Category: Editing tips

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Submitting to Anthologies or Magazines

I was inspired to write this based on my experience receiving submissions for my Bigfoot Country Anthology. It applies to any anthology or magazine submission. Read the requirements and be sure to send in a professional document that meets all the standards requested.

I have received close to a hundred stories for my Bigfoot Anthology, (Submissions closing February 1st, at midnight Pacific Standard Time) about a third of them required formatting for me to be able to read and comment easily. A lot of submission editors would summarily reject submission for not following guidelines. I asked for .docx files in standard submission format. If you aren’t sure what that means, do a search and find out.

Things like leaving all the previous changes on track changes so I’m trying to decipher what is the most recent text. To be honest I just accept all changes and work with that. When you submit, you want to submit a clean, final document ready for the editor’s comments.

A lot of people used tabs or multiple spaces instead of creating the indent using the ruler and using styles to keep the formatting consistent through the story. Using tabs or other means of indent means your editor has to go through every paragraph and fix the indent. It is a colossal waste of time.

Even worse were the few who simply dropped their story into the body of the email, meaning that every line had a paragraph break.

I like stories, so I went to the extra effort. It meant an extra fifteen to thirty minutes to put things right. It doesn’t sound like much time until you multiply it by thirty. I had the time to do that. If it had been two hundred stories or more, some calls for anthologies or magazines get thousands, anything that didn’t fit the submission requirements would have been rejected unread.

So please, do yourself and your story a favour. Format it correctly. Use styles. Save it in .docx, or whatever the editor is asking for. Make it so they open your story and start reading without needing to fix anything before hand.

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Writing Through a Slump

Hi, should have done this last week, but motivation to do things when nothing seems to be happening is difficult. Speaking about motivation, let’s look at the difference between a slump and writer’s block.  

A slump is when your writing slows down or drops in quality, and it is a general malaise. Nothing is working, everything is garbage.  What I do in a slump is write through it, then look at my mistakes and try to learn from them. Taking a day off isn’t a bad idea, but stay away from your writer’s garret too long and you’ll have trouble returning.  The other thing is to pay attention to what is going on in life around your writing. The pandemic, for instance, has made it hard for me to get going on my writing tasks for the day. Even though my life isn’t that terribly different than it was. You aren’t going to be able to fix everything, so maybe consider writing about what is haunting you instead of ignoring the ghost at the banquet.

A writer’s block, at least in my mind is very specific. I’m stuck at this particular scene. I’ve tried it twelve different ways and I still can’t make it work. The mind is blank, or at least fuzzy. The reason I suggest writer’s block is specific is it isn’t about being able to write, but being able to imagine. That makes it different from a slump. So what do I do about writer’s block? My first thing is to go to the story structure. If I can’t come up with a scene it is very often because I haven’t laid the groundwork.

K.M.Weiland ‘Making Writers into Authors’ blogger is a genius at explaining story structure.  (google her) If I’ve missed a plot point, or jumped over the inciting incident, my plotting brain calls a halt. But it also may be that classic actor’s question. What is the motivation? Have I established why the character is doing this? Does my character know? Does the reader know? Do I know? Action follows motivation, if you get it turned around it could lead to a dead end. Another problem may be you aren’t writing the story you think you are writing. I have heard it said that Erin Morgenstern starting working on a book, but the characters didn’t want anything to do with it, they wanted to run away to the circus. She listened to the characters, the result is The Night Circus.

With writer’s block taking a walk, changing up what you are writing are also effective methods to get past it.

As a professional writer, I am expected to produce stories, if I stop, I’m no longer a writer. Though I publish my own books, I have deadlines to meet decisions to make about where a series is going. So I rarely take more than day off unless it’s a planned vacation. Oddly, I enjoy my vacations better when I want to write, but don’t because I need rest.

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Those writing mistakes are a revision gold mine.

One of the frustrations of writing is going to revise and realizing how many writing mistakes you’ve made. Repeated words, too many adverbs, weak verbs, static description, the list goes on and on. Revision is a humbling experience.

But hold on, all is not lost. Those mistakes tell us something about what we were thinking when we were writing the story. As Stephen King says, first drafts are supposed to suck. This is where we pour out the story without stopping to worry about whether we’ve used ‘loquacious’ three times in this chapter.

I view the mistakes we make in the first draft as markers, holding a place for us, so we can go back in revision and write something closer to what our brains had in mind. When we are in the flow is not the time to worry about speech tags, adverbs and the rest, though as we gain experience, we will learn to make a whole new raft of mistakes.

I want to look at the kind of mistakes we make in more detail and suggest what it is they might be telling us about the story.

Dialogue

Dialogue is an essential element in story. It is possible to write a story without dialogue, just as it is possible to write a story that is nothing but. However for the average book, it is part of the three legged stool formed by dialogue, action and narrative.

What often happens, especially with new authors is that the dialogue is reported rather than shown. ‘Mary and Sue discussed where to eat supper and decided the new Thai-Bulgarian Fusion place would be a good idea.’ This is missing out on the opportunity to use the dialogue to show character and plot development. This isn’t to say that we always show dialogue, there are times when the characters are rehashing what we’ve already heard, so glossing over it is fine.

