Motivational Monday: Shoveling Sand

Sunday Funnies: Is It Though?

[Link] A 5-Minute Fix for a Blah Scene

by Janice Hardy

Sometimes the best fix isn’t changing what characters say—it’s changing where they say it.

This might be sacrilegious as a science fiction and fantasy writer, but I dislike writing description—especially settings. I’m more of a dialogue and action gal, and my first drafts (okay, sometimes second drafts as well), have a lot of “white room” scenes, where nothing about the setting is mentioned. This was a big problem in my early writing days, since SFF readers enjoy the world building and setting and all the things I had to slog through to write.

I got feedback such as:

• I can’t picture the setting
• Where is this happening? Could they interact more with the room?
• I feel unanchored, and there’s no sense of place

All of it was justified, and after a lot of reading, learning, and forcing myself to just do it, I found a way to enjoy writing setting descriptors.

I stopped thinking of setting as decoration and started using it as a storytelling tool.

Setting works best when it does something—not when it just sits there.

A vivid location can add atmosphere, but an active setting can add pressure to a ticking clock, reveal emotion a character is struggling with, and shape the choices that character makes. It becomes part of the story, not just where the story takes place.

Read the full article: http://blog.janicehardy.com/2020/08/a-5-minute-fix-for-blah-scene.html

[Link] Editing for Self-Published Authors: Types of Edits and How to Find the Right Editor

by A.C. Williams

Your manuscript is written. You’ve celebrated. You’ve done your research and prepared for every potential scenario, and now it’s time to start working on the finished product. Right? 

Wrong. There is more to producing a competitive quality novel than just writing it and making sure it has a good cover and that you know where it’s being distributed. There’s a very important step that you would be remiss as an author to overlook: Editing. 

So far in this series on self-publishing, we’ve talked about setting your goals, understanding your legal rights as a self-published author, ISBNs, distribution channels, market research, and book cover design. But before any of that happens, you really must have some kind of edit. 

Editing has many variations, and you might need one variation more than another. But no matter which kind of edit you opt for, you really need another pair of eyes on what you have written. When you have lived and breathed your story for a long time, you become blind to its shortcomings. You can’t see the problems. You might recognize that it isn’t perfect, but you can’t see how to fix it. That’s why you need an editor. 

However, there are some caveats to consider before you hire out this important element of producing a book. 

Here are some questions to ask before you get started with an editor. 

1. Does this editor understand my genre? 

While many editors have experience in editing multiple genres, not all of them do. Some editors have specialties. It’s not a good idea to give your historical romance manuscript to an editor who specializes in suspense/thriller editor. Additionally, if you write science fiction or fantasy, giving your manuscript to someone who only edits contemporary romance won’t end well. Those genres all contain specific elements that are unique to their genre, and an editor who doesn’t understand those genres won’t know to look for them.

Read the full article: https://thewriteconversation.blogspot.com/2025/09/editing-for-self-published-authors.html

[Link] How to Revise Your Novel Like a Pro (Without Losing Your Mind) With Alice Sudlow

by Savannah Gilbo

You've finally done it. After months of wrestling with character arcs, plot holes, and that stubborn middle section that refused to cooperate, you've typed those magical words: "The End." Your first draft is complete, sitting there on your computer like a 100,000-word monument to your persistence.

But now what?

If you're like most writers, you probably opened that document the very next day and started fixing sentences. Maybe you rewrote Chapter One for the fifteenth time. Perhaps you got lost tweaking dialogue tags and obsessing over whether you used "said" too many times. And three months later, you're still stuck in the same five chapters, polishing the same scenes over and over while the rest of your manuscript gathers digital dust.

This is exactly what I talked about with Alice Sudlow, a developmental editor and book coach, on the Fiction Writing Made Easy podcast. Alice and I have been in the editing world for nearly ten years, and we've both observed this pattern repeatedly. The problem isn't your writing ability. It's that nobody taught you how to edit a novel.

