers’ guides tend to tell you what to do. This is logical and often works well. But in my role as a writing tutor I’ve come across many writers, of varying capabilities, for whom this prescriptive method appears unproductive.

We can all learn from our mistakes – writers included. The problem is error is not always apparent to us. How, when working alone with only a keyboard and screen for company, can we scribblers know when we are making mistakes – or when errors might be looming on the horizon? The blunt fact is we usually can’t. Occasionally we may stumble across a right way after repeatedly trying, and failing with, the wrong way – and this trial-and-error learning can be valuable and incentivising. But often, we remain blind to our mistakes. Why? Because, in the absence of feedback, the tell-tale signs are not there. Doing the wrong thing feels exactly the same as doing the right thing.

Is this a problem? Not if you’re where you want to be. The mistakes I make of which I’m ignorant aren’t stopping me from doing what I want to be doing – making a living from words. But if you’re not published and you’re trying to get published, if you crave a second career as a writer and you’re struggling, or if you want to write a best-selling book and you haven’t come close – then your mistakes are likely to be the obstacles standing in your way.

This book (and those which follow) will show you what those mistakes might be. Like the blog which inspired it, it will address and discuss mistakes individually: what the mistake is, why the mistake is a mistake, and what you can do to help put it right or avoid it in the first place. Each will help you learn and, I hope, move forward.

In showing you how to right or avoid mistakes, you might argue that the book, in a round about way, will be telling you what to do, just like other writing guides. A fair point. However, the spirit in which the book is written is a little less instructional – although often, due to the nature of the mistake, this