Common Mistakes

There's a few things that tend to crop up over and over again and they don't mean that people are bad writers, but that we all miss a little something when we try to transfer the image we have in our heads to the printed word.

Dialogue attribution. I see lots of different types of attributions at the end of these sentences. Remember that he or she said should be good enough. Anything else like 'he said sadly' just wont do. Make sure the character demonstrates their emotional state. As a fiction editor, that's one of the things I see a lot of. More later.