“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” (Stephen King)

So, when stepping back into my young life, we discovered the first rule of writing:  READ - a LOT!

But what about when you try to write?  Is reading a lot going to teach you everything you know about sentence structure, paragraph structure, when to end a chapter?  What is a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb - and even more important, might your story have been turned away by a publisher because you wrote every paragraph as one run-on sentence that took up half a page?

For those who are still in school when you find this blog, my advice to you is to pay attention during your English classes.  No matter how boring you may think the exercises that your teacher wants you to do are, they are the building blocks you need in order to write.

If you've graduated from school and are out on your own before the writing bug bites, let me introduce you to a book that I was introduced to way back in the dark ages, when I went to college with the Marquis de Sade:  "Steps to Writing Well" by Jean Wyrick.

Ms. Wyrick, at least in the edition I still have in my possession, was mostly concerned with the short essay or thesis.  If I was trying to keep myself to a specific number of pages or wanted to make sure that I stayed on a specific topic in order to pass in a paper for a class, I would follow her instructions to a "t".  Unfortunately, trying to write an outline and stick to a specific topic when you're writing a tale that has a bunch of crazy characters who are busily changing the story the moment you turn your back.......

Yeah, I don't do outlines for my novels.

However, if I'm questioning my punctuation, or the grammar checker on my computer brings up a "rule" that I no longer remember, it's always good to have Ms. Wyrick sitting on my bookshelf, ready to remind me about the rules that I was taught in the many classes I took over the years.

Now, all of this may sound like I'm just being picky for the sake of being picky, but publishing houses aren't going to read your work if the query letter comes off like a 4-year-old child's letter to Santa Claus.  Of course, if they DO decide to take a chance with your writing and ask you to submit a manuscript, they will expect you to follow their submissions guidelines - which means they will be expecting you to send them a file with proper spelling, proper grammar, and proper punctuation.  Cross your "t", dot your "i", and make sure that this would be a writing effort that would have given you an "A" in your English class.