One of the first things to look at in our dialogue is how we use speech tags. Most sources suggest we use ‘said’ or ‘asked’ and only rarely use other tags. The theory is that ‘said’ and ‘asked’ disappear like punctuation and don’t detract from the speech. This doesn’t stop some writers from having characters bark, whine, moan, sigh or laugh words. I see ‘greet’ as a tag, though it is a class of verbs which needs an object and is probably more properly used as a beat. Or the author uses adverbs to tell us how things are said, so people speak hurriedly, angrily, lazily and so on.

So what do these alternate speech tags tell us? They are our attempt to express the manner in which the words are spoken, to evoke the emotion of the dialogue. The goal of dialogue is to have the emotion in the words being spoken, not in the tags. Tags are a way of telling, not showing. What we need to do is examine the speech and work on putting that emotion into the words, or alternatively to use a beat to show the emotion through action or facial expression and body language. Beats are also a great alternative to endless lines of ‘he said’.

There are a couple of reasons beats are a better choice than speech tags whether alternative tags or ones modified by adverbs.

The first reason is they show where tags tell. With a beat you can set the subtext by internal thought, or through emotion show by physical reaction or action. They add depth that the dialogue alone can’t achieve. This is why we use all those alternative and modifiers, our brain is telling us we need to anchor this conversation in the character and plot of the book.

The second reason is to prevent the dialogue from becoming talking heads disconnected from the rest of the book. Beats allow us to show the setting, move the plot forward, reveal character, all while the characters discuss what to eat for supper.

There is something we need to watch when we use beats, and that is what I call empty beats. This is most often a two word beat. He smiled. He shrugged. He laughed. The problem is that they don’t really tell us anything new about the character or the dialogue. A favourite is to show the character nodding or shaking their head after their words indicate whether they agree or disagree. Most often these beats need to be expanded to show more of what is going on in the character’s mind.

Exposition

We have all heard about the info dump. The large wall of text explaining some point the reader needs to know to get the story. The truth is the info dump is very rarely the best way to let the reader in on this information.

Very often, the information will show up in the appropriate place without the need to explain. The best place to insert information into the text is the last possible moment before it becomes relevant to the plot. If it is never relevant, you don’t need it. This is not to say that the info dump is a waste of words. It is a use tool for checking that the information needed does in fact show up at the right time. Even if it is information not needed by the reader, you as the author need to understand it in order to write the story.

Aside from the info dump, there are a couple of other ways we try to sneak the information into the story.

One is through dialogue. There is the ‘As you know Bob’ dialogue where two or more characters tell each other what they already know. Nobody talks that way unless they are being sarcastic. This is not to say you can’t hide the information in dialogue, but it needs to fill an authentic purpose. This brings us to the ‘Dumb Mechanic’ dialogue where one of the people does not know the information, and so it is new to them, and the reader. They need to actually not know for it to work, and it must only be information that they need in the moment.

Teaching and instruction is a form of the dumb mechanic, but needs to be used sparingly. Having an instructor begin the training of a newbie to sword play or other fighting technique is a good way to set up the basic terminology you are going to use later in fight scenes.

Another trick to slip information into dialogue legitimately is when a character needs to report on something to their boss or other person. A report needs to be detailed, and we can tailor it to say exactly what we need.

Authors also use internal thought to push exposition onto the reader. The character sits and thinks exhaustively about the history and customs of their land, only no one really thinks that way. We don’t stop and remind ourselves in orderly fashion of the information around us. What we do it think of the fraction of the knowledge that we need in that moment.

That is the secret of exposition whether it is broader knowledge of the story situation or backstory of the character. Drop it in hints at the moment when it is necessary to the plot. Very rarely is a substantial amount of information needed at a single moment.

When we spot info dumps or exposition in any of these forms, our task is to decide if it is necessary, then check to see that it shows up when it is needed. Odds are it appears naturally in dialogue or action without needing a lot of extra work from us.

One last thing to watch for is the temptation to explain a character’s motivation for an action or speech. Probably it is clear from the context, and it if isn’t, we can put something in to make it clear.

The main thing to keep in mind when it comes to information and inserting it into the story is we need to trust ourselves as authors. The necessary stuff is there. But we also need to trust the reader to get it without us laying it all out for them. Part of the fun of reading is connecting the dots.

Word Issues

Word issues include things like filler words – that, just, only, so, perhaps. They don’t add anything to the meaning of the sentence, but they slow down the story. Often we use the words out of habit, but they may also be a pointer to the need for more emphasis in that sentence. When we see the filler words, before we delete them and move on, we should ask ourselves what there is about that sentence which made us think we needed the extra word?

I use search and replace to replace the word with itself with track changes turned on. That will show us all 1497 times ‘that’ shows up in our novel, giving us the opportunity to reassess 1497 sentences to make them stronger. Use the same technique for other filler words, and we have checked a large portion of our writing.

Every author has a personal list of over-used words and phrases. Software like prowritingaid will highlight the most used words, but also two and three word phrases. These phrases may be habitual, but they are also a chance to reframe parts of our writing to make it stronger.

‘Seemed’ deserves a special mention in the list of over-used words. Most often it is used to hedge a character’s observation. We put it in because the character can’t actually know their friend is angry. The truth is we weaken our story by using it. Trust your character to know how to read the people around them. If they don’t know how to read the people or situation around them, you will want something much stronger than ‘seemed’ to show that.