The Manuscript Editing Mistake That Keeps Writers Stuck Forever

Most writers approach editing like they approached writing their first draft: they start on page one and work their way through. It seems logical, right? After all, that's how you wrote the book in the first place.

But as Alice explained in our conversation, editing a book is a completely different beast from writing a book. It requires a different process, different tools, and most importantly, a different mindset.

Read the full article: https://www.savannahgilbo.com/blog/novel-revision-strategy-with-alice-sudlow

The Editing Onion

Editing isn't a one-stop shop.

Editing. It's the dirty word of writing. For most, it's the part where the fun and creativity goes to sleep or drives off into the sunset, leaving you with a boring, tedious, time-consuming, and oh-so-not-at-all-fun WORK of finding out just had poorly you can spell and how much you use weak verbs and too many adverbs and why you should just chuck your Creative Writing MFA and go sell... Sorry. Got a little lost in the weeds there. 

But it doesn't have to be. 

Maybe it will never be fun exactly, but it doesn't have to totally suck either. 

And the best thing is that the more you learn to do it effectively, the better you tend to be at it. 

But, at its heart, what is it exactly?

Not That Kind of Onion

No need to cry about it, editing has layers, just like an onion. (I never said my puns were actually funny. Sorry.) Still, just like our sweet Vidalia metaphor, editing gets more specific and more useful the deeper you dig into it. 

When lots of folks think about editing, they are thinking of just one thing. That one thing might be proofreading. It might be copyediting. It might even be concept editing. Some folks might mentally jump straight to story editing. But each one of these isn't just a 'one thing.' They're all just a part of something bigger--the process of editing.

For me, rather than breaking it into categories like those, I prefer to think about the pieces of the story we're editing, hence my onion metaphor. 

Layer 1: Words

The atom of your story (yes, it's a new metaphor, just stay with me) is the individual word. It's the basic building block of your sentences, your paragraphs, your chapters, and your stories. It's the tree that makes the forest possible. And unlike that cliche, sometimes we writers can't see the trees for the forest. We're so busy noticing the sprawling majesty of the story that we can't or don't notice the individual words that created it. 

Sunday Funnies: Headaches

Sunday Funnies: 75 Times

Sunday Funnies: Those Tenacious Typos

Motivational Monday: The Vision, Not the Words

 

Self-Editing Tips and Tricks

For this week's writer roundtable, let's talk about self-editing tips and tricks. What are the ones you use to help you catch as many errors and edits as possible? 

Sean Taylor: For me, I use several depending on the story. 

1. Shuffle the pages and read them out of order. That takes my brain away from the story and focuses on paragraphs instead. 

2. For stories shorter than 5000 words, read them backward to catch spelling and comparably spelled words (or and of, it and is, to and too, for example). 

3. Read aloud. Hearing it will often register better than seeing it. 

4. Have an app read it to you (this is great for those times at night I can't sleep and just lie in bed). 

5. See multiple pages at once on a printout. This forces me to look at pages in context of each other. 

Brian K Morris: Me, I use the text-to-speech part of MS Word to read the story back to me to catch misspellings that aren't (from/form or Brian/Brain). after I've visually edited the piece as best I can.

My twist is I use the AI voice that's WRONG for the story. For instance, if I write crime adventure, I find a voice like a little girl to read it back. If I'm putting together a story with some romance in it, I find the deepest baritone I can find. This way, I don't get lulled because someone's reading to me like my mom did when I was a kid.

Matt LaRock: In my head, I read it in different accents. Sometimes it shows me phrases and sentences that don't really work. And it adds a sense of humor so I don't take it too seriously.

Danielle Procter Piper: I let the story sit for a month, then review it with fresh eyes. Then it sits for another full month before I comb through it again.

