Advice to Young Writers

I just left a killer long review of someone's story, and I feel like this is advice every young writer needs to hear.

Well, you asked me to review, and so I shall. I think the dialogue in this story is your main strength, but the strengths of this story are outweighed and overwhelmed by the things you need to fix, like your spelling and punctuation.

Before you put a story up, it should be a given that you've checked it over to make sure your sentences start with capital letters and you have basic proper punctuation. Normally when I see a story without proper punctuation I stop reading and forget about leaving a review, because if the writer can't take their own story seriously enough to proofread, I'm not sure I want to waste my time.

When someone stops speaking in a sentence and a period is required, you need a comma. "Like right now," the Wordsmith exemplified. But there's a lot of ways to end a sentence, and that comma rule doesn't work all the time. If you know someone who's a really good writer, like an English teacher or an older sibling who's taken a lot of English classes, ask them to explain the rules to you, because frankly, they're really hard to explain over the Internet.

The other major problem I see with this story is that your beginning is a little...amateur. You need a good beginning to hook your readers in, and no real writer begins their story describing the physical attributes of their characters. It's boring! If they're well written, people aren't going to need to know what they look like, only how they act and feel. The way a character looks is only secondary to the story, and doesn't need to be described in detail unless it's somehow related to the plot.

And speaking of plot, I'd like to know where this story is going. You have a nice little summary for it, but it's the end of the first chapter and I wouldn't know what the story is about unless I read that summary. You need to introduce a problem, or a hint of what the problem's going to be, before you can start trying to be funny or describe the daily lives of your characters. What does this gum incident at the end have to do with being pregnant? Is it the gum's fault that the girl is pregnant? I know that sounds like a stupid question, but authors always have to have a reason for putting something in a story, and right now, I'm not seeing what the line of reasoning was.

So I'm sorry for the long and angry review, but I mean it all in the best way. All authors have to go through a phase like this one, and the best thing to do is keep writing, and also keep reading. The reason I'm giving this advice is that I really wish someone had told me all of this stuff when I had started writing.

The best writers, I've been told, are the best readers as well. when you read, you find out what you like, as well as what you don't like, and you can see how real, published authors write, set up plot, and treat characters.

So keep going, and keep reading. You might your next big idea.

I didn't know how long I'd been writing until I realized how good my writing actually was compared to the twelve and thirteen year olds of the world who are just starting. I've come a long way since then.