The one place where ‘seemed’ is needed is when something is counter to reality. The floor seemed safe, but it collapsed under Bob’s weight.

Words which are similar to filler words and can be checked the same way are filter verbs. Filter verbs are verbs like ‘thought/felt/saw/heard’ and so on. They force the experience of the story through the character. Bob saw the car roaring toward him. We are seeing Bob see the car. What you want is ‘The car roared toward Bob.’ It is direct and immediate. In first person, or third person limited, the POV defines who is experiencing the world of the story. We don’t need to remind the reader it is being mediated through the character.

The exception, because there is always exceptions, is when the seeing/hearing etc is the result of a positive action by the character. ‘Bob listened carefully for sounds of movement, only hearing the scuttling of rats in the walls.’ He hears in response to his listening.

Weak nouns and verbs are another challenge. ‘Look’ and ‘walk’ often get adverbs attached to them to make them more effective. Walk briskly, looked angrily – that kind of thing. Once again search and replace is a way of checking, though it won’t pick up all of them. The goal here is to use a stronger verb, after all one can stroll, saunter, amble, stride, jog, or glare, stare, examine, scan etc. The weak verb is the easiest one to think of in the moment of composing the story, but they should be thought of as holding the place of a stronger verb.

One caveat is that we must be aware of the nuances evoked by similar words. A glance is different than a stare. A smirk is different than a smile. If you aren’t sure, check the dictionary meaning before you use it.

Nouns function in much the same way, though often it is about being specific. Hawk is more evocative than bird for example. If you are piling on adjectives, you may want to consider switching the noun for a more specific one.

When it comes to weak verbs, ‘was’ in all its iterations is king. The verb to be is a transitive verb, that is, it identifies one thing as another thing. ‘The leaf is green.’ It becomes a problem when was is used in place of an active verb. Anytime we can replace was with an active verb, we should do that.

‘Was’ also shows up in continual tense, that is ‘He was sitting.’ Continual tense is for when an action is interrupted, or when an action is carried on in the background. If neither of these conditions are met, we probably want the simple form of the verb.

‘Was’ is also part of the passive voice. ‘He was attacked.’ The simplest way of checking if we are writing the passive voice. The simplest test for passive voice is the zombie test. If we can add ‘by zombies’ at the end of the sentence and it makes sense, we are writing in passive voice.

Passive voice is not automatically evil and deserving of eradication, but it is used in limited situations. The first is when the doer of the action is unknown. ‘Bob was thrown down the stairs.’ If we don’t know who threw Bob down the stairs, and it isn’t important to know, passive voice is useful. The other case is when the action is more important that who accomplishes the action. If it doesn’t matter who threw Bob down the stairs, passive voice works.

What passive voice does is remove agency from the subject of the action. Bob has no choice about being thrown down the stairs.

The last place we tend to overuse ‘was’ is description. How often do we have our characters enter a room only to have a paragraph of sentences like ‘The room was large. Tables were covered with knick-knacks and dust. The feeble glow of the fire was hardly enough light to see the body splayed on the carpet.’ This is the character standing in the door and looking around at the room. That may be exactly what the character is doing, but such descriptions have the effect of stopping the action while the reader takes in the new setting. Usually we are better to have the character interact with the room to show what is important in the scene.

‘So many tables crowded the room they left little space for Bob to wind his way to the far end. Each bump sent knick-knacks clinking and clouds of dust into the air to tickle his nose. Stifling a sneeze, Bob knelt on the carpet where the dim light of a dying fire revealed a corpse staring reproachfully up at him.’

Whenever we can make description an active part of the story, we not only put the reader into the setting, we make the setting a part of the plot and it becomes like another character in that moment.

On last word issue – the over prevalence of pronouns.

‘He nailed the door shut. He ran down the hall. He skidded around the corner into the kitchen. He pushed the fridge in front of the kitchen window.’

It is easy in the heat of writing our draft to use a lot of pronouns. It is a quick way of getting the bones of the action into the story. However, we need to go back and take a hard look at any sentence starting with a pronoun. Action scenes are made up of more than a sequence of actions done by the character. A lot of pronouns suggests we’ve pulled away from the POV and are narrating the story. Our goal should be to pull in tighter and write the action, not the character acting.  

‘He nailed the door shut before sprinting down the hall. His feet lost their grip on the floor sending him crashing into the mirror. Glass dug into his skin in the scramble to get into the kitchen and move the fridge to cover the kitchen window.’

Emotion

Emotion is essential to a good story. The ability to evoke strong emotions in the reader can make the difference between the reader turning the page or not. Plot may start the reader, but emotion is what holds them.

The biggest mistake with emotion is to name them. ‘Bob is angry.’ Stating a character’s emotional state will not help the reader experience that emotion. The task then is to read through the story to find the places where we’ve named an emotion and look at how we can show it better. There are lot of resources on writing emotions, but the simple method of writing emotion is to write the effect of the emotion on the character. What happens to their body? How does their posture/expression change?

