Shoutout to the grammar checker that caught my 700 word prologue problem

I was beta reading a friend's fantasy draft and their word processor flagged a sentence that repeated itself in the same paragraph. That made me look back at my own 700 word prologue and realize I spent 4 pages describing a door hinge. Has anyone else found a dumb spelling error that actually exposed a bigger pacing issue?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_alex1d ago

Oh man, I've totally been there. My advice is to cut the first 300 words no matter how much it hurts, because if your own tool is flagging it, your reader is already bored.

emmaking1d ago

Three drafts and 2,000 words later, my "novel" is apparently just a prologue for a story that starts at word 301, and @the_alex is out here speaking the painful truth I didn't want to hear. Guess I'll go delete my own masterpiece and pretend the cursor was broken.