Allan, that’s great advice and I hope our budding author takes heed and appreciates the effort you’ve gone to to lay things out so concisely.

The only other thing I’d add is that I think our budding author needs to read far more of other peoples’ work in the subject area. Perhaps “read” isn’t the right word, “study” is probably nearer the mark.

If you read a story/first-person account and you enjoy it, why did you enjoy it? Take the work apart and analyse how the plot’s structured, the level of technical detail and the language used to get it across, the continuity and flow of the perspective from which the story’s told. Good stories rarely flow off the keyboard unchanged and concise, engaging text is the product of a great deal more effort than rough drafts. It’s not just about laying a story down on paper, it’s about endowing the story with the attributes that make people want to read and enjoy it. To some this may come naturally, I suspect that to many successful authors it takes a lot of hard work.

I vaguely remember a quote, I think it was from Samuel Clements, that went along the lines of “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”.

The idea of the “Cold War turning Hot” is NOT fiction – it COULD have happened.

Sorry, Daz, it IS fiction. Whilst it may have been possible, it’s still fiction, unless your understanding of the term differs from mine.

I read quite a lot of the cold war story. It didn’t grab me. One of the reasons for this is that each sentence is mired by irrelevant minutiae that make it very heavy going. If there’d been a hint of a interest in the first twenty pages or so then I might have been more engaged.

Why denigrate “armchair experts”? Surely if they can spot a flaw in your work they’re more qualified in the subject than the inept author who’s too lazy to check his output.

Congratulations on your heroic ability to completely miss the point! :p

No, I think that honour’s all yours.

Why denigrate “armchair experts”? Surely if they can spot a flaw in your work they’re more qualified in the subject than the inept author who’s too lazy to check his output.

Sorry, it’s not just historical inaccuracy, it’s a lack of credibility. The inaccuracies are undermining a story that’s not believable in the first place. Others might be happy to just plough through this, but I’m afraid I didn’t see the point of continuing.

If you’re writing within an historical framework you need to put far more effort into getting your details correct and to string these around a plot that doesn’t look like a collection of non sequitous events.

I’m afraid I lost interest very quickly due to the glaring inaccuracies. It wasn’t worth the effort to catalogue the errors, getting the detail right is the your job. By all means cook up fictitious events within an historical framework, but if you lard the story with so many errors it dilutes your impact to the point where there’s not much point ploughing through the text. It looked to me like you’d copied out a chunk of Goodbye Mickey Mouse and attempted to make it different enough by larding it with chunks of Mickey Spillane.

Just out of interest, have you ever seen a compass? “two bandits, four o’ clock, bearing three-seven-zero, sixty one miles,”

Robbie, the outside world’s going to give you a shock when you encounter it. If pigs weren’t intended to be reduced to their component parts then they wouldn’t taste so amazingly good.

Stop wasting peoples’ time with such pathetic complaints and attention-seeking behaviour.

In order to provide a llittle balance to the thread….

Ah a rare blind driving panel