There is also a danger of using the same action to represent an emotion throughout the story. The reality is we react differently to emotions depending on the context, so anger won’t always cause clenched fists. Sadness won’t always result in tears. Work the context, and be prepared to make the emotional reaction of character ambivalent and complex.

Summary

As the song says, we are supposed to make mistakes. In writing those mistakes become place holders marking the spots our brain thinks need more work. Rather than getting depressed at the sheer volume of mistakes we need to correct, we should view this as an opportunity to assess and strengthen a significant portion of our work.

I have always found that as I am hunting down the repeated words or static descriptions, I find other things to work on. By the time I’ve been through the manuscript the three or four times needed to check all these things, I’ve not just fixed these issues, but areas where the plot is weak, or characters are acting strangely.

Working on these ‘mistakes’ is a gold mine for revision and will make our writing much more powerful.

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Hello, may I present…

Introducing a character to the reader is a bit like introducing that special someone to your parents. The temptation is to tell everything you know about them so the reader will love them as much as you do. 

The problem is that page and the extolling of the character’s looks, virtue, smarts and tough background story has derailed your plot. At the end of it the reader knows lots about the character, but they’ve lost the connection between character and story.

Here’s an example from a book I have in progress:

Frederick groaned as the cobbles dug into his back and looked up into Katerin’s brown eyes. She was not the delicate beauty of the other nobles in Lexburgh, her gown didn’t have nearly as many frills. Perhaps it was due to her, like him, being a scholarship student at her Academy. Katerin had appeared every time Vassily tortured him. He couldn’t guess at her reasoning, she risked her reputation each time she healed him. Yet here she was, again, that crooked smile on her face, as if she herself didn’t quite know why she was bending over him.

What have we learned about the plot of the story? Frederick is lying on the street, we know why since that is the prequel to this introduction. At the end of the introduction we’ve learned nothing new about Frederick. Even Katrin is mostly a sketch. Is she kind? Does she like Frederick?  We don’t know, but expanding on the paragraph to tell the reader how kind she is, and how she doesn’t really like Frederick but is somehow fascinated by him won’t do much more than delay further any revelation of plot.

Here’s what I wrote:

“Why do you let him do that?” Katerin crouched beside Frederick and put her hand on his chest sending warmth through to his battered heart. It beat more regularly and he could breathe normally.

“Why do you keep showing up to help me?” Frederick took Katerin’s offered hand and she pulled him to his feet.

“Let’s say, I’m not a fan of the Harnchev family.” She frowned, her deep brown eyes clouded before she shook her head and let go of his hand. “You need to move if you’re going to keep to your schedule.”

“You know about my schedule?” Frederick’s heart banged in his chest for a different reason.

“How long have I been stopping to help you?” She patted the same cheek Vassily slapped and walked briskly away. Frederick had followed her one time to watch her enter the girl’s version of the Academy on the far side of the huge green space which formed the center of Lexburg. The punishment for missing the first class was severe – ten soft lashes and then he had to run laps of the campus until he collapsed.

Now what have we learned from this introduction? We don’t know she’s on scholarship, but do we need that knowledge yet? Not really. We also get the bit on how she dresses, that may or may not be important to the plot. I’m somewhat infamous with my editors for not describing characters. So maybe the dress could find its way into the revision, but probably not.

The reason for that is I want show her emotional conflict. Note she doesn’t directly answer his question, instead she responds that she doesn’t like Vassily’s family. What we do get is she’s a healer of some kind. Her touch helps his heart and breathing.

She is familiar with Frederick’s schedule even if she doesn’t want to explain why. Perhaps her reason is not one Frederick would like, thus her walking away instead of answering directly.

As a bonus we learn some things about Frederick too. He is attracted to Katerin at some level. He appreciates her help, even as he doesn’t understand it. Katerin fascinates him enough to make him late for school, once.

At the same time we learn the schools are separated by a large green space, and at Frederick’s punishment at least is harsh. 

It could be argued that the bit about him following her is exposition, and I’d agree, but it also fits as immediate reflection by Frederick. He tried to learn more and it resulted in a painful lesson. So I’ll probably keep it in revision, but edit it to reveal more setting without taking anymore space.

The trick is to weave information into the story, make it part of the story. Not only do we meet Katerin, but we find out there is some conflict about what she is doing. I try to use dialogue as part of most of my character introductions. Even in the snippet before this one, Vassily gets lines to say to show us his character. (He’s a jerk.)

Now when I want to show more about Katerin, maybe about her relationship with her Academy, or her classmates, I’ll put her into another scene with more action and dialogue. The reader sees her and a bit more is revealed, but only as it is needed.

The same process works for setting, not that the character talks to the setting, but they can talk about it, or interact with it. Those cobbles under Frederick tell us a lot about Lexburgh. (I have them in a slightly different place in the revision)

Interaction with the setting could include a character shivering in the wind, pulling their collar up to try to stay dry in the rain, him tripping on holes in the road. The smell of horse manure, or the scent of blossoms. The sight of the Academy, the sounds of other students chattering. 

Because these are part of the character’s experience, the reader experiences them too, and the story keeps moving forward.

Now, what happens if we need more information right from the start? We make the scene longer and weave it in. Action, thought, dialogue all can show us what characters are like. Past actions of the character may affect the present moment of the POV character. Perhaps a memory of a mentor brought out by the experience. 

