Fiction Writers Can Avoid "Legal" Problems

More info and where to buy the book

Fiction writers--if what you think you know about courtroom law comes from novels, TV and movies, your writing may have "legal" trouble.

Lawyers, legal secretaries, and most people who have worked in law or the criminal justice system agree:

"I hate it when books don't even try to get legal details right!"

They may laugh, but frequently they will stop reading when a plot twists the legal system inside out or a crisis in a book is based on a legal problem that could never happen in real life.

You Want to Keep the Reader Turning Pages.

So I've written, The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About Courtroom Law as a legal reality check.... It covers the basics you need to write believably about lawyers, courts, trials, and evidence.

For example:

Your characters don't always have the right to remain silent. Mistake 20 explains why the right not to incriminate oneself doesn't apply to every police encounter.
Mistake 21 describes how the police actually use the Miranda Warning during interrogations--and when they don't.

What about a defense lawyer who wants to switch sides? Read Mistake 33 to find out what would happen if a lawyer found such horrifying information that he decided to quit in the middle of a trial--what can he do and what would he never do?
I've worked in law offices for thirty-five years, and transcribed police interrogations, FBI surveillance and trial proceedings. I like to get the details right.

Here are the answers to how courtroom dramas work, so you can eliminate errors that make people in the legal community snicker, drop the book with a thump, and put you on their "Do Not Buy" list.

In The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About Courtroom Law you'll discover:

● What is the one basic rule of questioning that all trial lawyers learn?
● Can lawyers who are married to each other represent opposing sides in a lawsuit?
● A wife cannot be forced to testify against her husband--except in these circumstances....

GETTING SMALL DETAILS RIGHT can give a story an air of truth, while getting them wrong can irritate the reader and throw a monkey wrench into the finely tuned workings of the most beautifully constructed plot.

Fiction writers don't live by crime alone. Characters filing lawsuits to haul each other into court can spark major plot conflict, but readers won't believe in the situation if you don't know the important differences between civil and criminal law.
IGNORANCE OF THE LAW IS NO EXCUSE! Most of the mistakes I see writers make arise out of ignorance of the most basic legal structures. The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About Courtroom Law was written to give you that essential information--and more.

Let me show you some little-known sides of the law that can provide insights most readers will never see coming, even as the legally savvy readers nod their heads and say, "Yes! Finally someone cared enough to get it right!"

That's why you should own The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About Courtroom Law today (in fact, you can be reading it in as little as 5 minutes from now!).

More info and where to buy the book

Resume Sweet Spot a Featured Article

I'm happy to note that Ezine Articles liked this piece.

The Sweet Spot for Resumes

In sports and a variety of other activities from bridge building to nose piercing, the sweet spot is the point in the middle where impact will have optimal effectiveness. In resumes the sweet spot is the place to put your strongest information. This magic spot is at the top of your resume right under your name and contact information.

Some resume formats label this area Goals or Objectives, while others may focus on Skills, Accomplishments or Experience. In some academic Curriculum Vita, Education will be featured first. No matter what the heading, if the right words are there, your resume has a better chance of getting a more careful reading.

The cold, hard truth behind this is that the person scanning your resume will begin looking at that top section, and may not go further. How to get them to read the rest and schedule an interview is the next question to consider.

What information should go in that top section? The current estimate is that each resume may be scanned for six seconds or less by human resources, even less time if the company involved is having resumes scanned by a software program. Computers are only speeding up the same process that employers and their personnel screeners have been doing for decades—searching for a few specialized phrases.

These are the words you want to put in the sweet spot at the top of your resume. In order to customize your resume for each job application, consider two factors:

1. What the employer wants--the ad you are answering should answer this question and provide useful words and phrases.

2. What you are offering in terms of experience, skills or accomplishments that demonstrate how you can do the job being offered, and how your goals and objectives will add value to the employer.

Using the sweet spot can simplify the task of tailoring a resume to a variety of different sorts of jobs, because only that small segment of the resume may need to be changed in order to focus more closely on the job/employer you are targeting.

More tips can be found at:

Resume formats

Job Mob - A Microsoft Word Resume Tip that You've Never Heard

For Novelists--a Secret

In order to help me get over a bad habit, I'm going to share some secret knowledge with you. The habit I'm trying to quit is reading books that have been published "before their time" as Orson Welles used to say of wine. If there were fewer of these novels I wouldn't have to read so many. (Okay, I didn't say it was a very efficient way for me to get over my bad book habit.)

Often these novels are self-published by authors who have been driven mad by years of rejection, or blinded to simple things that might have made their books more marketable on a larger scale. If that is you, reading this, I feel your pain. Sometimes such books are put out by small presses, or even major publishers, who for whatever reason, simply do not do careful editing. Like unripened fruit, these books would have benefited from more nurturing, editorial feedback and yes, even rewriting, before they were thrust into the world, or thrown into the marketplace. Ironically, some authors at the top of the heap are guilty of this carelessness because of the pressure to publish more frequently, while authors standing at the foot of ladder do the same thing because they haven't stumbled upon someone to give them knowledgable feedback.

Want to avoid this mistake? I'm going to share one simple way. I learned this secret some years ago. It may be the commonest error in novel writing. Every time I see it, I want to drop the book in irritation yelling, "Ditch the first three chapters, the story starts on page 20, or 30 or, lord help us, 50!"

One of my most valued how-to books on writing (which I hesitate to recommend because I hate to strengthen the competition!) is literary agent and author, Donald Maass' Writing the Breakout Novel. In the workbook edition he puts it well:

Again and again in manuscripts I find my eyes skimming over backstory passages in chapters one, two, and even three. Backstory doesn't engage me, because it doesn't tell a story. It does not have tension to it, usually, or complicate problems. However, once problems have been introduced, backstory can be artfully deployed to deepen them. It can be particularly useful in developing inner conflicts.

(p. 141 Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass)

Write on!

Lynne