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…
Recently, NaNoWriMo, the annual event where one tries to write a novel in 30 days, minimum word count 55,000 words, recently posted an AI policy. Like everything else on the internet, it lacked any sort of nuance. Like everyone else on the internet, I had a knee-jerk reaction. In a nutshell, without explaining what AI…
So what is it I do for a writer? Nothing. I do it for the reader. That is the writer’s ultimate client. Sure, they have to consider bookstores, distributors, agents, and acquiring editors, but whether the author is writing independently or going traditional, my job is to get them closer to the reader. A publisher’s…
Editors use a lot of tools to cleanup a manuscript. I’ve heard many say you just need a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style and a good grasp of grammar. No one who says that is an editor. There are many tools, and I’ve talked about them on the old site. But The two I…
