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Flashing lights
Tuesday 8th September 2026
When you first start out, you often don’t know good writing from bad writing. This is normal.
But at some point on your writing journey, you develop a sense. You can feel instinctively when something in the manuscript isn’t working.
For me, it’s a bit (though not exactly) like a flashing light in my mind. The bigger the problem, the bigger the light.
The wrongness might be a scene, a paragraph, maybe a whole story thread or character. With enough experience, this sense could be honed to a single word. A tiny flashing light in your mind.
And it’s important to spot them. A single word won’t make or break a manuscript, but imagine your whole novel flashing with tiny warning lights everywhere, like the dashboard of some crash-landed spaceship.
Even as I write this, little lights are flashing in my mind. And that’s okay. Sometimes you just need to write, and fix these things later. Sometimes it’s just a blog post.
But don’t ignore them.
It’s so easy to ignore them.
You can feel it there, blinking in your peripheral vision, but you don’t want to admit it to yourself.
Often it’s fear. A paragraph is wrong, but you don’t know why, or what to change. Maybe the paragraph is in the wrong place. Maybe it needs to be fleshed out, or bookended by two other paragraphs. Maybe it needs cutting altogether. This is all part of the process.
But don’t ignore them.
I’m lucky enough that my wife reads me every manuscript I write. It helps me to hear the flow, to spot when something is clunky or doesn’t make sense. And the funny thing is, if she reads a single word wrong, I know it immediately. My ears prick up, and I check the document to make sure she did, in fact, read it wrong.
That’s how familiar you need to become with your words. Each one matters. You must obsessive over them, become a control freak. You need to take pride in them. You mustn’t rest until you’ve fixed those flashing lights.