Hello Maggie,

 I am a huge fan, and thanks for the enjoyable evenings, reading your books, has brought me. 

 I have been reading books for over 25 years. I have ideas and thoughts in my head.  I have full stories and plots I am dying to get out of me, onto paper.  I just don’t know where to begin or how. I read some of the books, you posted [on your website] for beginners and tried typing my thoughts down. But when I go back to reread what I type, it’s not good.  I am not sure what  I am doing wrong, I just know I need to get these stories out of me. I hope you can understand what I saying. It’s true I might suck at writing,  But I do know one thing, I am almost 40 years old, and I don’t want to be 50 and be thinking any thoughts about  “what if?” I have to try, if only once.

 Any advice you can give me about writing would be a wonderful help to me.

Aspiring, but Clueless

Dear Aspiring,

I’m always thrilled to get a letter asking about my favorite topic. And it’s one I now about, as I’ve been writing for a living for nearly 15 years now.

The thing is, having read your note, which you’ll probably notice looks very different here from the way it looked when you sent it in, I can see that you need to work on the very basics first. You wrote just over a paragraph, and I found 15 to 20 mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar. This is nothing to be embarrassed about. Most people who write casually produce notes and letters and cards full of mistakes and don’t even realize it. But to write professionally, you need to master those basics first. These are the boring parts of learning to be a writer, but they’re necessary. An editor isn’t even going to bother reading your manuscript if it arrives on her desk full of mistakes. So that’s first. Get some books, take some classes, talk to some English teachers or English majors, and learn about basic writing skills. Some excellent books for this are The Elements of Style and The Elements of Grammar, and last I knew, both were still available. Ask your bookseller to order copies for you if they don’t have them in stock, borrow them from your library, or check for them on Amazon.com