2 Tips for Professional-Looking Fiction

So you want people to pay you money to read your stories? Great, but make sure your current amateur status doesn’t show by avoiding unprofessional habits.

The following comes from my own mentors, most of them editors for publishing houses. I’ve found their advice to be solid gold, and these warnings have served me excellently as both a writer and an editor. These two tips both address things that can get work “tossed in the round file” even if other aspects of the writing are strong. They simply scream “unpublishable.”

Stick with He Said and She Said

When it comes to attributing dialogue, keep it simple.

And here is a good time to note one of the major differences between a lecture and a written document: a repeated phrase works quite well when done correctly (e.g., “Yes, we can.” “I have a dream.” “Build that wall.”), but on the page, it quickly looks like the writer is running out of ideas. Unlike in speech, the written word doesn’t “go” anywhere. It sits there for readers to choose to reread and review at their leisure.

Here at ProofreadingPal.com, I’ve seen that a lot of unprofessional writing seems to come from a lack of confidence that the reader is paying attention. Repetition, heavy emphasis, and cute wording are deployed as tricks to keep readers’ interest and make sure they “get the point.”

(Read more on emphasis here.)

A professional writer is confident that readers will be attentive and can work things out when there is some fun ambiguity, a pointed irony, or a subtle message. If you want to look and sound professional, be confident that your story is enough to keep the reader engaged, and leave those tricks behind.

Julia H.