Jim Ritchey: Bono taught me No.3, of all people, or got the wheels turning. Concentrate on the sound of the words. How they fit together. Started noticing it in all my favorite writers. Steinbeck was musical.

John Pence: Reading out loud is great neuroscience. You have to process it on so many levels: symbols to letters to words, motor-speech, spoken language, heard language, grammar, and memory …

That’s the shit, but I don’t always do it.

Time away is always good, too.

Robert Krog: Reread it. Read it out loud. Read it backward. Wait a couple of weeks before rereading by one of these methods. Of course, all of these take the time I don’t usually have, but they all help to catch typos and such and are worth it. Just rereading aloud is good, but I actually have read stories backward a time or two. Another option is having someone else read the story to me. I find that works quite well. I don’t usually have a reader available though.

 David Wright: I definitely take my time in walking away from a work and returning to it with fresh eyes. I do that multiple times. I also have four beta readers I rely on to not only catch errors but challenge me on decisions. You gotta have at least one person in your corner that is going to put the quality of your finished work above your feelings. And never, ever let a misspelled word go. If you're ever re-reading something and you see an error, correct it right away because you may not ever catch it again. Typos drive me nuts. Also, if a certain passage or phrasing just doesn't quite do it for you, but you can't think of a better solution, don't let it slide. Dig in and challenge yourself.

Mike Bullock: I have this weird thing of "putting it to bed" wherein I hand it off to my editor and the moment I've done so it gives me fresh eyes. Then I re-read and catch things before the editor reads it over. Something about "finalizing" it that gives me a new perspective. Not sure why... 

Before I get to that point, however, I will re-read following certain sub-plots or character arcs only. For example, When I wrote the Phantom: Checkmate story, I re-read it solely from Phantom's POV, then Diana's, then HIM's. This gives me an altered perspective and helps ensure each character arc and/or subplot works, and I catch typos, etc. in the process I may not have caught otherwise.

Elizabeth Donald: Print it out on paper and read it aloud as you edit with a red pen in hand. Your eye will catch things you’ll never see scrolling on the screen, and your ear will hear the language and the ways it doesn’t quite fit. I have used this procedure for all my own edits, and counsel-urge-beg-plead my students to do the same with their essays. I can always tell the ones who actually try it vs. the ones who run spellcheck and say, “Eh, good enough.”

Ernest Russell: I like to let it sit for a few days. Work on something else during that time.

Then I'll pick it back up and run it through Grammarly. It is a useful tool that can point missing words, duplicates, double words, etc. It is a good tool, but I never use any automated program carte blanche. You can end up with some really weird wordings and punctuation. On the other hand. you have to look at every line, both as part of the story and individually.

Sometimes, I will use Autocrit; it is great at word counts. It lets you find homonyms. Have many times did you use a particular word. Did you really intend to use the word "that" 586 times?

Again, a very useful tool, but a tool.

Printing the draft double-space. Read through it making notes.

When I feel satisfied. My partner, who once worked as a copyeditor for a newspaper, looks it over and tells me everything I missed. 😀

Mark Barnard: Reading aloud helps immensely.

Ron Fortier: Read aloud what I just wrote. Hearing mistakes works.

John M. Olsen: I have a hit list of things I've overused in the past. I have my computer read it aloud to me. I run a few reports in ProWritingAid. I run multiple spell checkers. I run a tool I wrote that graphs the emotional flow to make sure I have the right highs and lows.

Teel James Glenn: I read things out of sequence to not get caught up in the story. I always read my work out loud as I write it so I've done 'that stage'...

Dale Kesterson: I have been known to read segments aloud to some victi--er, friends who are patient enough to listen. I tend to pay more attention to it that way than reading it aloud to myself.

Read it from back to front. That way I focus of the words, not the narrative.

Alan J. Porter: Reading it out aloud is a great way of catching story and pacing problems.