We do need to be careful with the reflection by a character as it can turn into exposition disguised as thought. The litmus test to decide if we are writing reflection or exposition is the emotional weight. The memory means something, it changes the emotional state of the person remembering. 

That brings us to the crux of the matter. If anything we’ve write does not move the story forward, either revealing plot or characters interacting with the plot, we need to cut it or rewrite it. That means a lot more work from us as storytellers, but our reader will thank us.

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Styles and Formatting

Book Template

The link above will download an updated .docx file with paragraph styles I use most often defined. I’ve set them now so the proper style follows automatically so you don’t need to remember to change them. The advantage is you don’t have to wade through the dozens on the list to get what you want. You don’t need to preserve the text. Simply type, select the style and away you go. The article tells you how to customize the styles to suit your book and mood. If you need a style which isn’t on there, say for sub-sections in a chapter, select the styles pane on the far right of the Home Ribbon, then scroll down to find a style you want. Chose modify style and select ‘add to style ribbon’ for ease of access while working.

I’ve also set the margins and headers for what I use for most books going to print, for smaller books you may want slightly smaller margins.

Creating Styles for a template:

Create a paragraph, format it in the way you want, font, size, indent, spacing. Highlight it. Right click on the Style you want to modify, the select “modify from selection”.  Everything in that style will change to reflect your highlighted paragraph.

From this menu, you can control all the formatting for the style. Here’s where you check that your Headings aren’t bulleted lists.

I create the styles and formats I want for the book first, then I write the book in that format, so I don’t have to go back and change it. From here, you can format for both print and e-book, depending on what you do.

You need at least two styles, one for the body of your writing, called ‘body’ ‘default’ or ‘normal’. I like using ‘body’ and rename the modified style to that name. Then I know it’s my format, not the computer’s. If you already have a ‘body’ in your menu, modify from the Selection.

Make sure you don’t have any stray lines on the page which will stay in a different style if you click on them. This is so you don’t find your font etc. changed and you need to go back and fix it.

The other style you must have is ‘Heading 1’ which you will use for chapter headings. In Kindle, the software looks for Heading 1 to create the Table of Contents (TOC) You can have more control creating your own TOC, but we’ll get there if we have time.

Using styles, you can change your entire document from double spaced to single spaced, change the font, font size, margins, indent from one menu.

If you’ve already got the book written. Make a copy of the file, open the copy.

Your writing is probably in ‘body’ ‘normal’ or ‘default’ Clicking on a paragraph will highlight which style you’re in up in that style menu. From there you can format a sample paragraph, and modify the style of everything in that style the same as if you created the styles first.

Beware! Some word processors will overwrite italics or bold with regular text when you change the font. Double check. This is why you work on a copy at all times.

There are some issues we need to look at with already written text.

First is tabs. Ebooks do not work with tabs, so you need to take them all out. First in your ‘View’ Menu click on ‘show non-printing characters’ or ‘show invisibles’ You’ll see your document full of blue arrows and dots etc. The tab is a straight blue arrow pointing right. Highlight it, control ‘c’ to copy, then open the search and replace menu.

That’s the one that says ‘replace’. Advanced find and replace will work, but the extra options can be confusing.  Paste (control ‘v’) the tab into the ‘find’ bar. Leave the ‘replace’ bar empty. Click on ‘Replace All’. This should delete all the tabs from your document. Now you use styles to set the indent.

If you are a double space after period typer. You can do the same thing with the spaces. Select two blue dots, copy and paste into ‘find’ then into ‘replace’ backspace over one dot to delete it. ‘Replace All’ and all your double spaces will be single spaces.

Ebooks don’t play well with too many hard returns in a row. Those are the right angle arrows pointing left. If you’ve double hard returned between paragraphs, you may want to use Search and Replace to fix it.

If you use ellipsis … You’ll want to select an ellipsis, then replace it with an ellipsis you type in the replace bar. This will make sure the software doesn’t split them between lines. Same with n-dashes and m-dashes. N-dash is one hyphen, m-dash is two. Word will ask you which you want when you type so it makes it easier.

Now you’ve done all the formatting scroll through the entire document quickly to look for odd looking paragraphs. Make sure they are given the proper ‘body style’. Put page breaks before each chapter heading if you haven’t already.

Now you’re ready to upload to kindle.

Each site has its own formatting requirements. It is a good idea to look at them.  You will be guided through each step, and will have a chance to check your book before you click the ‘publish’ button.

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Preparing your manuscript for editing

Preparing your Manuscript for Editing Workshop

This the outline I used for a workshop to help prepare writers to make the most effective use out of an editorl

What is editing?

