Challenge yourself to create more vivid writing.
I appreciate the advice from children’s writer Christian Harder Tangvald: “Circle every is and was on your manuscript; you don’t want writing that’s “isy” and “wasy.”
So I checked each use of was while I edited the 60,000-word YA novel. It started with 942. I cut that to 786.
The word isn’t evil; but it’s often slothful. These before-and-after examples … Continue reading
Don’t miss this tool for finding your mistakes.
Want to submit an error-free manuscript? Remember one keyboard shortcut.
Seriously. A few days ago, this simple command enabled me to catch multiple problems I’d missed in my first two editing passes through a book-length manuscript.
The novel told a great story. But the author struggled, as many of us do, with a few fine points of English.
He … Continue reading
Fill your mind with effective examples.
The past two weeks I’ve been spending six hours a day editing someone’s novel.
The author’s a solid storyteller, but his mechanics are weak. So I’m taking pains to fix the punctuation on nearly every sentence. And the dialogue attribution. And much of the spelling. Plus some of the verb tenses. I can work no more than an hour at … Continue reading