Citing sources is essential to playing it fair in writing! Imagine spending a ton of time and effort to putting together a document of your own ideas based on your own research, and then someone comes along and pretends it’s their work. All they did was slap their name on your paper, and now they get all the credit! Unfair! That’s exactly what you’re doing to other people when you don’t cite your sources. Whether you’re directly quoting or paraphrasing someone else’s ideas, give credit where credit is due. Always. Another reason for citing sources, other than giving credit to others for their ideas, is to allow the readers to find those sources for more information. If you read a book with a lot of amazing quotes originating from a single book, you might be interested in reading that book. But you wouldn’t be able to do that if you didn’t know which book it came from.

It’s very rare that someone intentionally goes out to exclude someone through their writing, and most people don’t mean to throw in sexist stereotypes when they’re writing a book. And yet it happens every day. . . . Why is this? And more importantly, what can we do about it?

Language changes and develops with the people speaking it. We do not speak the same in 2022 as we did in 1622. Not even the same as we did fifty years ago! Conventions and meanings change. This means we may have been taught rules that are no longer important. And somehow, some of us have been taught things that were never rules in the first place.

I want to go through some of these grammar “rules” that aren’t rules at all so we can stop worrying about them.

Overwriting often happens with amateur writers. New writers think they need to explain everything to the reader for them to understand. This means there’s lots of meaningless description without much progression of the story. The reader is pulled out of the story and gets bored! So, let’s learn how not to do that!

Are you writing to experts in the field or someone who is just starting to learn about this topic? Are you writing to upper-class people, lower-class people, or people of all SES backgrounds? Are you writing to people in your geographical area only or anywhere in the world?

You don’t need to write to everyone.

Have you wanted to write a book forever but thinking about staring at a blank page is paralyzing? Where do you even start?

Imagine if you could sit down every day (or however often) to write, and you knew exactly what to write about. What if you always knew exactly what came next and could pick up right where you left off each time?

I know you’re probably eager to get started writing your nonfiction book (either memoir or self-help), but you need a plan first. It will be worth it to take the time now and figure out the answers to three big questions before you start writing.

If you thank someone by name in the acknowledgments section of your book, you don’t need permission because it’s probably a positive or neutral mention. If you want to talk about how your stepdad ruined your life, you’ll need permission because that’s negative. Seems pretty easy, but when in doubt, always ask permission. I’ll mostly be talking about negative mentions in this blog post.

In this blog post, we’re going to talk about how to narrow your reader audience for nonfiction books.

Whether someone needs developmental editing depends on the person and their manuscript and their goals for the manuscript. If you’re just writing because it makes you happy and you don’t care about making money, or because you just want to share your story with your family, maybe you don’t need it. If you’re creating a book out of a course (which is already structured well and pretty much acts as a detailed outline), maybe you don’t need it. If you prefer to use beta readers and critique partners to help you get the organization down, maybe you don’t need it.

It's totally up to you, your goals, your budget, and your timeline.

I edit lots of memoirs, so I see lots of common developmental problems. If you can fix these before you get your book to an editor, the editor can focus on other issues, which results in a better book. Maybe after implementing these changes and working with beta readers, you even feel comfortable skipping developmental editing altogether and saving some time and money!

Here’s three common mistakes of memoir writers. Let’s get into it.