Always Write for Your Readers: From Draft to Publication

So, having made the decision to write a thriller, for example, you should write with the intention of thrilling your reader. You need to know your purpose before you begin.

When writing your first draft quickly and without too much agonising, try not to get sidetracked into overdeveloping ideas that are not pertinent to your purpose. Stay as focused, in other words, as you can on the intention of your writing.

The key difference between writing literary work and genre fiction is, to me, about maintaining discipline.

Literary works may meander without purpose, hopping from one set of profound observations to another. This may lead your reader to feel rudderless.

Genre writing is often more focused on the needs of the reader and invariably requires more work in the writing and the editing from the writer.

To me, the important issues are clarity and direction. Your story or nonfiction piece should shine with a clear and obvious thrust that takes a reader on a focused journey.

A good narrative contains logic that can easily be followed by most readers, whatever their upbringing or education level. The author's job is to present an alternate view of reality that is compelling. Only text that is easily understood can be fully absorbed and endorsed by a reader.

The need to emphasize logic and sense in your stories may mean that your final editing process is ruthless. You may need to remove paragraphs, sections, and even chapters that have little or nothing to do with the story intention.

When editing, you will need to become acutely aware of how the writing flows from the point of view of the reader.

This is one of the main reasons why you should take time out between edits to distance yourself from your own work: you need to be able to see your writing from a reader's perspective.

If you can't manage that trick, show your work to others before you publish or submit to legacy publishers.

At the end of the day, writing for publication is about writing for other people: to entertain, to inform, and to help them transcend the norm. Your friends and fellow writers are often the very people who will tell you whether you're succeeding in that objective.

There's a whole new industry growing online that offers to edit your material for publication - for a price, of course.

But actually, to me, using a third party editor can cause long term problems for you. Not least because, unless you edit regularly, you'll never learn how to do it properly.

You really should be editing to the best of your own ability at all times.

This does not mean giving your work a cursory once over just after you've written it (as far too many new writers do.) No. It means studying every word, sentence, every piece of punctuation, grammar, every nuance and stylistic inflection - and to keep editing until you know for sure that what you've done is good enough for mass market consumption.