No, not the well-regarded 80s band led by producer Don Was. Was (along with is, are, were) is a double-edged sword for writers. Why? Used in action verbs, it blunts to impact of a sentence. And used as the verb itself, it’s passive voice. If you listen to hundreds of writing experts and “experts,” passive…
Ah, the lowly dash. And it’s many forms. We so love using them, especially Gen X and Millennial writers. We especially love our em dashes (— ). Nothing wrong with that, though I wish Cormac McCarthy had made peace with quotation marks before he died. Blood Meridian was brilliant but hard to read. And yet,…
I’ve had a couple inquires about developmental editing recently. Both customers balked at the potential cost. Both also wanted them within a timeframe not conducive to doing a good job. This is something I ran into as a client myself. It takes weeks to breakdown a story and put it back together again. Sometimes months….
Once upon a time, I read Tom Clancy’s novels. They were brilliant adventure pieces, though Jack Ryan ultimately became a bit of a Mary Sue character. I was young and my imagination locked into The Hunt for Red October and Cardinal of the Kremlin (the Cold War still a thing back then.) But as I read more…
The biggest challenge for an editor comes from copy editing anthologies. With a novel, you have one or two writers’ styles from beginning to end. You adjust early on and carry it through to the end. Anthologies? I received an assignment from a well-known short story writer and editor, himself a freelance editor. This came…
You hear the terms developmental and copy edit bandied about. I talk a bit about the former here. These days, a lot of developmental editors are calling themselves “story coaches,” and that’s probably a more accurate term. Especially because, when the developmental edit is done, you will most definitely need a copy edit. All that…
Early on in this space, I talked about the different types of editing. Most people think of copy editing, cleaning up the prose and trimming the fat. Sometimes, people think of a proofread, which is a once-over of a manuscript looking for typos. But what is a developmental edit? This is where you let someone…
