self-editing

Don't Give Readers a Reason to Reject Your Novel

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This post by Jodie Renner originally appeared on her Resources For Writers blog on 3/8/14.

Have your trusted friends or beta readers told you your WIP (work in progress) novel is too long, confusing, or just doesn’t grab them? Here are some typical “big-picture” weaknesses to watch out for in your fiction and correct before publishing it or pitching it to an agent. These types of glaring gaffes in writing, pacing, plot, or structure will bog down your story and invite bad reviews, which could sink your reputation as a novelist. Fortunately, they can all be remedied at the revision and self-editing stages.

~ Overwriting. Not enough self-editing.
Today’s bestselling novels are mostly between 70,000 and 90,000 words long. Unless you’re an absolutely brilliant writer, and experts in the business have told you so, if your manuscript is over 95,000 words long, it definitely needs tightening up. Cut way back on explanations and descriptions, and trim down long, convoluted sentences to their essence. Make every word count.

~ Meandering writing – the main story question / problem is fuzzy or buried.
What’s the protagonist’s main goal and fear, and his main problem? This should be obvious early on and be the overriding driving force behind your whole story. Don’t let it get lost in meandering writing, too much backstory, frequent info dumps, too many characters, too many subplots, and unrelated plot details.

~ One unrelated thing after another happens.

 

Click here to read the full post on Resources For Writers.

 

New Non-Scientific Information About Not Good Enough Syndrome

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This post by Andrew E. Kaufman originally appeared on The Crime Fiction Collective blog on 4/16/14.

I’m reaching a point in my current manuscript where I feel as though I’m starting to get a handle on things.

Well, that’s a relative term.

One never truly has a handle on things when one suffers from what is known as Not Good Enough Syndrome. You may have heard of this affliction. It’s non-specific, widely undocumented, and for the most part, difficult to diagnose.

Symptoms may include:

• Self doubt

• Self-loathing

• Second-guessing everything.

• Not liking anything.

• Lack of inspiration, ideas, or sanity.

• Isolated episodes of global panic (with intermittent aspirations of world-building).

• Private, self-contained tantrums, which can range in severity.

And there are subcategories, and of course, I have a few of those as well. Currently I’m in the throes of, There Aren’t Enough Damned Twists in this Book! (Yes! There is an actual exclamation point at the end! A demarcation of severity!)

 

Click here to read the full post on The Crime Fiction Collective blog.

The Writer As Editor

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This post by Karen Ball originally appeared on the Steve Laube Agency blog on 1/30/13.

As we saw in my post last week, there are any number of ways a manuscript can go wrong. Hard enough to write a novel, but then to have to dig in and edit it yourself? That’s especially tough. So here are some tips to help you be the best editor you can be.

Don’t let the editor out to play too soon

Writing and editing are very different functions for the brain. Writing is a creative process; editing, logical and detail-oriented. When writing, we need to let ourselves forget the rules and coax the story to life. When editing, we must embrace the rules as a solid foundation to help us strengthen what’s landed on the page. I’ve seen so many writers almost drive themselves crazy by trying to edit as they write, which ends up making them second-guess everything. And freezes the story in its tracks.

Puts me in mind of one of my favorite pens (pictured below). It’s a two-tip pen—black ink at one end, red at the other. The body of the pen is made of two colors of wood, one with black tones, one with red. One end for writing, the other for editing. The pen works great—so long as I only use one end at a time! Trying to edit and write at the same time would be like grabbing the pen at both ends: totally ineffectual.

If you’re the kind of writer who can edit as you write, kudos. But for the rest of us, let’s give ourselves a break. Don’t do that. Rather, just WRITE. Keep the editor safely closed away until the writing is done.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Steve Laube Agency blog.

 

Oh Dear. This Is AWFUL.

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This post by Greta van der Rol originally appeared on her site on 5/3/14.

Like every other writer, I have a vault where I keep stories I’ve written that have never seen the light of day. Or maybe shouldn’t have seen the light of day. I recently blew the dust off a manuscript (koff koff), thinking this was one I could do something with. It was fan fiction and not half bad, as I recalled. Okay, way back when I wrote it I thought it was crash hot. Which is pretty good. I figured I could change a few names, tweak here and there, and maybe end up with a salable story. It would be fun.

So I opened up the doc and started to read.

And folks, it was AWFUL. Newbie writing 101 FAIL.