Mark Vander Zanden: Reading aloud and having the computer read it to me are two of my steps. I also use Autocrit as well and that helps me find some of the weak spots in my writing. I take the number rating with a grain of salt but a few of the reports it runs do come in handy. I will have to try the shuffle approach as well.

Bill Craig: I run mine through several layers of PerfectIt editing program

Austin S. Camacho: Reading aloud is a must. and know your personal weaknesses. I do a search for the word "that" because it's seldom really needed, and search for "ly" to clear out adverbs that are clearly and truly unnecessary. 😉 [OR clear out unnecessary adverbs.]

John French: I also read the story aloud. Plus I run it through Grammarly. I don't always agree with its suggestions but I wind up looking at things I otherwise would not have thought about.

Danielle Palli: I have two tricks I use: 1) Everything goes through Grammarly to catch errors my brain auto-fixes. 2) I re-read out loud. Speaking is slower than thinking, so I catch more. 

Stuart Hopen: I use checklists, borrowing from my days as a Hospital Risk Manager, imitating the routines of the Operating Room to prevent mistakes. My lists include things like: Do the sentences vary in length and structure? Do the characters make decisions for understandable reasons? Do events unfold as an understandable consequence of character decisions? Are scenes structured around specific character goals? Does the pace contain variations of emotional intensity, humor, peaks, lulls, and resolution? And the like. The checklists vary depending on the project, and they are tailored to alert me to things I know are my weaknesses. At the bottom of the checklist is a reminder -- stop editing and rewriting, or you will never be done. Good is the enemy of Great, but Perfect is the enemy of finishing.

Motivational Monday -- The Writer, The Inner Critic, & The Slacker [Link]

by Alexander Weinstein

One of the greatest fears that writers share is a worry that the writing won’t be good enough. We fear our poems and stories will be boring and we’re not meant to be writers because our work, to put it simply, will suck. To help overcome this fear, I suggest we think of our writing selves as three distinct roommates who share an apartment—The Writer, The Inner Critic, and The Slacker. Unfortunately, these roommates don’t get along. The Writer hates The Inner Critic. The Inner Critic wages a quiet battle against The Writer. And The Slacker annoys both by watching TV too loudly and sleeping all day. To solve the problem it’s best to separate the three personalities so we might learn the benefits that each can bring to our writing home.

Read the full article: https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/the-writer-the-inner-critic-the-slacker

[Link] Editing for Frugal Self-Publishers

by Val Breit

Who doesn’t want to save a bit of money when they self-publish a book? Today’s guest post by Val Breit offers many cost-saving tips and resources for authors editing their books before sending them to a professional editor. If you’re not ready to have your book edited, you may want to bookmark this post and come back to it later. Enjoy!

You want to write (and sell) an amazing book, but you don’t want to spend a ton of money doing it. If you aren’t careful, the costs of self-publishing a book could run your bank account dry.

In fact, the average cost of self-publishing a book can be between a couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand dollars.

And one of the most expensive parts of publishing is editing.

Editing is not something you want to skip. With a weak storyline, the reader won’t read past the second chapter. And a book littered with grammatical errors and typos screams amateur.

So what can you do to have a professionally edited book without spending thousands of dollars?

Here are the best frugal tips for getting a talented editor to polish your book for less money.

Read the full article: https://www.thebookdesigner.com/2018/04/editing-for-frugal-self-publishers/

Nugget #128 -- Editing As An Act of Creation

If, as the axiom goes, writing is rewriting, 
then editing is as much part of the creation 
of stories as telling the tale itself.

#MotivationalMonday -- The Best Editing

[Link] Two Tips for Copyediting Dialogue

by Amy Schneider

Accurately representing dialogue in fiction can be tricky business for both authors and editors. In its most basic form, words spoken aloud by a character, you can’t go wrong with the good old journalistic style of “comma quote name said”: “Just do it this way,” Amy said. But there are so many more ways that characters express themselves, and the editor’s job is to help such expression be true to the character while being understandable to the reader. In this article we’ll touch on the two most common issues I see.

