Where do I get started with this topic? It's so vast!

Mary, Leanne and Rhon have already addressed many of the popular myths that dog fiction writers, but there's one in particular that I'll harp on today. And that is the very amusing idea that you don't have to clean up your work before you submit it to a publishing house. How many times have I (tactfully, even sweetly) flogged an aspiring author for leaving typos, dangling participles and sloppy phrasing in a manuscript that she plans to submit?

Thousands.

And the response I often get is this one: "But that's what an editor is for."

MYTH! MYTH! MYTH! MYTH! MYTH!

Here's the reality: in a fiction market that's tighter than Scrooge's fist, an editor isn't going to read past your first page if she finds misspellings, typos, word repetion or dangling participles. Leaving errors like that in your manuscript is like showing up to a job interview with bed-head and mismatched shoes. It's like opening your mouth to say hello and exhibiting a large spinach leaf between your front teeth, or reeking of booze.

Let me spell it out: you're not going to get the job.

None of us are perfect writers (and I'm sure there's someone out there who'll be happy to rip out a page from one of my books, highlight an error and mail it to me) but you've got to minimize your goofs. And if you know you can't spell, if you know that you won the Most Likely to Dangle a Participle Award in high school English class, if you think that punctuation is for other people--then for God's sake, please hire someone to proof your work for you before you submit it.

Yes, publishers do have copy edit people. Yes, their job is to clean up awkward phrasing and other errors. But you're never going to get to those copy editors if you can't get your work reasonably clean in the first place so that an editor can get through it to make sense of your story.

Okay, that was pretty basic. But now I'll say something that might surprise you. "Cleaning up your work" applies just as much to brilliant but over-complicated writers. Writers who aren't making grammatical or spelling errors but who craft seventy-two word sentences that are calculated to make the ghosts of Tolstoy, Hardy and Joyce weep.

NEWS FLASH: you may be a fantastic writer with an MFA in Literary Snootology from a university miles beyond the Ivy Leage . . . but if you're trying to get published in today's commercial fiction market then you'd better streamline and simplify your work. You'd better find a marketing hook. And you'd better reign in any vestiges of a colossal ego. (Trust me on this: I'm the daughter of a literary critic who was published by Princeton Press. My background was more hindrance than help!)

So if there's one statement I never want to hear again as long as I live, it's: "Why should I labor over these petty issues? That's what an editor is for." I'm going to open up an industrial-size can of good, old-fashioned Texas Whoop Ass on the next aspiring author to say those words to me. Whether a writer ignores grammar, punctuation or spelling out of laziness, ignorance or stylized pretentiousness doesn't matter. If you approach a New York editor thinking that you're e. e. cummings, chances are she'll tell you to get going--and fast.

And that's my Myth Buster. Happy Thursday, Karen