Did you NaNo? Welcome to the "Now What?" Months

As Jane mentioned at the end of November, November isn't the time to query your NaNo novel. And, despite the glory of starting your year of by sending out batches of queries, that isn't the best idea, either. After all, traditional advice for revision includes waiting (at least) a month between your first draft and your first re-read, so you can look at the story with fresh eyes.

So, using the official NaNoWriMo etymology, January and February are the "Now What?" months. This, however, is where the official site falls short. Per their page on revisions, they recommend the same kind of "anything goes" approach to revisions as they do to writing.

While I (and most others) are all for first drafts in which anything goes and nothing matters but the words on the page, revisions should be approached more carefully. There are many moving parts in a novel that need to be in perfect alignment if you want the smoothest, most enthralling story for your readers. You need to have characters that are well-developed and (usually) follow a character arc, a plot that hits the major plot points, and a theme that comes organically out of the characters and plots.

It can be overwhelming to think about everything your novel needs when you first sit down to re-read what you've written. The most important thing you can do is realize what you have accomplished. Think about the strengths in your story. Consciously dwell on the pieces you're most proud of--whether it's a specific line, or a plot twist, or a fascinating character you just love. You've already done more than most people ever will: you've written a novel!

There are lots of successful writers who use intuition in revision, but if it's your first go of it, or you like a little more structure, I recommend finding a revision process that works for you. I use the detailed revisions process laid out by Susan Dennard as a jumping off point, which has evolved over time to suit me.

A Google search for "Revising your novel" leads to a lot of x-step guides to a finished novel. Holly Lisle, for instance, says she edits a full novel in one to two weeks and if you're taking more than a few months you're probably doing it wrong. I disagree with her, especially if writing isn't your full-time job. Many of us, myself included, simply don't have the time to devote 6- to 8-hour days to working through our manuscript. Take the time you need to take. That said, she offers excellent advice (set a realistic deadline for yourself; write the best book you can now, without worrying about the best book you can write next year) and some great questions to ask as you re-read. Despite the title, Anne Lyle's Revising Your Novel in 10 Easy Steps doesn't overly simplify the process, but gives you a great place to start and concrete steps toward making your book the best it can be.

If you either enjoy consciously plotting story structure or don't understand much about it, K.M. Weiland's website, Helping Writers Become Authors, is my go-to website for learning about structure. There are series on structuring the whole of a book, structuring scenes, and structuring character arcs, as well as a database of examples and a plethora of other things. If you don't know what to look for when it comes to making sure your story holds together, her website is an excellent source.

However you choose to go about revision, there are a few things to remember:

• Always revise big picture first and details last. If you have to add a new scene, treat it like a new first draft, making sure the right things happen before making sure dialogue is perfect before making sure typos are absent.
• There comes a time when you will need to show your work to critique partners and betas. This is absolutely necessary before sending to agents or out for self-publishing. For me, this step is after my second draft, when I've done my revision for the big picture and tackled much, but not all, of the smaller issues. For you, it might be after the first draft, so your critique partner can work as a sounding board for how to change things. It could be as you write, chapter by chapter. It might be after your fifth draft. What matters isn't the timing, it's making sure you get someone else's opinion.
• Revise again after you receive feedback. Probably set it aside for a few weeks and revise another time after that. Revise until you're not sure you like the story anymore. Then stop, trust yourself, and head over to QueryTracker to start querying. That's when you'll be ready.

Rochelle Deans is an editor and author who prefers perfecting words to writing them. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two young children. Her bad habits include mispronouncing words, correcting grammar, and spending far too much time on the Internet.

How to publish your NaNoWriMo novel

Don't! Not yet!

Okay, let's back up a step. If you've just completed National Novel Writing Month for the first time (http://nanowrimo.org) you're probably riding the crest of your success, thrilled with your book, and already thinking of what to wear at your first book signing.

I get it. Even though I'm a jaded old lady who knits socks on cold nights, I get it. Right now, you love your book. Love it with every last atom of your heart, and you want it in the hands of readers who will love it just as much as you do and sketch pictures of your favorite scenes to post on their tumblr pages where they tell all their friends to buy your book. You can't even think "my book" without thinking 💜my book💜. I've been there.

Do not try to publish it yet.

1) Your book needs time.

Let your book "rest" a bit so you have time to come down from the endorphin rush. You're in love. You're producing so much oxytocin that you could singlehandedly power a rocket to Neptune and then ride a gravity whip out to Pluto. That's not the time to make any kind of judgment about your book.

Go read someone else's book and force yourself not to look at your manuscript for a little while. Later you can come back to it and be a little more objective about the main character, the plot, the setting -- you know, the small details people tend to want to hang together in a story.

If you have a nagging concern in the back of your mind about one specific part of the story, it's probably correct. Even if you don't yet know how to fix it.

2) Your book needs feedback.

Find a few avid readers who aren't afraid of tears or screaming, and ask them if they'll read the first draft of your book. You might have to look online for what's known as a "beta-reader" but do find one, someone who will read through the story and be unafraid to voice all those repeating concerns you had in the back of your head. You know, about things like the main character, the plot, the setting...  It has to be someone who's not afraid to say things like, "I didn't care what happened to your main character" and "Why didn't he just get in his car and leave the house full of spiders?"

(Yes, even if neither of those things apply to 💜your book.💜 A beta-reader must be tactful but fearless.)

It doesn't feel good to get negative comments, but trust me, when the book is published, no one will hesitate to bestow them upon you by the crate-load. And if you're going to publish traditionally, agents and editors also won't worry about your feelings. If you get a negative response at all, it will be along the lines of, "Not for me." You'll need actual feedback.

3) Your book needs detailed critique and an editor.

Once you've gotten through some beta readers, you want a critique partner to go over the book with you on a much more detailed level. Ideally this should be another writer, that way the two of you can chew on different solutions to complex problems. A beta reader might know the plot is confusing but a critique partner will be the one to point out that these three characters could be combined into one character without any damage to the plot, or that the main character's stakes should be raised in Act III (and then make a suggestion on how to do it.)

4) Your book needs a sharp query and an interesting synopsis

Get both of those ready before you start pitching to agents. Make sure you know exactly how querying works and what to expect when you approach agents. Learn what agents do. If you're going to approach small publishers, you'll need to know what they do too, and the kinds of things they want to see. Get other eyes on your query to make sure it's a tantalizing sales letter for your book.

5) Your book needs not to fall prey to scammers.

The larger NaNoWriMo gets, the more predators are going to try making money off it. Before you even consider publishing your book, you need to learn how publishing works, both traditional and independent. The QueryTracker blog is a good start (this site, if you got here by googling "publishing my nanowrimo novel") but you should also find guidance in writing groups. Double check that any service you use is not a scam.

Traditional agents do not charge money to read or represent your manuscript. Traditional publishers do not charge money to publish your manuscript. You should not be bound by contract to purchase a certain number of your own books. You should not have to earn back the publisher's net expenses before receiving royalties. You should be the owner of your own copyright. You should not be forced to sign a non-compete clause. You should have a lawyer review any contract you sign and be prepared that every sentence of any contract will be leveled against you in the worst possible way. If you can't abide by the strictest interpretation of the document, don't sign the contract.