  • Content/Structural Editing
    • Foundational issues: Plot, character, tone, structure, world building
  • Copy/Line Editing
    • Prose, sentences, paragraphs, pacing. Word use and over use.
  • Proofreading
    • Grammar and spelling

 

Foundational Self Edit

  • Using an outline as an editing tool.
    • Lots of people will talk about writing with an outline, but they can be great tools for editing. If you aren’t sure about your structure and arcs, putting the bones down in an outline will help you check things, and balance the space between major points.
  • How technical with story structure do you need to get?
    • There are countless books and blogs dedicated to story structure, KM Weiland’s Helping Writers become Authors is one of the best with lots of examples.
    • If you are an outliner, you’ll want to mark the major points of your plot arc and character arcs so you have that going from the start.
    • Don’t get focused on structure to the detriment of your story. I’ve seen people warp their story trying to make it fit a structure they’ve read about. The story needs to come first. If you work on telling the story well, most of the structure will take care of itself.
  • Are your characters well rounded, heroes with flaws, villains with good sides?
    • Another popular tool for writers is character sheets where we fill out their favourite colour and what they like in their coffee. The problem is once we have that information, we want to include it all. What is important is what makes your characters human. Does your hero make mistakes, get angry, hurt people? Why not? Perfect characters are boring. Ones who struggle internally as well as externally will hold the reader’s attention. The same is true of villains. Too many times the villain is all bad, which makes it easy to cheer for their downfall, but doesn’t add much tension to the narrative. Make your villain a hero with an opposing goal to the MC’s and you have a gripping story.
  • Does everyone have sufficient motivation for their actions?
    • I say everyone, but most important is the villain’s motivation. Why are they opposing the hero? What will they get out of it? I read somewhere there are several classes of villain. The greedy villain, the power-hungry villain, the insane villain, and the scariest, the saintly villain.
    • Knowing the motivation doesn’t mean explaining it, but letting it come out in action and dialogue.

Copy Self Edit

  • Does each scene have its own internal structure?
    • Just as stories have a three act structure, your scenes should begin somewhere, move through some conflict to a resolution.
  • Do fights/love scenes/chases etc have their own plot?
    • Like scenes, these events need their own structure. Also each fight etc needs to increase the stakes leading up to the finale.
  • Does each scene move the story forward?
    • If a scene doesn’t move the plot or character forward. Rewrite it or chuck it.
  • Pacing with paragraph and sentence length.
    • Pacing is important. The length of chapter, paragraph, sentence will either speed up or slow down the story.
  • Beats vs Speech tags
    • Do your dialogues become talking heads? If a reader were to read only the dialogue scene, would they know about the setting, mood, etc?
    • Beats are snippets of description or action or thought which highlight and enhance the words being spoken.

 

Using Search to look for overused words.

  • Control F is one of your best friends. It will help you find out that you’ve used ‘really’ 149 times in your book. Make a list of the most commonly over used words: just, only, that, really, actually, was, were

Using grammar programs

  • There are a number of grammar programs out there, from the grammar checker in Word to Grammarly to Prowritingaid.com They have their place, but like spellcheckers, they don’t replace careful reading. What they can do is point out where you have too many pronoun starts, or consecutive sentences which start with the same word. They will help with the overused words and to a greater or lesser extent with sentence structure and length. All of them have free versions and they are worth trying.

Proofreading

  • Reading out loud.
  • Reading backwards.

Why you still may want to hire an editor.

  • After all this work, why hire an editor?
    • Editors aren’t attached to the story, so they will see things you miss. They may also spot your habits and point them out so you are aware of them.
    • Editors will know story structure and point out where it needs work, and how you might fix the problems
    • Editors are enthralled by darlings.
    • Working with an editor will make you a better writer.

 

How to hire and editor and work with them.

  • Just as there are publishers who are scams, there are editors who will take your money and give little or nothing back.
  • Not every editor is the same. You need to be able to work with this person and trust their advice.
  • Get a test edit, preferably get several editors to do test edits on the same section of work. I prefer the first 5k (which is a huge test edit but I have my reasons). This test edit should be free and no obligation. Read through all the comments and pick the person who is going to grow your story. I’ve had more than one client tell me they picked me because I made them cry. Not that I was mean, but I saw so much more in the story than the people who told them everything was brilliant.
  • Negotiate a schedule and process. If you have deadlines, tell your editor up front.
  • Ask questions, argue. The editor is not always right. This is your book, and in the end, you decide. The editor should be able to adjust their work to fit your vision of the book. You want your book, only refined, not your book the way the editor would write it.
  • Pay for the work. This person is taking hours of their time to work through your book. They deserve to be paid on time and without griping. If they are too expensive, you are better to find someone else than try to talk them down.

 

 

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The Joy of Nuance: The dreaded Thesaurus Rex

A thesaurus can be a writer’s best friend, but like all good friends it can lead us into trouble. When we gleefully substitute synonyms for the word we’re overusing it is essential we pay attention to the nuances of meaning. Let’s look at smile as an example.

Here are some synonyms:  beam, grin, laugh, smirk, simper

In context beam is a broad smile, especially delighted. A child might beam when given a new toy, for example. But if you simply replace smile with beam, you could end up with a something like this:

Mary greeted John with a tight-lipped beam. “You’re late, again.” She spoke in a fake, cheery voice to hide her anger from the kids.

Even if you take out tight-lipped it doesn’t make sense.

Grin is a wide happy smile, and is probably the closest synonym.

The most commonly used synonym is smirk. It is one of my most loathed words because it is used so often and so often wrong. A smirk is a nasty smile. There is an edge of meanness to a smirk. Synonyms of smirk include sneer and leer. A bully smirks when they know they have you trapped. Yet I have seen sentences like this:

Patrick lifted Lucia’s veil and smirked at her. Married life with her was going to be fun.

