First, you do not have to be an editor
to be a writer, They are two completely different jobs.
Good grammar and spelling (two things I
don’t have) are helpful to a writer, but a writer is not dependent
on them. I believe even the best writers need someone to edit for
them.
However there are some pieces of
knowledge that are helpful to have when writing. Being as I only
became a writer 15 days ago now I have been doing a learn as you go
approach. Because of this I learned a some hard lessons yesterday.
It all began when I started to notice I
kept switching between the words “said” verses “says”.
Example in some cases I would use the sentence
The boy said “Let's go.”
Or sometimes I would use
After researching and looking through
some of my favorite authors who also wrote in third person (J.K
Rowling) I learned I should have been using “said” all along.
They mean two completely different things. You can learn more about
this from this link here.
As I ran through my novel to fix all of
my “says” to “said” however I noticed some of my sentences no
longer made sense.
The boy stands up and says “Lets go!”
Was becoming...
The boy stands up and said “Let's
go!” (doesn’t make sense)
I learned it should have been...
The boy stood up and said “Let's go!”
(all past tense)
When you are writing in third person
point of view and you're narrating a story that happened in the past
you need to stay in the past tense.
For all those non writing friends of
mine this meant I had to completely read through 25,000 words and fix
three out of every five words.
It has been been a lot of work fixing everything! But now
when reading a part of my book it makes better sense and sounds
a million times better.
Anyone else going through anything like this? I would love to hear. Feel free to comment on Facebook!
Amber <3
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