Many writers are desperate to get their stories out there, but if you try too soon, you will undercut your book's success. Your story...I mean, 💜your story💜 deserves the best you can give it. That means time, editing, and honest business practices.

You finished! Congratulations! Now give 💜your book💜 a huggle and tuck it in to rest for a little while.

---

For When Things Aren't Working Out

Ash had a wonderful post last week about the bravery and necessity of creating plans. Unlike her, I am and always have been a planner, not a pantser. I have made new year's resolutions without fail since I was 17 years old. For something like the past 5 years, I've broken those resolutions into quarterly, monthly, and, ultimately, weekly goals. I like check marks. I like seeing my progress. I will argue to a stalemate with anyone who tells me lists aren't important.

But, as Eisenhower says, "...I have always founds that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."

We've talked about how indispensable planning is, so I want to focus on how useless the plans themselves can be sometimes.

In 2011, I had some ambitions new year's resolutions. Already a resolutions veteran, I knew I had to make actionable, measurable goals if I wanted to get anywhere. So I did. And one of the things on my list was to be able to run two miles without having to walk. I was getting married that September, and though I wasn't out of shape, I certainly wasn't in shape, either. So I joined a gym and got on a treadmill. I followed my plan.

By early summer, I still couldn't run two miles, and I'd learned something: I hated running. I didn't enjoy that time in the gym at all. I had to focus on anything else to keep me on the treadmill. My knee, which has a stress injury from doing gymnastics as a kid, was hurting me again. Instead of looking forward to meeting my goal, I was looking forward to lifting weights, which I did after my dreaded time on the treadmill.

That goal, and many others in 2011, I never met. But I learned a lot about myself in making them. At the time, I was frustrated that I didn't meet my goal, instead of happy that I learned something.

Fast forward two years to when I decided to write a novel. I made a plan: write it, edit it, query it, publish it, profit. Simple. I planned on the whole process going quickly, so I edited as little as my CPs would let me get away with. I started querying long before the book was ready. I wrote another book, edited it, queried it. I saw some small problems with how the plot was going, and knew my word count was on the short end. I decided the agent who would inevitably fall in love with my book was going to help me fix it, so why bother.

When 2016 started, I had 40,000 words of novel #3 and no agent. My goal for this year was to finish my third novel and be querying before the year was out. I finished my first draft at the end of May, but unlike with my previous novels, I decided to take the advice of basically the entire writing world and set it aside for a month. So I did. Then, as I revised, I was determined to do the best I could by this book, because it's one I really believe in. So it's the middle of November and not a single critique partner has seen my novel yet. I'm not going to be sending out my first query by the end of the year.

I need to remind myself that it isn't a failed goal. It isn't something I stopped working toward, and it isn't a story I gave up on. The unchecked box on my Resolutions page represents not giving up, but hope. I believe in this book, so I'm going to take the time I need to make it as good as I possibly can before I query it. I'm going to send out the most polished writing I can muster.

Without my plan, I would never have gotten as far as I have on this book. Every week, I write out a new micro-goal that will push me closer to sending this book to my critique partners, and ultimately to agents. Every week, I fail that micro-goal but make progress. I am not defined by that box I won't check at the end of the year, because that goal is the reason I am as far as I am, and the unchecked box is my hope that this book, with enough time, will succeed.

Rochelle Deans sometimes feels like the only writer on the planet who rushes through the writing so she can start editing. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two kids two and under. Her bad habits include mispronouncing words, correcting grammar, and spending far too much time on the Internet.

When the "Show, Don't Tell" police come knocking

Every writer, at some point, has heard the phrase, "There is too much telling." Perhaps the critique came from a well-meaning critique partner, or even that rare agent who offered a personalized rejection. Unfortunately, that advice has become so common that it can be about as useless as the also-ubiquitous, "Passive voice is bad!" mantra.

So what exactly does it mean to show, not tell? And when is telling better than showing? Here are some tools I try to keep in mind when editing. To digress a moment, I don't recommend going through this process while you are churning out your first draft. It's called a crappy first draft for a reason.

When you see a long expanse of text with no dialogue, and no "short action" paragraphs to break up the action (like, "the cell door slammed shut"), ask yourself if the passage is lacking some description of a person's body language as well as other sensory elements, such as touch or smell that could convey the same information, or whether the same scene could be conveyed better with dialogue rather than description. If the passage if merely a character's backstory, does it read like an information dump or can you weave in some of the back story in later chapters if it doesn't have to be established up front?

By way of example, here is some "telling."

"Mary was very angry. Her husband was late for dinner again and despite several text messages and voice mails, he hadn't bothered to tell her if he was on his way home or not. To make matters worse, her teenage son had wolfed down a dinner she had carefully prepared from scratch. He had eaten quickly while standing up and then immediately dashed out, not even bothering to tell her where he was going. Mary wondered if she should just give up. She began googling divorce attorneys."

Here is how the same situation could be more "showy."

No new messages.
"Inconsiderate jerk," Mary muttered. She punched Joe's cell number with her thumb as she ladled the congealed remains of her signature lasagna into a plastic containers with the other hand. The remnants of fresh basil, oregano and garlic wafted through the air.

Straight to voice mail. Mary clicked End Call. She tossed her phone on the counter. The dog she hadn't wanted looked up at her hopefully with a leash in his mouth.

"Go walk yourself. I'm done being everyone's maid," she told him. "Jake, where are you going?

Her son barely looked up from his phone. He opened the side door. "Out."

"But you barely touched your din-"

The door slammed shut in his wake. Mary scraped the remaining food into the sink and put it down the disposal. She opened up her laptop, poured herself a glass of wine she'd been saving for a special occasion, and typed. A few minutes later, she clicked on Schedule a Free Consultation with one our Board Certified Divorce Attorneys.

In the first example, the writer is simply telling the reader what the reader needs to know about Mary. She feels unappreciated, put upon, and has simply had enough. The second example shows the reader things Mary does and says, and how she reacts to what other people do through action and dialogue. We don't need to be told how she feels because we can see it.

This is not to suggest that "telling" is always bad. Sometimes, telling is better than showing. Consider this "all tell" passage from Dress Her in Indigo by John D. MacDonald:

"T. Harlan Bowie had to be prybarred and torch-cut out of his squashed Buick, and there was so much blood the rescue people were in a big hurry. As it turned out, they would have done a lot better taking it slow and easy rather than turning him and twisting him and working him in muscular style out of the metal carapace. Nobody could prove anything afterward. The lacerations were superficial. But there was a fracture of the spine, and between the second and third lumbar vertebrae the unprotected cord had been pinched, ground, bruised, torn and all but severed. Nobody could ever say whether the accident had done it, or the rescue efforts."

You can't convince me that there is a better way to convey this information about poor Mr. Bowie than to just say it. There is no need to draw it out with "showing" techniques because the reader only needs to know Mr. Bowie's predicament in order to set the stage for actual plot, which doesn't really involve how he became physically disabled. Stephen King similarly introduces us to retired Detective Hodges in Mr. Mercedes by just telling us in straightforward, unembellished  fashion, about how he spends his days post retirement watching television and gaining weight.