Ouch, I wouldn’t want to be Lucia.

Simper isn’t a word we use a lot these days, it is a weak, kind of manipulative smile. A debutante might simper at an eligible bachelor.

All this is not to say don’t use synonyms, but use them with the nuance of meanings clear in your mind.

Let’s take another word;  look. Characters are always looking at things, under things, inside of things. We can’t use look all the time. So off to the thesaurus we go, and we hit the jackpot. There are a couple of dozen words we can use in place of look. Most people use three or four of them: glance, notice, stare, and occasionally peek. 

As with the synonyms of smile, there are nuances a writer needs to pay attention to. A glance is a brief thing, a second and it’s done. So, if your hero is checking the street for wandering zombie ninjas, he’ll need more than a glance. He may want to inspect the street, or survey it.

You need more than a sparse handful of synonyms to add punch to your writing. Don’t be afraid to use the Thesaurus, but at the same time consider the shades of meaning in different words. Why write ‘He took a quick look.’ when ‘He glanced’ works as well. If your character stares into the depths of a pool, and she’s been doing  a lot of staring lately, perhaps she contemplates the depths.

One of the things I find myself saying a lot is to trade in your adverbs for stronger verbs. When you are spitting out a first draft the adverbs are easy. She walked elegantly. He walked stiffly. So you end up using walk a hundred times or more in your story.

When you start the editing process, whether you go chapter by chapter or finish the draft and edit the book as a whole. Do a search for ly which will catch most of the adverbs in your story. For each adverb look at some synonyms for the verb it is modifying to find one that will send the same message without the adverb. She swept into the room. He clumped to the barn.

While I’m here in the land of synonyms and verbs, there are a couple of verbs you don’t want to mess with. Said and asked. As we covered in Boring Beats, modifying said and asked may lead to a condition known a Swiftisms. Named after Tom Swift who pranced across the pages many years ago. Tom is mostly remember now for the perhaps intentional humour of his modifiers.

“We must run!” Tom said swiftly. Google it, laugh, then deep six the modifiers you used to make said more interesting.

Now, resist the temptation to have your characters announce, state, scream, retort etc. This is one area where the Thesaurus is going to bite you. There are six pages of synonyms for say. Use them when you are in narrative summary or a character is talking about talking.

“…and so Jerry just announces he is taking charge, but Hank stated I would take over in his absence. Jerry screamed when I wouldn’t do what he ordered. ‘I’ll just call Hank,’ I retorted. That shut him up.”

There is no need to be afraid of the Thesaurus, with proper use and daily exercise it will strengthen your writing, filling it with subtlety and power.

http://www.thesaurus.com/

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Shades of Nuance: Shades of Feeling

Everyone knows feelings are essential to evocative writing. Without emotions there is little reason for the reader to care about what is going on in the story or what happens to the characters.

So we write how our characters are angry, or sad, or furious, or happy or any of another dozen or so standard emotions.

Take a second and try to imagine how many different emotions we humans have.

Give up?

I saw a list of emotions that listed 101 emotions, and it stated explicitly it was not a complete list. There are emotions for which we have no words in English, but other languages do.

So how do we write all this myriad of emotions? Do we dig out the Emotional Thesaurus and expand our emotional vocabulary. This is a great book by the way. It gives you an emotion, then the corresponding physical sensations and body language. This is a good start. Using words like cranky or grumpy, or ecstatic to describe feelings will add depth to your writing. Even more so when you start using the corresponding body language to match the words.

When I was studying to be a therapist, one of the things we were trained to watch for was body language that didn’t match what the client said or expressed as feelings. Clients whose bodies said one thing while their words said another were extra challenging. When you asked questions based on the body language, you tended to be more successful working through the issues at hand.

Imagine what you could do with a character whose body language didn’t match their expressed emotions? Your reader knows something is off, but they don’t know what. It is a great device to create distrust toward an otherwise bland character.

The next step is to get beyond the basic four emotions, mad, sad, glad and scared along with their hundreds of synonyms to feelings which are further off the chart. How do you write humility? Loyalty? Disgust? How do you use an emotion which has no name? We use the physical sensations and body language without identifying the emotion we are trying to portray.

This is where the real nuance starts coming in. Stop and think for another minute and list all the physical sensations you use to show character emotion to the reader.

How many did you come up with?

From my editing these are the favourites:

Sinking or rising heart/stomach

Some form of fire/heat/cold/ice

Shaking legs, hands

Of course the smile/smirk/eyebrow and other facial movements and movements of the head

Various forms of crying/laughing

Blushing/heat in the face

and of course the ever present Sigh

As there are hundreds of emotions, so there are at least as many ways we experience the emotions. We experience them intellectually and mostly write about them intellectually. The problem with writing emotions from the intellect, that is describing them through naming and categories, is the reader will process them the same way.

If we use the standard ways to show emotion, we never get below the surface and more to the point, we don’t pull the reader below the surface either. Moving away from the usual ways of showing emotion makes the reader think about the physical experience and label the emotion for themselves. While they may end up with a different word than we had in mind, they will be pulled into the experience.

