Thursday, November 6, 2014

WHY FOLLOWING THE RIGHT OR WRITE WAY IS BEST






Summary of Love Never Fails

Manfred and Sally’s daughter Molly Whiteman finishes school and returns to her home to teach. When old friends of her parents come for a visit with their son Stefan Elliot, Molly is attracted to the young man she admired when they were children, but his position in the Army conflicts with her dislike of anything to do with guns, especially the military.

 After he leaves to rejoin his regiment, Molly is both relieved and confused as to her feelings for him. Then an encounter with a bank robbery and being held hostage changes her attitude and heart, and she realizes that she does love Stefan even though she hasn't heard from him. When her grandmother falls ill and passes away, Molly returns to Louisiana with her family. While there, she learns that Stefan is home because of a disfiguring injury in a battle and goes to see him only to have him reject her because of the scars and wounds on his face.

 Distraught, she leaves but causes her horse to startle and run away with her in the buggy. Stefan witnesses the runaway and goes after her on his horse despite his own injuries, but is not in time to prevent an accident. Once she is declared all right with only a sprained shoulder, Stefan once more retreats because he has no future to offer Molly, only a scarred body. Will these two young people realize their love is true and open their hearts and future to what God has for them? 


Getting It Right

By Martha Rogers

I love a good story, but recently I have read two good stories by a multi-published author that left me shaking my head. If the story hadn't been good, I would have tossed the book aside. Things like head-hopping or changing point of view within a scene with no warning and beginning sentences with words that end with -ing had me pausing all the time and shaking my head. I had to go back a few times to figure out how and why the POV changed. 

Still I kept reading because the author created characters who captured my attention and made me care about what happened to them. The plot wasn't predictable and led down roads that seemed to have no connection, but in the end tied all together in an interesting way. However, I will hesitate before buying another book from this author. I have too many others in my TBR pile to bother with this author.

We've heard it said so many times that the story is most important. In the case of this author, she did all the things to make her readers keep the pages turning even though she didn't follow all the "rules" of writing. This was one of those stories that if I had been grading it as I did the papers of my college students, it would have earned an A for content and a D- for mechanics. 

I have found the head hopping, poor sentence construction, and grammatical mistakes more prevalent in self-pubbed books, but it can happen to those from a recognized traditional publisher also. I'm not sure why this is because editors should catch those things. The editor for the publisher of the book descr
ibed didn't catch them or perhaps decided they didn’t make any difference. 

Perhaps multi-published writers can get by with this type of writing as long as their story and characters are good and the readers like the author. However, can an unpublished author seeking publication afford to make those kinds of mistakes as the editor reads the manuscript? That will depend entirely upon the editor who first looks at the manuscript.


Authors who go the independent route and publish their own works need to have a professional editor go over the manuscript with an eye for mechanics as well as story flow and POV. Some of the errors that show up in these independent books tend to give the overall group a bad name.

No matter what route you take to publication, make sure your manuscript is as clean as possible. Do the work it takes to produce a book of quality, and you can reap the rewards of success. 


Meet Martha Rogers
Martha Rogers is a free-lance writer and was named Writer of the Year at the Texas Christian Writers Conference in 2009 and writes a weekly devotional for ACFW. Martha and her husband Rex live in Houston where they enjoy spending time with their grandchildren.  A former English and Home Economics teacher, Martha loves to cook and experimenting with recipes and loves scrapbooking when she has time. She has written two series, Winds Across the Prairie and Seasons of the Heart as well as several novellas. Love Stays True and Love Finds Faith, the first two books in her new series, The Homeward Journey, are available now with book number three being released in the fall of 2014. 


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