So when to show and when to tell? That is often in the eye of the beholder. But say that Mary in our first example is a fleeting character in a slasher novel who gets killed off rather quickly at the beginning. Maybe a little "tell" works better because we don't really need to know the details of her lasagna and her kid. But if Mary is the main character in a chick lit novel, then yes, we need to be able to identify with the every day experiences of feeling overwhelmed and under taken for granted. In that case, the second example works better.

In your own writing, if you notice a lot of first-version Mary writing that goes on for pages and pages, this should be a red flag to ask yourself a few questions. Can I write this scene referencing facial expressions, glances, smells, or by use of dialogue?  Instead of  saying "Lady Macbeth was convinced blood was everywhere and on her hands and she couldn't get clean," show a character scrubbing an already immaculate surface until her knuckles bleed while someone pleads with her to stop.

The next step in editing is to identify  the filler words we all use  when we try to "show, don't tell."  My writing's  worst offenders are eye rolling and shrugging. But that topic has to wait until next month.

Happy show and tell until then.

Kim English - is the author of the Coriander Jones series and the award winning picture book 'A Home for Kayla.' Her latest picture book, 'Rolly and Mac' will be released in 2016. Her website is Kim-

Editing the Muse #writetip

As a writer of all lengths of fiction, I always seem to have a work in progress. My muse, who apparently has some sort of attention deficit, like to bounce between novels and short stories and back again. Sometimes, I actually finish things. More often than not, I’m editing.

I’ve learned a lot about editing and revising over the years, through books and online classes and (my favorite) reading books by authors whose style I adore. I’m heading back to my WIP for a long, hard look and I’m considering doing some editing. For those of you who are also currently wallowing in edits, I thought I’d share some thoughts on the process.

I have a huge list of bookmarked articles on the subject... and these are the ones I always re-read when I need to refocus.

Fellow writer and former Query Tracker blogger Elana Johnson recently posted an article on “good vs. done.” It’s a rallying cheer we all need to remind us of our talent and our self-worth (as well as an opportunity to visit her fun vocabulary. I love to listen to her write.)

Sometimes, an editor or feedback group will recommend edits or revisions. It’s easy for us to think it’s because what we wrote is, as Elana puts it, sucktacular. But it’s not. Changes make something that’s already good even better.(And anyways, if it was truly sucktacular, they would have told us to shred it and start over.)

So, once we’re firmly reminded that we’ve already written something worth keeping, it’s time to edit it. Dustin Wax writes that there is no good writing, just good re-writing. Having edited my first novel over the space of three years, I have to agree with him. I find this to be a splendid philosophy for anyone facing the daunting task of staring down a first draft.

Before you start, it’s important to ask yourself what, exactly, you need to do. Are you making surface edits or major revisions?  I came across Dennis G. Jerz’s article “Revision vs. Edition" and found a great quick-reference list.

While polishing a short story can be done in a manageable amount of time, editing a large volume—say, a four-hundred page novel—can be downright overwhelming. One trick many authors--and editors--use is to break the process into steps. You can find an example of a breakdown here.

It also helps to make a list of changes you want to make throughout the piece. Just tackle them one at a time and you make big progress with every small step. Take it chapter by chapter, task by task, and remember: keep going. It’s worth the work.

And then, once you think you have that WIP right where you want it, read Nathan Bransford’s advice to see how close to “done” you’ve gotten. If necessary, lather, rinse, and repeat.

But if it’s done, then it’s all good.

Right? *evil smiley because we all know done is never, ever, really, truly, done*

Ash Krafton is a speculative fiction writer who, despite having a Time Turner under her couch and three different sonic screwdrivers in her purse, still encounters difficulty with time management. She's the author of the urban fantasy trilogy The Books of the Demimonde as well as WORDS THAT BIND. She also writes for YA and NA audiences under the pen name AJ Krafton. THE HEARTBEAT THIEF, her Victorian dark fantasy inspired by Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, is now available.

Unleashing Your Creativity: Five Ways To Switch Off That Internal Editor

A writer has two main signals in the brain: create and edit.

The creator, well, creates. Stories grow and bloom and take on life. The editor and her red pen prunes and cuts and shapes. But there's a reason why I'm a writer, not a farmer, so let's lose the gardening analogy and think of this another way: think green light and red light.

Green light, go—the words flow. Red light—stop. Stop and fix, stop and think, stop and just plain stop.

And stopping isn't going to help you get your first draft done.

First drafts need to be green light, all the way. Any time your word flow hesitates, it's an opportunity for the editor to take over. You'll re-read those last lines and tweak them. You'll pause, mentally discarding phrase after phrase because they're just not good enough. The writing stops. The cursor blinks, wondering if you got up and left. Red light.

But you don't have to live at the mercy of a red light. The writer controls the signal. Like every other element of writing, it's a piece of craft to be learned.

Pro-level Green Light
One way to bask in the glow of the green light is to attain a level of competency that lets you self-edit on the fly.  In this article, Sean D'Souza discusses how writing competency leads to writing fluency, where editing happens so quickly we don't even know we're doing it. The red light is only the briefest of flickers in a stream of green.

How does a writer become competent? You write. And you write. You make the mistakes that come with learning a craft. You learn from those mistakes and you get better. Each mistake and its subsequent lesson is one step closer to competency.

But learning a craft takes a long time. In the meantime, we still set word count goals and deadlines, long before we attain this nirvana called fluency. How do we keep ourselves writing forward instead of deleting backwards...or stalling because you can't get past a sentence just because you can't get it down right?

Do everything you can to keep the red light from coming on.

I have a few tricks I use during first draft writing and each one contributes to green light streaming in its own way.

1).  Go Analog
Notepads don't have delete keys. Plain and simple.

Writing longhand gives me a change to simply write. My handwriting is smooth enough that it all blends in my periphery--I tend not to look back over the last lines as I write. If I do need to change something, I strike it through. Unlike deleting, the original word is there so I don't obsess that I made a mistake by erasing one.

Plus, I love the flow of ink. I'm a very visible-art kind of person so writing with an ink pen is akin to painting words. Best of all, I get to choose the ink color that inspires me. When I was younger, my pen of choice was a purple Pilot ballpoint. Today, I'm partial to blue ink. So much of what I read is in black and white so the mere sight of blue taps into my creative side.

Blue is also my ideal color for meditation. Calming, serene blue. Did you know that writing is, in itself, a form of meditation? Google it sometime—when you're not supposed to be writing, of course. Which leads me to another red light reducer:

2).  Remove distractions
Distractions create pauses. If you are not actively submerging in the creative flow, typing out words, focused on the story, then your brain will flip the switch to editor mode.

I have a lot of cool junk on my desk. There's a lovely collection of ravens and skulls (thanks to my endless devotion to Edgar Allan Poe) and a bunch of Dr. Who and Sherlock and Supernatural collectables (because I will go down with that 'ship) and a bunch of other nifty writer things. In fact, my desk is the reason why I don't write at my desk. Ever. Too much to play with... and if I'm playing, I'm not writing.

If I look up from the page, I might toy with a sonic screwdriver. My brain might then toy with something I'd already written. The red light comes on and the editor comes out. And that's not what I want when I'm trying to get that first draft written.

