Notes from the Judge: The Dangers of Autobiography

Michael J. Vaughn is a long-time judge for Writer's Digest novel competitions. He's using this series to pass on the issues brought up by the entries he reads.

The danger of writing a purely autobiographical novel is that real life wanders ceaselessly, whereas good novels tend to have tightly focused narratives. This is exacerbated by the questionable edict of "write what you know," which has led to millions of dull novels. Why not use your life as raw material, and bend and create where the demands of the story call for it? After all, if you were being completely accurate about these events, why aren't you writing it as a memoir? It's called imagination. Use it.

Notes from the Judge: The Showoff

I am a judge in a novel contest, and I hope this series will provide some insight on the common flaws that appear in the entries.

Today's entry featured an author who had a high vocabulary and was intent on showing it off. In a single sentence, he used "flexion," "incurvate," "turgidity," and "torsioned." A good twenty-dollar word works well in the service of a more precise description. But it's like a good spice, best when used in moderation. Thesaurus overload makes your prose too thick, ruins the rhythm of sentences and distracts the reader from the story. The emphasis should be on communicating, not showing off.