Structuring a Story

Welcome back, everyone. Last time we touched a little bit on the words would and could, and how they make writing sound weak.

This time, I want to touch on something a little bit different, yet correlated to weak writing. I want to talk about the overall structure of sentences and paragraphs.

Once again, I’ve delved into the works of a “Best Selling Author”. I put it in quotations because this is an excerpt of the first few lines of Gary Lindberg’s The Shekinah Legacy. This is another author who simply says he’s a best seller, and he even goes so far as to photoshop a best selling award label onto the cover of his books, but if you check his books’ rankings, he’s far from best seller status.

That said, if he chose to misrepresent his books, he may have achieved Amazon Best Seller rank at some point; it isn’t difficult to do. All you need is to choose an obscure set of labels for your book, like Free Masonry and Christian Murder. Then, you sell three copies, and your book is a “best seller”, for two or three hours, but long enough to snap a screen shot of your rank, and then you can show everyone how amazing you are, calling yourself a “Best Selling Author”.

Readers, however, see right through it. Readers take a look at the first pages of a book, and they know right away if the author has the makings of a best seller.