Thread: What characteristics show a young or beginning writer?

I am thirteen and am pretty far into a novel i am writing. I was wondering what you thought really shows that a writer is a beginner. Also, what are some things you truly hate to see in a story. The genre my novel is in would be Fantasy, Romance, Young Adult. Thanks for all your help.

By what shows that a writer is a beginner - you mean bad things, right? #1 on my list is grammar. Other than that, there's nothing I really hate to see in stories.

When i was 13 i used to use the silliest cliches. My grammer pretty much sucked and i had so many ideas coming into me that i could never work on one thing for long. hehe. I hope your much better than i was!

I still have my first story, which I wrote at 13. Mainly, I had a lot of gaping plot holes, contradictions, and cliches. I also never used quotations or breaks in paragraphs. I was terrible, lol.

Aside from getting the conventions (grammar, punctuation) right, you want to make sure:

1) your novel has a sustained conflict through the book;
2) your main character(s) grow/change during the book;
3) your characters have goals and motivations;
4) you show rather than tell ("She balled her hands into fist and glared at him" not "shs was really angry at him."
5) You use active voice and strong verbs, not passive voice or weak verbs supported by adjectives. ("She hurled the cup at him," not "he was hit by the cup which she angrily threw." or "Clouds scuttled across the dark sky and rain beat at the windows" not "It was a dark and stormy night.")

What I hate: Characters who act in unrealistic ways; characters who are too unbelievably perfect (make them human); inconsistent plots.

This is pretty standard writing advice. If it's new to you, you should buy or get a book on writing out of your library. The For Dummies series has How to Write a Romance Novel and a few other writing titles. They should be easy for you to follow. While the Romance Novel title might not completely apply, many of the ideas could be generalized to Fantasy.

Also, you need objective critiques. There are on-line critique groups, or you can recruit friends and family. But, you really need someone who is willing to tell you what doesn't work, not someone who is going to think your book is great, regardless of whether it is or not. A teacher might help you there.

Remember, a first draft is a first draft for a reason. So, even if, as you learn more about writing (and we're all still learning) you see flaws in what you've written so far, you can fix and change things.

Good luck

http://www.writesf.com

This link is to Jeffery Carver's site for aspiring authors. It's is very to-the-point and useful. It it good for writers of any age but was written specifically for young authors.

Beginning writers make some common errors, like setting the scene too long (you don't have to describe everything in detail), poor dialog (good dialog can be hard even for experienced writers), said-ism (trying to find 1001 ways to avoid using said), thesaurus-itis (it's a useful book if used sparingly), unrealistic characters, and including useless stuff (like every single thing the character does from brushing his teeth in the morning to getting his mail at night, none of which furthers the plot because the writer doesn't know how to get to the next day's scene).