Using Guidelines

My writing students sometimes turn in perfectly good essays, but they fail the assignment. Why? They fail because they ignored the guidelines of the assignment. They ignored the word limit, style, purpose or format guidelines or all four. Should this matter if the writing is good? Absolutely, it should matter. The world is about guidelines, especially the writing world. Try sending to an editor an article that doesn't meet the publication's guidelines. It will be soundly rejected. So will college writing assignments, job writing assignments and a myriad of other daily living writing tasks. Ignore the guidelines and you get turned down. That's the way life is. Writing is as much about following the guidelines as it is about the mechanics of writing. If you want to write mysteries, then study mysteries. Learn the guidelines of that genre and know what editors and publishers expect from mystery writers. Then follow those guidelines to a T. This may sound like the death of creativity, having to follow guidelines. And you may ask whatever happened to creative license? But what good is creativity if you can't get it published? Your challenge is to be as creative as you can within the parameters you have to work with. Maybe your wonderful 5,000 word short story is 2,000 words over the limit for a literary magazine you really want to be published in. Work on that story to make it tighter, cleaner, stronger. Make it lean and mean until it fits within the word limit. You're not limiting your creativity by doing this. You're strengthening it by plying the tools of your trade and becoming a master at revising your work. And most importantly, you're giving your work a fighting chance to be seriously considered for publication. Use guidelines to your advantage and success will follow.