Take the time to make a list of your worst distractions. Internet. The telephone. Your hair, if you're a twister-tugger-fidgeter like me. Identify those distractions and do what you can to limit them. The less you look up from the page, the less likely you are to staunch that green light flow.

3).  Plan Ahead by Plotting
Some writers love the freedom of watching a story bloom and unfold right before their eyes, with each sentence taking them further along a path toward a new undiscovered word. That's a beautiful thing, that quicksilver taste of creativity—and it's the reason many of us enjoy writing as much as we do.

But how many of us actually sit down in from of a blank screen without at least thinking where the book is going to go? Precious few, I'd wager. At the very least, we have an idea. A hook. An anecdote. Something.

But if that something isn't big enough for a pantser to go on, it's easy to bang heads with writer's block. (Pantser? Writer's block? If that's the main problem for you, read this.)

So, plan ahead. One easy way to do that is to create your plot outline.


Seems like contrary advice coming from a pantser like me but just hear me out. If you know where the story is going, you can write more freely than if you have to come up with each and every element as you go. A little planning goes a long way in illuminating the path ahead so you don't go bumbling in the dark.

4).  Allow Necessary Roughness
A first draft is often called the rough draft. However, writers forget that they are allowed to be rough when writing them. Sometimes, we set unrealistic expectations for ourselves and our writing and feel pressured to make the first draft the only draft.

When I was in college, my freshman lit professor told me she loved my first drafts. I wasn't a budding writer or an English major. I had no thoughts about writing novels. I was a first year pharmacy student who felt more at home in the humanities department and I simply loved my reading and writing assignments. Lit classes were a brief escape from chem labs and white coats.

These days, I still haven't escaped the white coats, but I do still try to put out competent first drafts. It's a weird way to pay homage to my old mentors back in Philly—the pharmacist who writes as if her freshman lit teacher was watching. But these days, there is a big difference.

I'm not going for a grade. I've given myself a lot of breathing room. I allow myself to write imperfectly. I permit roughness in my drafts.

For instance: I use brackets (like this article describes.)  If an element makes me stumble, I close it off, skip over it, and keep going.

Skipping the unwritable parts keep the green light going. You can go back and write those spots later, after you've had time to work them out. (That's what second drafts are for, right?)

In fact, I love skipping things. In my current WIP, one chapter has only three words: SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS. The next chapter picks up the narrative once more, with actual scenes and sequences. I'm able to pull this off because of the previous tip about plotting. I know where the story is going so it doesn't matter if I have trouble somewhere.

I just gun the gas and speed past it, blasting through that potential red light. Skipping stuff can be such a rush.

5).  Avoid Criticism
It's not enough to allow myself to write roughly in a first draft. I know what I'm writing is not the final product. I know it's going to get better, and deeper, and less riddled with thinly-developed ideas.

But would someone else know that?

Beta readers and critique partners are a writer's best friends. Seriously. We all need a set of impartial eyes on our stories to see the flaws we can't. But a first draft is no place for that kind of critique.

Not only is the story not yet at a place to be properly critiqued—neither are we. A first draft is a place of discovery and experimentation, a place where creativity needs to flow unimpeded. Criticism, at this point, slams the writing light to full red. It forces us to rethink our work, to go back and change. It intentionally switches us to editor mode.

It also does something to our confidence. Even when the critique is gentle and constructive, it makes us doubt ourselves and where we thought our story was going. You might think a critique is necessary at the beginning, that it will save us unnecessary work down the road. I think that's premature. I think that there's a bigger risk of squelching a good idea before it has a chance to be fully developed. That's the worst kind of editing—it's censoring.

That's why I keep my first drafts to myself. I might give a sneak peek of a scene to one of my inner-sanctum betas, just for a taste of what I'm writing. But I never give enough to inspire criticism and I never hand a red pen over with it.

Green Light... Go!
The next time you find yourself stuck in first draft traffic, don't despair. The writer in you has the power to switch that signal and turn that red light green again. You don't need a miracle. You just need to learn how to take back that control.

The switch is all yours. Learn to use it to your advantage.

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Five Ways To Switch Off Your Internal Editor

Red light, green light: Editing vs. Writing

Improve your creative flow with these 5 tips

Ash Krafton is a speculative fiction writer who, despite having a Time Turner under her couch and three different sonic screwdrivers in her purse, still encounters difficulty with time management. She's the author of the urban fantasy trilogy The Books of the Demimonde as well as WORDS THAT BIND. She also writes for YA and NA audiences under the pen name AJ Krafton. THE HEARTBEAT THIEF, her Victorian dark fantasy inspired by Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, is now available.

The Importance of Being Edited

It's never fun to read a critical review, but even worse than a reader who simply didn't like your book is the critique that says something like "And on top of it the typos and punctuation errors on almost every page really made me cringe." How can this be when we pour hours and hours revising and editing, running spell check and combing through our manuscript searching for mistakes?

 I liken it to housekeeping. Ever walk into someone's house and think, "Oh, my, how many dog/cats do they have?" Walk into your own house, though, and you are far more likely to overlook the dishes in the sink or the Eau de Fluffy because, hey, it's your house and you clean on Sundays and it's only Friday, right? Same with your manuscript, which you know by heart. You know you meant "you're" not "your." But without a fresh set of eyes, one that doesn't already know every plot twist, you will miss things and people will notice. This is where an editor comes in handy. Even if you don't plan to self publish, an editor can be an invaluable tool along with your critique partner and beta readers, in getting your manuscript in the best shape possible.

 Let's define some terms. I conferred with fellow Floridian and freelance editor Becky Stephens to help understand the different types of editing services a writer may use. (Disclosure: portions of the information provided by Becky appeared on my blog earlier this month in an interview format, so I am using quotation marks to ensure her comments are properly attributed) "Although the terms can vary from publisher to publisher and editor to editor, generally speaking, the 'copyedit' editor ensures that the prose is smooth and the style consistent. She provides line edits with the focus on spelling, grammar, punctuation, verb tense, word repetition and usage, and all the minute things."

 But, you say, in the word processing age, won't the almighty spell check will catch all my mistakes? "No. The word processor’s spellcheck is never enough. It can't differentiate between “your” and “you’re” or to spot “in” when “it” was correct, for example." This is where your beta readers comes in handy. And speaking of beta readers, if you use them in lieu of a professional edit, ask yourself what you expect from them. "Do they read simply for overall plot? Will they spot an inconsistency, such as a character walking barefoot on a cold floor, but suddenly is wearing shoes two pages later? Will your betas notice the missing or incorrect punctuation before the closing quotation mark in front of a dialogue tag? If you aren’t 100% sure they will spot these types of things, consider bringing an editor on board."

Back to defining terms. "A 'content edit' (also known as a developmental or substantive edit) starts with the editor helping an author develop ideas. In the case where a manuscript is already completed, a substantive edit is a significant restructuring of a manuscript. The content editor helps an author organize, sharpen, and tighten a manuscript so that the characters and dialogue are believable, the plot is coherent, and the setting appropriate."