So… what was awful about it? Oh dear. Let me count the ways…

Look, when you’re critiquing, you’re suppose to find the good points first, so let’s get that out of the way. The plot was reasonable for what it was. Princess wants to avoid an arranged marriage so has a few adventures crossing the galaxy to a relo’s house, expecting to be safe. There, she meets a dishy alien admiral who was her dead husband’s CO. Sparks fly. He keeps her safe. The end. The spelling was spot on and the grammar obeyed the rules.

BUT

Point of view

What possessed me to think we needed her father’s POV? It’s easy enough to establish he’s a conniving prick from her POV. And why do we need the little cameos between daddy and the jilted suitor? We’ll find out the baddies are chasing her soon enough. (In her defence, the writer probably thought she needed to warn the reader that Mary wasn’t safe, and that it wasn’t daddy’s men chasing her, it was the other dude’s. To which this critiquer replies, ‘so what’?)

 

Click here to read the full post on Greta van der Rol’s site.

 

How to Know When You are Boring Your Reader to Tears

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This post by Jean Oram originally appeared on her The Helpful Writer site on 3/11/14.

Ever wondered why your books maybe aren’t getting purchased? Finding an agent to rep them? Or just plain and simply catching on?

There are a ton of reasons why books don’t connect. Timing, luck, voice, content, etc. Some of these aren’t controllable. But one thing is.

Boring your reader to tears, death, or worse…having them put your book down in disinterest.

It happens. We can’t connect with every reader. And if we try, well, chances are we’ll end up with a book that connects with even fewer people. (Not everyone liked Harry Potter, believe it or not. They just stay in hiding.) But there ARE things we can do to increase our chances of connecting with our readers and one of the big things is not boring them.

I know, right?

 

How to Know if You are Boring Your Readers and What to Do About It

The easiest way to figure out if you are boring your readers is to see if you are boring yourself.

Seems too basic, doesn’t it?

Right now there could be some of you thinking, “But there isn’t a stitch of boringness in my whole story!” Could be true. Maybe you wrote The Hunger Games. If so, you’re excused. However, the other several billion of us did not. So, dig deep and fall out of love with yourself for a moment (shouldn’t be too hard–we are artists, after all where self-doubt and loathing is as common as cheap bar soap).

Here are a few inklings that things aren’t as tight and as exciting as you might wish them to be in your story and you might be boring your reader.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Helpful Writer.

 

Hemingway Takes The Hemingway Test

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This article by Ian Crouch originally appeared on The New Yorker on 2/13/14.

Creators of the Hemingway App Explain Their Rules for Writing

This week, in the Times, Charles McGrath wrote about a newly digitized collection of ephemera from Ernest Hemingway’s Cuban estate, Finca Vigía, which confirms that the famously terse writer was, as McGrath says, “a hoarder.” Ticket stubs, telegrams, Christmas cards, diary entries—all of it amassed in the twenty-plus years that Hemingway kept his house there. Amid the collection, McGrath identifies two notes that Hemingway had seemingly written to himself, in pencil. One reads: “You can phrase things clearer and better.” And the other: “You can remove words which are unnecessary and tighten up your prose.”

The above paragraph scored an “O.K.” in Hemingway, an app, created by the brothers Adam and Ben Long, which analyzes text and, as it promises, “makes your writing bold and clear.” The program highlights overly complicated words and suggests alternatives (my “all of it” could have simply been “all”). It also calls out adverbs (“newly,” “famously, “”seemingly”), difficult-to-read sentences (the first being “very” hard to read, while the second was just hard), and instances of the passive voice.

 

Click here to read the full article on The New Yorker.

 

Ask Questions to Find Your Story

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This post by C.S. Lakin originally appeared as a guest post on the blog of Elizabeth Spann Craig on 2/17/14.

I ask a lot of questions in my line of work as a professional manuscript critiquer and copyeditor. Sure, I also give a lot of suggestions and fix badly constructed sentences. But it’s the questions that get to the heart of the story. Asking authors questions helps them get thinking about what they’re writing and why.

So much important information seems to be missing in so many novels—especially first novels by aspiring authors. Novel writing is tricky; there are countless essential components that all need to mesh cohesively. To me, the key to reaching that goal is to ask a lot of questions.

