Writing to Be Published: A Writers Guide to Successful Writing

Helpful Advice and Tips for Beginning Writers from Michelle Devon

I never planned on becoming a writer, even though all my friends and family kept telling me I should try it. After years of avoiding it and doing everything but writing, I finally gave writing a try.

One of the first things I did was joined Associated Content. I did my first article. I actually made a little money from it. Since than, I have done many other things within the field of writing. I had a lot of questions and concerns about writing. I needed to find someone I could get advice from. It was through Associated Content that I found, and was befriended by Michelle Devon.

Michelle Devon is a writer. As she will tell you it's not what she does, it's who she is. After careful consideration, I started talking to Michelle. I picked her brain for advice and ideas on how to be a writer. I want to be a writer, a good writer, maybe even a great writer someday. What I got was more then I would have thought possible. It was important to me to learn anything and everything concerning writing as a career.

In school, English wasn't a very good subject for me. Punctuation and spelling was my weakest part. I asked Michelle about this.

She responded, "Well, grammar and punctuation is important to make a piece make sense and so people understand it, but I don't think that grammar and punctuation is writing. It's really editing, more than anything. I've been writing for years and I still make mistakes, but I try to catch what I can when I edit. My advice is, just write first. The story is most important. Write it while you're in the flow, and then come back to it later and look up the grammar and spelling stuff or get a peer to edit it."

That advice was enough to get me going and not worry about how I'm writing. As I grew as a writer I wanted to know what types of writing there were. More importantly, I wanted to find my niche. I asked Michelle about different styles of writing a person could get involved with.