So, the big question. How much is this going to set me back? According to Becky, the rates vary considerably from modest to budget busting. Do your homework. The ranges of common editorial rates set by the Editorial Freelancers Association will give you guidance on what to expect.

Once you decide you want to hire an editor, how do you find the one that's right for you? Ask yourself these questions: "Are you looking for someone who follows all the rules laid out in the Chicago Manual of Style, an editor who is willing to bend–or even break–the rules, or someone somewhere in between? What you want is an editor who meshes with your style and genre(s). Don’t hire the first editor that pops up on a Google search. Talk to other authors. Ask your author friends and their friends for references. Find a Facebook group or Goodreads group where you can inquire about editors. Authors who are happy with their editors are willing to brag about them. It’s up to you to do your research. Once you find a few potential editors, get in touch. Ask about her portfolio, what genres she is most passionate about, whether she specializes in content or copy editing, and about her other clients. Due diligence on your part is critical."

I was curious what are the most common mistakes/problem areas that editors see. The winner is: Incorrect dialogue tags and punctuation. Becky provided these examples:

“Maggie, darling. You’re here!” Jonathan cried out. In this case, because the dialogue tag says he cried out, the exclamation point is overkill. A comma is all that is needed.

“Jonathan,” Maggie breathed. In the example above, an incorrect dialogue tag is used. Breathed is a body function, not a dialogue tag. Maggie probably whispered his name.

I admit it. I've had characters "shrug" words. I've used all caps in dialogue. Everyone occasionally messes up putting a comma instead of a period. But with the assistance of an eagle-eyed editor, the world never has to know we didn't get it right the first time.

 

Kim English - A native Floridian, Kim is the author of Coriander Jones Saves the World and the upcoming Coriander Jones On Assignment at Sabal Palm Academy. She lives in southwest Florida with her family and an ever increasing number of rescue pets. You can learn more about Kim and her books at CorianderJones.com

How to Edit a Synopsis

First, a confession: I finished my book sometime this summer. As of Thursday, I had not finished a synopsis. I had a book I was excited about and a query I didn't hate, so I didn't want to tackle a synopsis because, let's face it, synopses are hard. Then, in a series of fortunate events, I needed one. Quickly.

I've read lots of posts on how to write a synopsis (I have this one bookmarked for its ease of use, and this one is good, too, especially for longer synopses), and my handwritten ideas notebook is full of the starts of synopses for this novel (five of them, if you wondered).

It took me a long time to get to a draft that I thought was complete. At about 800 words, I was satisfied that it was short enough to qualify as a "short synopsis," and happy enough about the plot points it covered. I read it over several times, patted myself on the back for finishing it, corrected some sentence flow stuff, and sent it off for critique.

My synopsis went to two different people. One has read the novel, the other hasn't. Here's my tip of the day: always have someone who hasn't read your book critique your synopsis.

The synopsis I was so pleased with a few hours before was completely ripped to shreds. It was fantastic (for the book; not for my ego). "Wait, how can this happen?" "I thought they were there?" "Is this even relevant?" There is a temptation to get defensive and say, "Well it makes sense in the book..." When that happens, it's important to remember the point of a synopsis: to tell the story to someone who hasn't read it. If the person critiquing your synopsis is confused, Amazing Agent X will be, too.

The goal for synopses isn't to write pretty sentences or make the reader infer anything. Its goal is to quickly tell someone (an agent or editor, probably) what happens in the book. Your job is to make it obvious what that is, so make sure that people who haven't read it are clear.

Rochelle Deans sometimes feels like the only writer on the planet who rushes through the writing so she can start editing. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and young daughter. Her bad habits include mispronouncing words, correcting grammar, and spending far too much time on the Internet.

Things I've Learned Along The Way: Finishing

It's a thrill to reach the final words of your first draft. It's also a catharsis, and sometimes I'll just sit a little numb afterward, riveted by that sense of completion.

Of course, nothing's complete at that point. If this isn't your first novel, you know you've got plenty of finishing work left to do.

I'm going to give you a visual, since a picture is worth a thousand words and no one wants to read me going on an extra thousand words. I made this lace shawl [free pattern here] about a month ago. I hope you'll agree it looks nice (even though I ran out of blocking boards. Sorry.)

It's a really pretty pattern and it's a good idea and the yarn is nice and all that. Let's call that a first draft.

Writers talk a lot about how hard it is to edit. Half my writing-related Twitter feed involves people moaning about editing, and one of the big surprises of my life is how much I love it. I love editing. Editing is about the hunt. It's the hunt for sentences that are pretty good so you can flush them out, isolate them, and turn them into great sentences. It's plucking a word out of a thicket and saying, "You're not doing your job" and replacing it with a word twice as powerful to do the heavy lifting.

Editing is finishing work, and no one tells you its transformative power at first because you wouldn't believe it. Flush with the thrill of finishing your first manuscript (you may even have naively typed "the end" to the amusement of all your critique partners) you're saying to yourself, "It's got a couple of problems, but I love it and it's just right."

When you crack it open again to start the editing, though, you're going to have to fall out of love and start relentlessly criticizing. You're going to find the hidden patterns and open them wide so they're out in the light. And you're also going to find your duplications to cull them out. You're going to find those parts where you hesitate and learn that momentary hesitation means you know it's wrong, and you have to do something about it.

Only writers who've done a full edit on their own manuscript know the insane delight that happens when you realize two characters can easily concatenate into one much-more-appropriate character. Or the dread followed by the relief of highlighting a thousand unnecessary words (that is to say, they were necessary when you wrote them but the reader needn't see them -- ever) and hitting the delete key. Or that breathless moment when suddenly you main character's hidden problem finally confides itself to you and you're in effect holding that character's beating heart in your ink-stained hands, and you know just how to leverage that inner pain to create the perfect transformation.

Agents and editors can tell if you've done this work or if you've skimped on it. They may not know exactly where you deleted five adverbs from a paragraph, but they'll recognize a strong paragraph when they read it. They'll appreciate the speed of reading a manuscript without unnecessary verbiage, and they're going to marvel at your finely-tuned characters.

Complain about editing? It's actually kind of a let-down when there's no more to do. It's a moment of despair: I guess it doesn't get any better than this.

But gosh, is it ever worth it. Because in the end, your finishing work turns your little crumpled story into this:

 Someone's going to stop you in a crowd to say, "You made that, didn't you?" and bedazzled, you're going to say, "Yeah. I made that."

Conquering the Cliche

Editor's note: I'm nose-deep in edits of my latest project... and I'm finding myself in need of some of my own advice. Enjoy the reposting of a much-needed lesson!


Whether a plotter or a pantser, a novice or a pro, every writer will eventually do the same exact thing—and that's stare at the screen, fingers poised over keyboard, planning a character's next move.

How you handle your character's next move will set you apart from the rest of the writing masses. Genre matters not; length matters not. What matters is whether or not that next move is a cliché.

A cliché is any expression, idea, or element that has been overused to the point of losing its original intent or effect. There are the obvious clichés, namely those turns of phrase that get used over and over (whoops, that was cliché).

They are comparisons and references and descriptions that are so overused that they render the very language empty and boring.

While clichés are most often recognized as those annoying catch phrases, they can also relate to larger things like character and dialog and plot. Clichés are wicked little buggers that weaken our writing and writers should do their best to find them—and fix them.

