Editing Reality Check

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When writers have spent such a long time at writing, crafting their stories, many will happily turn their attention to editing. However, it saddens me to realize that many writers don't fully understand what editing actually entails.

In a post earlier this year, I spoke about the who, what and when of editing. In that article, I mentioned that editing falls into four main categories: critique, developmental, line and copy-edit. Each stage is important for a manuscript's development but for different reasons. Unfortunately, the number of writers that seem to miss the critique and developmental editing phases, going straight to line editing, is surprising.

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The Value of a Synopsis

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When one completes a manuscript, it’s vindication that you can do this. Then the hard work begins. I’m not going to kid you: querying for agents and publishers is a hard road, one that many turn away from.

Writing the manuscript is hard. Editing it into something worth reading is harder. Writing a query letter is harder still. And the synopsis is a nightmare. Let’s face it: compressing a full-length novel into one page is a frightening task. Not all agents want a synopsis, but most publishers do. So if you are fortunate enough to snag an agent without needing to write a synopsis, you will eventually need to write one.

During my preparation of my own submission materials, I struggled to bring my synopsis to under one page, like so many other writers, but I did it. Working out where to send queries is a different problem, and not one I’m going to address for this post. However, I have noticed that submission packets have a huge variation in requirements.Read More→

Trick from the Editor’s Hat: The “Was” Edit

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When editing a manuscript, one should always be looking at ways to tighten the writing and language used. There are many tricks that one can employ. Here is one that I often pull out of my hat when editing.

The "Was" Edit

This editing technique is incredibly simple: search for every instance of is/are/was/were and ask yourself if can you reword that sentence to removed that instance of was-type words.

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Trick from the Editor’s Hat: Read Aloud

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You're staring at a manuscript that you have spent countless hours, days, weeks, preparing for publication or submission. It's as stellar as you can make it. Or is it?

Here is just one of the tricks that I occasionally pull out of my hat when editing. This technique is the best method of making dialogue sound natural and will pick up the awkward sentences faster than any other method. There are times when I use this technique while writing too. It is one of the best tricks one can have stashed under their hat.

Read Aloud

You can read a line over and over again, but you still don't see the mistake. It's something incredibly simple, like a missing "the", but you still don't see it. Our eyes filter what our minds see. The eyes make the corrections needed and hence our brains don't register anything different. However, when we read something out, vocalize the line, our brains work differently. And guess what... That missing "the" becomes obvious.

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Give me the Em-Dash

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Many writers encounter special characters within writing and either don't know how to use them or how to get their word processor system to render them properly. Yes, you can go "insert character", however, for characters such as an ellipse and em-dashes, most word processors auto-replace.

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Billy said… Diana said…

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When I critique and edit writing, there is one common flaw that comes through time and time again. Sometimes, it's subtle and easily overlooked. But then there are times when it hits you in the face.

I'm talking about he said — she said.

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Trick from the Editor’s Hat: The Backwards Edit

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You're staring at a manuscript that you have spent countless hours, days, weeks, preparing for publication or submission. It's as stellar as you can make it. Or is it?

Here is just one of the tricks that I occasionally pull out of my hat when editing. It can be slow going, but it can help you isolate those awkward, sticky sentences and eliminate those beasts.

The Backwards Edit

During a backwards edit, you read a manuscript from the last sentence backwards to the first. When you do this, you're unable to focus on the story; sentences lose their contextual meaning. As a consequence you focus entirely on the words.

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Fiction is NOT a Genre…

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Recently, I was skimming through a fellow editor's website (who shall remain nameless) and encountered a page where people were listing the titles of their manuscripts and their respective genres. OMG, the number of people that listed their genre as FICTION...

People, FICTION is NOT a genre. It tells us nothing about your story, except for the fact that it's made up. And it's not good enough to tell us the you write Young Adult or Middle-Grade either. All this tells us is who your target audience is.  Let's face it, a science fiction story is very different to a western. (However, you could have a Western SciFi — Firefly is the perfect example of this sub-genre.) A Young Adult SciFi and a Middle-Grade SciFi, on the other hand, will contain similar elements, all related to the SciFi genre.

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US or UK?

To UK English or US English? Or to some other flavor of the beast?

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Those who live outside of the USA are very familiar with the concept that there are multiple different dictionaries used for English, all depending on what version of English you are using. You heard that right, folks. There is another way to spell those favourite words.

And that was one right there: favourite. That's how those using UK English spell it. Yanks spell it without the 'u': favorite.

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Young Adult: A Category or a Genre?

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Whenever someone tells me they write young adult, my first response is always, "That's nice. So what genre do you write?" More often than not, I get a blank stare in response. The look in their eyes says it all.

"I just told you. I write young adult."

At this point, I normally chuckle. "So you write fantasy." I tend to make this conclusion because most of those I meet who have made this young adult classification mistake do write fantasy of some flavour or another.

However, sometimes I'll get that affronted look. "No. I write young adult." To this, I bow my head in shame.

The confusion between genre and category is something that plagues every new writer. We're told that we have to categorise this piece of work that we have spent months, if not years, working on, but we don't want to fit into a box — we want to be in a circle. So… the question is, what does young adult really mean?

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