Read the full article: https://www.copyediting.com/two-tips-copyediting-dialogue/

#MotivationalMonday -- Blankety Blank

[Link] WORD WATCHERS ~ CUT THE FAT NOW

EDITOR'S NOTE: Guys, gals, and green tentacle beasts from the planet Yyyyarchazaick... this is hands-down one of the best articles I've seen on how to trim the fat and cut words to tighten your prose, fiction or non. You owe it to your career to read this article. 

============================

by Paul Bishop

The experience of editing over fifty books and repeatedly slashing red ink across the same words and phrases, has made me hyper aware of the same issues in my own writing. I now mercilessly try to eliminate all of the same fat in my manuscripts I’ve scalpeled from others.

To write leaner more impactful prose, you must not only be willing to eliminate flabby sentences and fat words, you need to be able to recognize them. To help with this process there should be a self-help program for writers to join—Word Watchers: Lose 10% Of Your Manuscript In 10 Days...

Members of the writers’ group I mentor know I am on a quest to eliminate the word that from the English language. As an editor, I’ve found the dreaded word to be riddled unnecessarily through almost every manuscript I review. My rule is, if you can remove that from a sentence and the sentence still makes sense, run the word out of town on a log.

Compare the following:

•She needed to tell him that the car wouldn’t start.
•She needed to tell him the car wouldn’t start.
•I was glad that she was doing better.
•I was glad she was doing better.

In both examples, the sentence becomes stronger by removing the weak link of the word, that.

Use a word search to see how many times that appears in your manuscript. You’ll be shocked. It’s especially overwhelming when you realize 95% of thats could be excised. Removing this scourge will strengthen your sentences without changing the integrity of your prose.

Of is another overused word I can guarantee is cluttering up your manuscript like a bad case of acne.

Compare the following:
•He examined the damaged paw of the dog
•He examined the dog’s injured paw.

You decide which sentence is stronger, leaner, expressed more concisely. Now think about how many sentences in your manuscript are being blemished by the of virus.

Read the full article: http://www.paulbishopbooks.com/2017/02/word-watchers-cut-fat-now.html?m=1

Forget the Scissors, I Need a Machete!

Will these do?

For this week's writer roundtable, we're going to talk about cutting words -- and not just a word here and there but a significant amount of them. 

Here's the scenario... You finish your latest novel or novella, but you're WAY over the word count. 

WAY, WAY OVER. 

How do you get it back to the side your editor wants? 

What are your techniques for serious trimming on your work?

Lee Houston Jr.: Actually, there have been a lot of times where my writing buddy and friendly neighborhood beta-proofreader Nancy Hansen says I write too tersely and always fall short of the minimum word count, so I go back and keep re-reading and adding more until I've reached the goal.

In the end, if I'm over, I just reverse the process. I keep rereading and subtracting. Making choices in that category is tougher because you cannot be so in love with your own prose that you are unwilling to cut anything, even if in hindsight the passage in question actually doesn't add anything to the overall story.

But whichever way you're headed, you have to be careful not to subtract too much or your story might not make sense and adding too much could have your readers think you "pad" your stories.

It's a tricky tightrope to traverse, but every writer finds themselves walking it at one point or another during any project. The real trick is to get to the other side successfully.

PJ Lozito: I am a big believer in cutting out (but save it to a file!). That's one reason I don't think giving a daily word count means much. As for getting up to size, I have notes I can and do use. Nothing makes me prouder than finally being able to use some interesting tidbit I was saving.

I heard you were looking for a word-cutter.