Do The Unexpected

Clichés are often found hiding in plain sight (another cliché) whenever we let our characters act naturally—and these are the clichés that doom us to failure (probably cliché).

By acting naturally, I refer to the character doing what feels perfectly natural to us. I like to call it "First Response Syndrome", an unhealthy story condition wherein the character acts upon his/her first—and therefore natural—response to a situation or stimulus.

When a character does exactly what we expect them to do, remember this—every other reader on the planet (cliché) is expecting them to do it, too. And that's kinda boring.

Say your character is waiting for a bus that doesn't seem to be slowing down for her stop.

• The natural response is to let her wait safely on the curb so she doesn't get flattened.
• The unexpected action would be if the woman takes off her shoe and throws it at the bus, cracking the windshield. That's more interesting.
• More interesting, still, would be if the character jumped into the middle of the street and made the bus driver slam on the brakes (technically a cliché but you know what I mean).

Do the unexpected.

Of course, there's a difference between unexpected and ridiculous. You wouldn't have an arthritic ninety-year old grandma jump into the street to stop traffic. (Unless, of course, we only thought she was a ninety-year old grandma but was instead an escaped acrobat who's on the lam (cliché) and wearing a disguise. That is so not cliché.)

But, as I said—ridiculous is not a good thing and you don't want to pull the reader out of the story. You just want to keep them on the edge of their seat (cliché).

Actions aren't the only things that can be cliché in this fashion. Dialog can be cliché, too, even when it doesn't contain any overused expressions. Any character who says what we expect them to say suffers from First Response Syndrome and is in dire need (cliché) of a rewrite. Don't allow your teen protagonist to be a carbon-copy (cliché) of every other teen you know. Forbid your villain the pleasure of twisting his mustache and howling his favorite mu-hahaha laugh (no matter how cool it sounds, it's cliché.)

Breaking The Habit

It takes effort to break a bad habit (cliché) like writing in cliché. However, the story will reap the rewards (cliché) if you can train yourself to spot them and fix them by doing the unexpected.

For instance, doing the unexpected may cause your character to come to a realization about themselves or someone else. An unexpected response may lead to heightened emotions. An unexpected response may tell the reader something about a character's makeup that would otherwise take pages of description—in short, an unexpected response would show a quality that the writer might otherwise be compelled to tell.

Try this exercise: select a portion of your manuscript and print it out. Using a highlighter, mark everything that seems it might be cliché—look for those expressions that are done to death (cliché), scour your dialog for trite or dull responses, and mark off every reaction to a stimulus.

Then, evaluate each instance of highlighted text. Think of a different way to write over those overused phrases. Add color to dialog using emotion and fresh language. Make your character do the exact opposite of their original response.
Do any of the rewrites heighten tension? Make the character seem more interesting? Take the story in a new direction? If it's more interesting to you as the writer, it's going to be more interesting to the reader, as well.

What a lot of us fail to realize is that sometimes our stories get rejected not because our writing is bad but because our work is clichéd. Good isn't acceptable anymore—our work has to be great.

Our characters need dialog that is fresh and original and our characters have to be ready to do the unexpected. Thinking past the first response will add an element of surprise and excitement to your work—and a reader who has to keep reading to find out what happens next is the reader that stayed hooked.

A hooked reader—that's not a cliché... because that never gets old.



Ash Krafton is a speculative fiction writer who, despite having a Time Turner under her couch and three different sonic screwdrivers in her purse, still encounters difficulty with time management. Visit Ash at www.ashkrafton.com for news on her urban fantasy series The Books of the Demimonde (Pink Narcissus Press). Her paranormal romance WORDS THAT BIND (The Wild Rose Press) is now available.

Why You and Me (Make That "I") Need a Copy Editor

As my bio indicates, I am an English teacher in my day job. I also advise our school newspaper, which requires me to read thousands of words of copy each week. Essentially, I edit for a living, which gives me a strong command of grammar and usage, as well as a sharp eye for the typo. But guess what? I still need a copy editor for my own work. The examples below from my original MS of Murder and Marinara should give you some idea why:

Reason One-"An" sounds a lot like "in."

You have exactly five days before Nina LaGuardia pounces for in interview.

Oops.

Reason Two-Some common words are actually proper names:

He led me to the dumpster Dumpster at the corner of the lot.

Who knew?

Reason Three-What makes sense in your head won't always do so on the page:

I stopped at the laundry to pick up all the linens Tim and I had dirtied in the pantry, hoping to drop them off before my grandmother noticed. 

The wise copy editor suggested "return them to the restaurant" for better clarity. Good call.

Reason Four-Continuity. In a scene between Victoria and her sister-in-law Sofia, the women are surfing the internet for information about the case they are working on. However, in the margin was this comment from the copy editor:

They are at Vic’s cottage. She told Josh earlier that she has no Internet there. 

Ah, so she did. (Get the cable guy here, stat!)

Reason Five-Every publisher has its own house style:

We have to find out how he spent his day up to the minute he walked into the restaurant at three thirty.

My original had "3:30" which is the way I normally indicate the time in anything I write. I also don't use a capital letter after a colon (NAL does). I hyphenate two-word modifiers, such as the one in this sentence (NAL does not). Happily, however, we both use Oxford commas.

Copy editors are the usually young, often anonymous, and always unsung heroes of the production process. They exist to make your work shine. So don't dismiss them--embrace them! (After they put down their red pens, of course.)

A Jersey girl born and bred, Rosie Genova left her heart at the shore, which serves as the setting for much of her work. Her new series, the Italian Kitchen Mysteries, is informed by her deep appreciation for good food, her pride in her heritage, and her love of classic mysteries, from Nancy Drew to Miss Marple. Her debut novel, Murder and Marinara, was named a Best Cozy of 2013 by Suspense Magazine. An English teacher by day and novelist by night, Rosie also writes women’s fiction as Rosemary DiBattista. She lives fifty miles from the nearest ocean  in central New Jersey, with her husband and two of her three sons.

Feeding And Feedback

"I wanted you to like me, and I thought the best way to do that was with brilliant and insightful critique."  This is how I introduced myself during the first session at a local critique group. "But in order to do that, I'd have to be brilliant. So instead I made cookies."

Not my original idea, to be fair. I ganked that quote from my English 201 TA, who baked for the few students who attended on the day before Thanksgiving too many years ago to count. I recommend his strategy because it works.

For the second month I attended my critique group, I thought about bringing cookies again. I like baking for other people. I also like eating the things I bake, making it a win-win. But the second month, my Patient Husband said, "If you bake for them this month, they'll expect it every month."

I repeated that on Twitter, and someone replied, "Newsflash: they already expect you to do it every month."

The day before the writing group, I did bake some awesome oatmeal-cinnamon chip cookies, but my youngest child stood on a chair to watch and managed to break the sugar bowl on the stove-top. I threw away two dozen unbaked cookies on the grounds that no one would like Glass-Shard Chip Cookies. After that, I wouldn't have had enough, so I didn't bring any.

For the third session, I considered brownies.

Then I realized, I'm getting critiqued. Does that change things?