 

Questions Create Story

Starting a novel is asking a question. What if . . .? What would someone do if . . .? What if the world was like this and this happened . . .? Then those initial questions lead to more questions, which shape and bring life to characters and story. Questions are the key.

Thousands of hours of critiquing and editing has led me to notice that there are some questions I seem to ask a lot. Which tells me there are some general gaps that many writers have in common in their novel-constructing process. I thought I’d share these questions, because maybe they’ll help you as you work on your novel.

 

Click here to read the full post on Elizabeth Spann Craig’s blog.

 

How to Write a Killer Scene

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This post by Jean Oram originally appeared on The Helpful Writer on 1/30/13.

I’m going to give you a secret on to how to write a killer scene. Are you ready for a very easy and very effective scene writing tip?

 

Come in Late, Leave Early

Wait… what?

Jean, what does “come in late, leave early” mean? And what does that have to do with writing a killer scene?

Let me explain.

 

Come in Late

When writing a good scene, you want to come in late. In other words, once the action is underway. There always has to be some movement or the reader gets bored. For example, I just cut a scene last week where I was not coming in late by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, my character was sitting with her grandmother DISCUSSING what action she should take and her gran suggested some ideas.

Borrrr-ring.

So I came in late. I scratched that scene and opened the next scene of Champagne and Lemon Drops with Beth already taking the action.

The benefit? The reader has to play catch up. Not so much that they feel as though they missed something huge and give up, but enough that they are curious. What is Beth doing? What is her plan? Who is she going to see? They know there is action because they are in it. And not having it all laid out beforehand I’ve created a hook that draws them in.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Helpful Writer.

 

Audio Proofing Word Files On Kindle

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This post, by Morris Rosenthal, originally appeared on his Foner Books site on 10/29/13.

Today I caught myself, with the shaving cream prepared for action on my hand, running my toothbrush under the hot water. I took it for my razor. So it’s not surprising that I have trouble proofreading my own writing, as my blog entries frequently testify. Believe me, I go through them several times before posting, you’re seeing the cleaned up versions:-)

One proofreading trick I discovered a couple years ago is to send Word files to an eInk Kindle and to read them there in large print. For some reason, this has more of a “published” feel to me than laser printed proofs, and the look of a published book is the only thing that recalls my proofing ability to the old days, when I never made it through a trade book without spotting errors.

Last week, as I was finishing up a guide to borrowing audiobooks from public libraries for Kindle and Fire, a little light bulb went off in my head. Audio? Proofing? I fired up my Kindle 2 (on which it’s possible to listen to library audiobooks though you have to download them to a PC first and transfer by USB) and used Send To Kindle to send over the draft I was working on. Then I used that funny synthesized voice that has been available on Kindle eInk since the beginning, and lo and behold, I picked up on a couple more errors I had missed through repeated readings.

 

Click here to read the rest of the how-to on Foner Books.

 

6 Keys to Revising Your Fiction

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This post, by Chuck Sambuchino, originally appeared on his Writer’s Guide to Literary Agents blog on the Writer’s Digest site on 9/20/13.

1) Make sure you’re in love.

I’m not a genius, my stories are not born lovely and perfect, their language strong, their plot lean and exciting. I have to work at it—a lot. And I don’t mind, because I enjoy editing. But I know there’s a big difference between revising a story I love and revising one I’m just fond of.

Perhaps this is obvious but to me the most important factor in ensuring successful revising is to be working on a piece that has legs or emotional resonance for you. If not, you’ll probably give up long before it’s in the best shape possible.

So what’s the key to knowing if it’s love or just infatuation? I once listed all of the stories, screenplays and plays I’d written—over 30—and looked at the themes, characters and plot, and I was able to see certain patterns. Not surprisingly, whenever I loved a story and its themes and characters, I ended up revising it enough that it was perfect—or as perfect as I could make it. And that story usually resonated with others.

 

2) Start from the beginning but don’t get stuck there.

We all know the first pages of a story or novel are critical, have to be sharp, enticing, fresh—generally amazing. These are the pages when a reader (agent, editor or final reader if you get that far) says either “Yes! I’m in” or the dreaded, “Ah, maybe not.”

Because the stakes are so high it can be tempting to stay on those first pages to the point of forgetting about the rest of the piece. Revising can become a sort of trap in which you start to judge the material so much that you never finish. It’s important to know when to move on so that you can get to the end and have a completed piece to revise.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Writer’s Digest.