Nancy Hansen: Anybody who's had to edit or publish me knows, I write too big at times. I have to cut all the time, and it's hardest with your own work. I can show you where to cut, but I can't seem to see it in my own stuff—at least not initially. So first off, if I have time, I set the piece aside and go on to something else. It's kind of like cleansing your palate with something in between courses. When I go back, I have fresh eyes. If that doesn't work, I'll hand it over to someone else, a trusted beta reader or even the editor who is waiting for it, and explain that I've tried to cut back but I am too close to the material to see where, and could you please take a look. Nine times out of ten with a short piece people are happy to help, and they give you an idea where and what should go. On longer pieces like novels, the usual advice is to look for a spot where something momentous is about to occur and taper it off there. Most times I can figure it out myself, but now and then you need a different pair of eyes.

Frank Fradella: Step One: Check your ego.

Step Two: Ask yourself if you have started this story as late as possible. Do I need this first chapter? The first three? Am I creating too much preamble? Do I REALLY need this characters origin or can it be revealed as necessary through dialogue or flashback later on?

Step Three: Ask yourself what purpose each character serves in the story. Do you have two characters who play the same or similar role? Can you eliminate one of them?

Step Four: Identify the purpose of each and every scene. Chances are you have one or two that you're chalking up to "character development" that can be axed outright.

Step Five: Push back. If every single character or every single scene has an unshakable purpose, present your case to your editor and ask them to suggest edits, and then be prepared to show why those scenes or characters need to be there. But remember Step One. Very often, they're right and you can make the cut. So cut.

Robert Krog: I start by searching for and deleting adverbs, interjections, needless intensifiers, words like just, so, and well. That always reduces the word count by a bit. Then, I go through and find wordy phrases that can be supplanted by fewer or even one word. Why be lazy and write "very happy" when "elated" means the same thing and so much more? When this too has failed to reduce the word count into the acceptable range, I begin looking for passages that don't advance the plot or build character. This is the painful part because I thought they all advanced the plot and added to characters when I was writing. I have, occasionally reduced the role of or even cut extraneous characters from stories. This usually does the trick. If the protagonist is still able to do all that needed doing without the sidekick, and the sidekick didn't add much or anything meaningful to the story, then out the sidekick goes. This greatly reduces the verbiage. Sometimes, I have already written lean enough that such cannot be done, in which case I've had to ask the editor for leniency on the word count. This has been known to work, but not often. Sometimes the editor will shoot back with suggested cuts, and I will have to admit that the editor is correct. Another trick is, of course, to look for inadvertent info dumps and eliminate them. Working the required information into the story in a show rather than tell format is usually less wordy, and the reader didn't buy a work of fiction expecting textbook style writing, anyway. Information dumps often insult the intelligence of the reader. Respecting the reader's ability to pick up what is needed from context is a good policy and should be used whenever possible.

The Internet called and said you wanted an editor.

Ellie Raine: Usually, I first look at each chapter and determine if I can afford to cut those out, or cut them in half. Sometimes, the hardest things to catch are the not-so-integral scenes before and after the good, important, meaty bits that actually matter, and firing those. It's usually mundane things like the character asking the desk clerk to check in, when that can be wrapped up in a paragraph to get to the scene where his hotel suite is broken into. Basically, I just look at what I think should be the focus of the audience's attention and cut the fat out.

Bobby Nash: The first things I look for are any side trips or character moments that, while can be great, don't necessarily advance the plot. After that, it's looking for extraneous words, adverbs, and tags that can be cut.

Lance Stahlberg: I am literally going thru that scenario now. Was also thinking it was blog worthy of listing off what I did. (Posted here: http://lrstahlberg.blogspot.com/2017/06/tips-to-reduce-word-count_23.html)

Matt Hiebert: The words "Kill Your Darlings" always haunt me. But I don't kill them. I cut and paste them into another document. Although I never go back and read them, I know they're there and not gone. Not dead.

Nugget #102 -- Eyes vs. Brains in Self-Editing

The biggest trouble with self-editing is that (as the

writer) your brain already knows what you want

to say. So when you read over your draft to fix

problems, too often your eyes miss the problems

on the page and instead listen to your brain’s intentions.