I liked (and still like) this group a lot. There's insightful critique; it's well-organized and everyone has an equal chance to participate. The group leader runs a tight-but-not-strangulation-tight ship. What worried me was that showing up with cookies (or brownies or pumpkin muffins) might undercut the other members' negative comments about my manuscript because they might not want to hurt the feelings of the baker. 

Above all, I didn't want them to hold back. In my opinion, hitting a manuscript with honest punches only makes it stronger.

It's overthinking, sure, but is it justified? Critique is useless when it's only positive. Saying that a piece's dialogue works well but omitting that the main character is loathsome (for example) doesn't help the writer, who needs to know those things in order to improve.

A friend of mine tweeted a great idea:

But somehow...oh, I don't know.

Over the years, I've found that the best way to induce insightful critique is more of a pre-emptive strategy than a reactive one. That is to say, I look for writers whose opinions I value and whose work I like, and I try to cultivate a critique-for-critique relationship. I'm no longer the jerk who sends a five-page unsolicited letter critiquing/praising/dissecting a 10-page fanfic (although I made one of my best friends that way) but I've found that when you ask someone to swap critiques, and then you spend about twenty minutes per page critiquing their work and compiling a significant edit letter, you get back about what you've given. (Not always, but if you're selective, it pays off often enough to make it worthwhile.)

Cookies are good, in other words, but most writers want something better to feed on. They want your honesty.

Not all writers -- and you do have to be careful. I also earned one lifelong enemy by saying "I find your tone to be uneven" (and immediately heard back that she'd expected such narrow-minded and judgmental responses from the unenlightened who were too stupid to understand her work. I apologized for being dim and never touched her work again, but she still hated me ten years later.) Sometimes a writer says "honest feedback" but means "unrestrained praise," and it's difficult to tell at first who those writers are. 

It's very important to give feedback at the level the writer needs -- and a writer needs first and foremost to be able to hear what you're saying. Sometimes that means not saying "Your main character is loathsome" but rather "I really like the dialogue, but sometimes I couldn't get as close as I wanted to your main character." Sometimes it means just focusing on the things that work until the writer is ready to hear more. 

Is that dishonest? Or is that like my son's karate instructor, a fifth-degree black belt, not punching my child into the back wall of the dojo just because he could?

That's not what I wanted, though. I wanted it brutal and honest. If the manuscript had to bleed, let it bleed cleanly. If my main character was loathsome, I wanted to hear "Your main character is loathsome no matter how snappy her dialogue."

So I stood at my oven, questioning: would sweet snacks and their empty calories lead to sweet commentary with equally empty suggestions? 

The urge to write versus the urge to bake. Who would win? And in the end, I didn't bring anything to that session either. 

PS: Nowadays, now that I can trust them to tell me where I'm failing, and now that they trust me not to go weep in the corner, I don't hesitate to bring any snacks I want. Because I enjoy both the feeding and the feedback.

---

Jane Lebak is the author of The Wrong Enemy. She has four kids, three cats, two books in print, and one husband. She lives in the Swamp and spends her time either writing books or baking pumpkin muffins. At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four kids. If you want to make her rich and famous, please contact the riveting Roseanne Wells of the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency.

Is Your Work Ready for an Agent?

Base image: DragonTash

One of the biggest mistakes writers make is approaching agents before they’re really ready.

Hard love: Just because you’ve finished a book and you’re happy with it doesn’t mean it’s good. And just because your dog, your significant other, your best friend, and your parents love it also doesn’t mean it’s good. Assuming you want strangers to read your work and think it’s good, you need to have some more objective eyes take a look. And you don’t want to assume that an agent will do the editing for you if there are problems. Many agents will work with you on polishing a manuscript that’s already in great shape, but major flaws are a good way to get a rejection.

Beta readers, who are usually other writers who will read and comment on your work in exchange for you reading and commenting on theirs, will see things you can’t. (If you're not sure how to go about finding betas, check out the QueryTracker forum. Make some friends and you're likely to find betas!)

I’ll never forget how one of my novels began with a heroine who was literally on the run for her life, and she was wearing the wrong shoes. Dramatically, it made sense to me to put her in heels—after all, she had gone to work that morning, and it’s harder to run in heels. But as betas pointed out to me, if she’d felt threatened for days by the people who ended up chasing her, she’d have had to be kind of dumb to keep wearing heels. And that was a turnoff—a heroine who made obviously stupid mistakes.

These days, she’s wearing sneakers.

We all make silly mistakes like that. Not because we’re dumb, but because we’re so wrapped up in the story that logic sometimes escapes us. Especially if we’ve rewritten something multiple times. Sometimes we change something in one place that necessitates a change elsewhere, and we don’t notice that the other change needs to be made.

Once your betas have worked your story over, you may also want to consider a freelance editor—someone you pay to correct problems in your novel before you begin submitting.

Editors usually have a more advanced skill set than beta readers. They may also edit on multiple levels, depending on what you need. If you need developmental or structural edits (i.e. you need the entire book checked for any and all structural problems, including plot, pacing, characterization, and theme), they will cost you more than line edits (i.e. comments and suggestions at the sentence level, including sentences that don’t flow well or make sense), which will cost you more than copy edits (typos, missed words, inconsistencies).

Not all freelance editors are equal, so make sure to shop around and ask writerly friends who they’ve used and liked, and why. Also be sure to check Preditors and Editors for warnings before hiring anyone. Also realize that a good editor will probably cost you a lot more than pocket change.

Some people want to bypass the beta reader stage and jump right to a freelance editor. Though I’m sure there are exceptions, typically this will end up costing you more money than if you'd used betas first because the editor is also doing the work of the betas. You will also get a more helpful edit from a freelancer if betas have helped you out. When there are big things wrong with a novel (major inconsistencies, poor writing, etc.), the editor has to focus on those. Big problems hide the details. Think about it like this: If you broke your leg, and especially if you had an open fracture, that’s what everyone would be worried about—not any less extreme cuts elsewhere on your body.

Once your manuscript is as polished as you can possibly get it and your betas (and/or editor) can't find much to complain about, you're ready for the next step—querying. More on finding and dealing with agents in future posts!*

So—what are your tips? How do you know when you’re ready for an agent?

*I’ve gotten several questions via email recently asking me about dealing with agents, so this is the second part of a series of posts on figuring out whether you need an agent, whether you’re ready to start querying, finding a reputable agent, and choosing someone who really “gets” your work. Of course, QueryTracker.net will help you through all of the stages, and fellow QT blogger Jane Lebak recently wrote a great post on How to Use the QueryTracker Site.

Carolyn Kaufman, PsyD's book, THE WRITER'S GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY: How to Write Accurately About Psychological Disorders, Clinical Treatment, and Human Behavior helps writers avoid common misconceptions and inaccuracies and "get the psych right" in their stories. You can learn more about The Writer's Guide to Psychology, check out Dr. K's blog on Psychology Today, or follow her on Facebook! 

Why You Should Critique Other People's Queries

A Publishing Nerd is Born

I learned to be an editor by accident.

As a 19 year-old college student, I already knew that the world of publishing called to me. So the fact that students at my college wrote and edited an annual edition of The Insider’s Guide to Colleges for St. Martin’s press was a boon to me. I needed that on my resume.