I suggest that one start with the usual expressions and gradually shift to more unusual ones as the book progresses. In essence we train the reader to dig deeper into their own emotions to understand the emotions of the characters. They feel every emotion the character does.

Writing deliberately nuanced emotions, physical reactions and body language gives us the opportunity to affect the reader in powerful ways.

A fantastic resource for writing emotion is The emotional thesaurus:

The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide To Character Expression (2nd Edition)

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Break Dancing, or Where to End your Chapter

Some people like long chapters that pull them deep into the world that the author is weaving around the the story. Others like short chapters. To say that all chapters must be long, or that all must be short would be similar to saying that you have write all long sentences or all short ones. Chapters, like paragraphs and sentences come in different lengths and evoke different feelings in the reader. Short chapters, as with paragraphs and sentences, move the story along briskly. Longer ones slow things down and allow time for the feel of the world you are creating to settle in the mind of the reader.

It is up to the author to decide where to break for a new chapter. That decision needs to be based on the needs of the story at that particular moment. It is a trap to simply start a new chapter whenever you start a new day of writing. It will make your story feel unbalanced and unfinished.

So where do you make the chapter break?

There are a few different reasons to end a chapter. The first and probably most over used is the cliff hanger. This is a hold over from the days when books were published a chapter a month in magazines. You needed something to get people to buy the magazine next month to see what happens. Comics still do this. A few cliff hangers are good, but too many just gets tiresome. The best place to put a cliff hanger chapter ending is just before a POV switch to another character involved in different action. A good cliff hanger doesn’t have an obvious or easy solution. It doesn’t have to involve physical danger, but there has to be something at risk.

Which brings me to the next reason for a chapter break. POV switch. I prefer writing entire chapters in the same POV. I don’t like reading stories where there is a lot of head hopping. So when you’re going to switch POV, start a new chapter. This is especially important if you are also changing the site of the action. An exception to the POV chapter break is if the characters are involved in the same action at the same location and you have a very good reason for switch POV. There is a discipline to staying with one POV for an extended time, but it will help you develop at a writer when you need to work out how to let your character learn what they need to learn to show the reader.

Natural breaks in the action are another good way to end a chapter. Everybody goes to bed. Instead of wasting time describing your characters sleeping. You end the chapter and start the next chapter with the characters awake and once more involved in meaningful action. Another form of this natural break is where you want to make a shift from quick action to more reflective thought. A major battle has been won (or lost) and your MC want to mourn the foolishness of war. A chapter break will signal and highlight the change in mood. That will allow you to follow the character into less ardous tasks and provide some contrast. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a variety of moods in one chapter. Let your story decide.

The last chapter break is a minor conclusion. Plot lines don’t go up evenly to the climax. Rather they should look a little like the graph on a seismograph. When your story has reached a point where a smaller obstacle has been resolved it may be a place to break. Just make sure that it doesn’t feel like the action is done. The above example is also an example of a minor conclusion. The characters get to live another day, but there is still the unfinished task hanging over their heads.

Knowing where to put chapter breaks is similar to knowing whether to write long or short sentences. It is about emphasizing parts of your plot and staying in control of pacing in your story. It is a skill that will mark you as an accomplished author. It is like dancing with your story. You need to feel the rhythm, but still stay in control.

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How to add words without bloating.

So you have a killer story and want to send it to a publisher who you know will love it. Only they insist submissions be a few thousand words more than what you have in your book.

Here are some ways of adding in words without making your story feel like it’s been padded.

The order you apply them depends on how you write, but this is the order I use.

Go through the book scene by scene. Have you placed the reader into the scene through description? Do they interact with their surroundings? Shifting from simple description to the characters walking through touching, smelling etc will add words. The advantage of interaction is the setting becomes part of the plot, instead of stopping the action while we look around.

Again looking at your scenes. Do you have your balance of narrative summary and showing right? Showing is using action, dialogue, internal thought to create a scene. Narrative summary is talking about the scene. Showing takes more words, so converting a few key scenes from narrative to showing will add words and depth. The trick is to pick scenes which will deepen your characters and plot, so don’t expand scenes which are repetitive or don’t have any weight in the plot.

Now, dialogue. If you’re like me, you get typing those words so fast you forget to add speech tags-that is ‘he said’ etc. I once added a thousand words just with speech tags. Then I took them all out again and used beats. Beats are lovely sentences which show expression, emotion, setting, action and more. In one review of an early book of mine, they made the comment that my dialogue became talking heads a couple of times. Beats will prevent talking heads from overtaking your book.

While we’re on the subject of beats and emotion, work your emotions on several levels. The first level is the words the character says. Next are the things the character thinks. Deeper yet are the physical sensations of the emotion.

Say you have a character who is sad. Having them say ‘I’m sad’ works in some contexts, but it doesn’t connect us to their feeling. You could have them say. ‘I’m fine.’ but think I wish someone understood me. This difference between thought and speech sets up a dynamic tension. Take it even further by giving the reader the physical sensations.

“I’m fine”  I wish someone understood me. John’s stomach sent a stab through his body, but he’d perfected his ability to hide all pain from the world.

If you need more than a few thousand words, you’ll need more than these tricks. At this point you’re looking at developing minor characters and side plots and maybe adding more twists to the plot, but that is a subject for another day.