First of all: to win the WWOTYA, rely neither on spelling mistakes nor on grammar errors. As soon as their number is above the correction allowance, your manuscript is rejected without even being nominated to take part in the championship.

From the publisher's point of view, spelling mistakes do not have much to do with the book, and this is still more true if you address a publishing house that specializes in dual language books; spelling and grammatical mistakes have a lot to do with the production cost. Of course, they are going to bother the reader, what can be part of a global scheme designed to not to get published, but they seldom dissuade him from reading an intriguing story.

Grammar errors are far more promising because they easily lead to confusion and allow you to write perfect nonsenses. The drawback is that nonsenses make the book funny, even if it tells a tragedy, and the funny side salvages a little something. You will not get published, but you will not win the WWOTYA either.

The significant writing errors are harder to achieve. Of course, you must use clichs and pleonasms; but they are the bricks, not the building. To completely spoil the literary aspect of your book, never balance anything. Too little or too much is what you must aim at.

When it comes to dialogs, inserting too many of them is quite easy to achieve. Not only the reader will be fed up with numerous He said and She answered, but you can play the imbalance game inside the imbalanced dialogs. What about the former French teacher ignoring French conjugations (my favorite), the old countess using slang or the young shoplifter quoting Spinoza?

These inner mistakes are powerful. Whereas you often need to combine the points covered in the previous lessons, inner mistakes proudly stand for themselves. The best way to fail is also the most commonly used: begin a story and go on with another. For your manuscript to end up in a museum do not exclude some other curiosities and things to see. A character whose name changes, another who appears despite his death, the narrator who jumps from I to One, the snow storm that would be so vividly depicted, if only the action were not taking place in Miami, etc.

Everyone overlooks some improper sentences. People who do not compete for winning the WWOTYA lay their manuscript in a drawer for a couple of weeks, even months ! before reading it again; thus, the mistakes of the kind stick out a mile. Never read your work again. Send it with some marvelous strokes of inspiration: a gun in each hand and a knife in the other or the two cars collided with each other exactly as the same time. Be careful. If there are too many funny mistakes, your book is going to be published with the label of humor.

Cheer up ! Not everything is lost as long as you are still able to argue with your publisher.

Gabrielle Guichard
Writes for http://multilingualbookstore.com/