Strangely, proto publishing nerds are not thick on the ground even at Yale. So the fact that I’d turned in five or six three-page college write-ups on time attracted attention. “Hey, you! Quiet girl in the corner—do you want to be an editor?”

Me?

I was wise enough to say yes, and my editing career was born. But I came to the task with a certain amount of trepidation. As I eyed that first stack of 800 word articles, I had no idea what it was I brought to the table. After all, the writer of each one had all the information, right? What use would it be to stick my nose in?

But then I began to read them. And before half an hour had passed, I was rearranging sentences and scribbling notes, asking for clarity. At least 50% of an editor’s job was simply to not be the person who wrote the thing. The job was to be unfamiliar enough with the material to know when things weren’t right. To not be blinded by my own intentions.

Fast forward *mumble mumble* years, and I found myself haunting the hallways of the Query Tracker Forum. At first, I critiqued queries on the board because it seemed like the helpful thing to do. Since I received assistance there, it seemed only right to chime in. But the critiquing I did there quickly began to strengthen my own query efforts. Any reader of the query critique threads will recognize familiar mistakes more easily than someone who labors only on her own work.

Whenever you step in, attempting to smooth out someone’s sentence—rescuing that sparkly description from drowning in adverbs, or untangling modifiers—you’re editing for yourself, too. It is the rare query which contains only mistakes I’m past making for myself. There’s always something to learn.

Last year, I heard a New Yorker Out Loud podcast on the subject of Twitter, in which the editors stunned me with their utter lack at horror over the idea of spending an afternoon trying to write the perfect tweet. Really? These masters of the long form would stoop so low? “It’s time in the batting cage,” one of them rationalized. And that’s what query critiquing can do for us all. Genre be damned.

And after you’ve read your 100th would-be query, a second layer of utility begins to form alongside all your new editing skills. By reading those threads, you’re putting yourself in the agent’s chair. Is this the fifth query you’ve seen which begins: “MC wants nothing more from summer vacation than a deep tan and an invitation to the beach jam, but…?”  Note to self! That opener, while perfectly sound, has been around the block a few times. I’d better not employ it myself. You will also start to spot common query ills—the dropping of too many character names, the compression of too much plot, the overly chatty bio ‘graf. Even if you’ve read up from excellent sources on the “Glamour Don’ts” of query writing, witnessing them in real time is starlingly educational.

Lastly, the art of critique is, in and of itself, an essential writerly skill. I have learned to start every critique by saying one positive thing. Even if the query needs buckets of work (and even if you suspect the manuscript does, too) there is always something encouraging to say.

At my children's school, the first grade teacher closes the day with a verse that the children stand at their desks to recite. The last two lines are keepers: "Every kind word makes me stronger. Every kind deed sets me free." What's true on the playground also works in queryland. Good luck out there!

Sarah Pinneo  is a novelist, food writer and book publicity specialist. Her most recent book is Julia’s Child. Follow her on twitter at @SarahPinneo.

Fifty Shades of Editing

by Stina Lindenblatt @StinaLL

 ©Stina Lindenblatt

Regardless of whether you’re pursuing traditional or self publishing, your book needs to be well edited. If it isn’t, agents and editors will reject it. If you self publish and the story and writing is weak, your writing career is pretty much doomed, unless you use a pen name for your next book. With so many options out there for readers, it’s tough to get a second chance if you blow the first one.

The point of this post is not to provide you with advice on how to edit your book after the first draft. Like everything else in this industry, it’s subjective. What works for one person might not work for someone else. A writer who plots and figures out characterizations first will approach his second draft differently than a writer who jumped straight into writing the first draft without much planning. Instead, I’m focusing on the edits you need to consider from an outside perspective. In all cases, you want to make sure you give the individual the best version of the story to date. That means, no sending them your first draft. You just waste everyone’s time when you do that.

THE FREEBIES

This group of individuals is invaluable. They are your first line of editing and they are free. Well, almost free. When someone offers to give you feedback on your project, remember it’s not a one-way street. There is nothing worse than giving feedback on someone’s 130,000-word manuscript and they do not reciprocate. This group includes critique partners and beta readers. What it doesn’t include is your mom, unless your mom can be critical and give valuable feedback. A lot can’t. On the other hand, if your mom is overcritical about everything in your life, you might want to skip on her feedback. Same deal with your mother-in-law.

Critique Partners and Critique Groups

With these individuals, you usually send your novel to them in chunks. Some groups will meet once a month and exchange chapters. They focus on the here and now, and chances are they won’t remember what they read last time. Because of this, they tend not to see the big picture. They point out places where you could rewrite a sentence so that it’s no longer confusing, and point out things that don’t make sense story wise. These individuals tend to be writers. 

Beta Readers

Unlike the critique partner, beta readers look at the big picture. They will point out problems with your plot and when your characterizations could be stronger (critique partners can do this, too). Some give line edits, but it’s not part of the job description. Beta readers can be writers or avid readers. 

PROFESSIONAL EDITORS

Professional editors tend to have a higher skill set compared to our beta readers and critique partners. But remember, not all are created equal. This depends on numerous factors, including their editing education and experience. An editor who works for Simon & Schuster, for example, will have a greater skill level compared to an author of several short stories who decided to make some extra cash on the side. 

Agents and Editors (with a publisher)

These are individuals are “free,” but they need to love your project and see a market for it before they will offer you a contract. Your book might be great, but if there’s no market for it (in their eyes), agents and editors will pass on your project. Are they right? Not necessarily. But if you’re planning to go the traditional route, you need to impress them first. 

Freelance Editors

These individuals are the ones you hire if you plan to self publish a quality book. This is a step you don’t want to skip. Even if you’re planning to pursue traditional publishing, it doesn’t hurt to have professional editing done before you query. In today’s competitive slush piles, this step might give you the extra edge you need to land a contract. I know one author who does this. The result is she has less editing to do with her publisher, which saves everyone time.

LEVELS OF EDITING

No matter which route you go, there are three levels of editing you need to consider. With traditional publishing, all three are typically done. 

Developmental/Structural Edits

These edits involve the big ticket items, such as plot, characterization, overall pacing, setting, story structure, etc. When you hear an author mention how they received fifteen pages from their editor, this is what they are referring to.

Line Edits

After the big ticket items come line edits. This is where the editor will make comments in your manuscript at the sentence level. She will point out sentences that don’t flow well and make suggestions. Remember, they are just that: suggestions. Be careful you don’t end up messing with your voice (unless you want to). 

Copy Edits

This level of editing is no less important that the others. A copy editor will point out typos, missing words, and inconsistencies. A good one will notice that your main character has blue eyes on page 30 and brown eyes on page 99. That is their job. I recommend you don’t skip on this one. A book filled with typos screams unprofessional. It also screams, “Don’t read my next book!”

The most important thing to remember is that the people giving you feedback need to share your vision for your book. If they don’t, you will end up ripping your hair out in frustration. When looking for the right individuals, see if you can get feedback on a few pages first. That way you can see if you are a good mix.

Have you used a professional editor? How many critique partners and beta readers do you tend to use for each project?