Category: Editing

The Diamond-Buyer’s Guide to Writing a Literary Gem

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Photo by Steve de Polo

When determining the value of a diamond, gemologists look at four factors, collectively known as the Four Cs. By a convenient coincidence, all four coincide with important points of writing. So here are a few pointers on writing a novel that shines.

Carat – the size or weight of the diamond.

Do your plot and characters have enough weight to carry the story? Does enough happen to your hero, not just physically, but emotionally, that the story is worth writing and worth reading? If so, proceed. If not, it isn’t worth the cost. Dig deeper.

 

Clarity – how many inclusions (little black dots) are in the diamond.

Unclear wording slows down your reader – and thus the story, and keeps the light from shining through. Bummer. Look back at 47 ways to find and eliminate inclusions in your writing.

 

Cut – If a diamond is cut too long, the light will bounce sideways off the lower facets. Too short, and the light just falls through. But just right, a la Goldilocks, and the light reflects off the lower facets directly into the eyes for optimum sparkle.

Just so with editing. “They” say to cut anything that is not necessary to the plot. But a novel cannot live on plot alone. Character is just as important. Check every scene to ensure it contains two or more of the following elements:

  • Establishing character
  • Advancing plot
  • Foreshadowing events
  • Braiding in subplots

If you find a scene that doesn’t have two or more elements—and you can’t manage to work a second element in—cut it. If there was anything important in that scene, extract it and work it into another existing scene.

                       

Color – the purer white it is, the more iridescent the shine.

In writing, that pure whiteness is honesty. Yes, you are writing about made-up people in made-up situations, but you still must be emotionally honest. About how you see the world. About what keeps you up at night. What you fear. What you long for. What hurts most. And why you keep on fighting. When you’re writing that first draft, don’t try to be eloquent. Don’t try to impress your readers. Don’t preach at them. Just climb into the head of the character who’s telling the story. Then reach into your gut and vomit your feelings on the paper. The worst and the best.

That’s when the precious gem emerges; when you’re not trying to create a feeling, but to express one. As Ray Bradbury says, “when a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.”

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47 words and phrases that slow your reader down

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Packed car trunk

Photo by Alan (click for credit)

Your neighborhood is about to be blown up by alien invaders. You have 24 hours to pack your car and get out of the city. What do you bring?

You have to choose the most essential, useful, meaningful items that you can possibly fit in a limited space. You have plenty of time to choose, but – still. You might seriously regret taking the gun instead of the pitchfork two months from now when you’ve run out of bullets and discover you have to grow your own food.

Sometimes the things that seem essential are really just taking up space. 

That’s what it’s like to write a novel.

It’s also one last tip in how to write a page-turner.

Cut the fluff.


The second A in AIDA

Fluff drags the writing. It’s clutter. Every unnecessary word makes a sentence harder to understand. The brain must sort through what’s important and what’s not, sometimes going over a sentence three or four times to make sure it read it right. More work for your readers’ weary eyes and minds. And yet another reason to stop reading.

“But I don’t have any fluff,” you might say, “Everything I say is relevant,” you might insist.

Are you sure about that?

Here are 19 examples of pointlessly wordy expressions from Strunk & White’s Rule no. 17:

  • The question as to whether (instead, say: whether)
  • There is no doubt but that (no doubt/doubtless)
  • Used for fuel purposes (used for fuel)
  • He is a man who (he)
  • In a hasty manner (hastily)
  • This is a subject that (this subject)
  • His story is a strange one. (His story is strange.)
  • The reason why is that (because)

 “the fact that” is never necessary:

  • Owing to the fact that (since / because)
  • In spite of the fact that (though / although)
  • Call your attention to the fact that (remind you / notify you)
  • I was unaware of the fact that ( I was unaware that / did not know)
  • The fact that he had not succeeded (his failure)
  • The fact that I had arrived (my arrival)

Case, character and nature are  rarely necessary:

  • In many cases, the rooms were poorly ventilated (Many of the rooms were poorly ventilated)
  • It has rarely been the case that any mistake has been made (Few mistakes have been made)
  • Acts of a hostile character/nature (Hostile acts)

Who is, which was, etc. are rarely necessary:

  • His brother, who is a member of the same firm (His brother, a member of the same firm)
  • Trafalgar, which was Nelson’s last battler (Trafalgar, Nelson’s last battle)


In On Writing Well, William Zinsser has plenty to say about clutter.

It won’t do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it’s usually because the writer hasn’t been careful enough….A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time.

He points out “[clutter] slows the reader and makes the writer seem pretentious.”

Here are 24 examples:

  • Assistance ( Help)
  • Numerous (Many)
  • Facilitate (Ease)
  • Individual (Man or woman)
  • Remainder (Rest)
  • Initial (First)
  • Implement (Do)
  • Sufficient (Enough)
  • Attempt (Try)
  • Referred to as (Called)
  • With the possible exception of (Except)
  • He totally lacked the ability to (He couldn’t)
  • Until such time as (Until)
  • For the purpose of (For)

Currently, at the present time, and at this point in time can all be replaced with now or today.

Cut fluff phrases like:

  • I might add
  • It should be pointed out
  • It is interesting to note

And phrases that indicate self-doubt (thereby and weakening the tone), like:

  • A bit
  • Sort of
  • I’m tempted to say
  • In a sense

 

I’ll add a few of my own:

  • Very [usually superfluous: very loud, very tall]
  • That [can often be cut: he thought that she was pretty vs. he thought she was pretty]
  • In order to (To)
  • Help to (Help)

Will Your voice may demand that you break some of these rules? Possibly. But only some. I challenge you to commit to cutting 500 words from out of your first chapter.* Take a word count, write it on a sticky note, stick it to your monitor and start cutting. You don’t have to cut whole paragraphs. You may not even have to cut whole sentences. Just a phrase here or there. Change from passive voice to active to save a word or two. Get clever. When you’ve cut reached your 500 mark, go back and reread the chapter. See just how much sharper the writing is.

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* This is assuming Only if you’re in the final editing stages. If you’re still fixing plot problems, don’t worry about line editing yet.

NOTE: The actual edits in this post are examples, not rules. For voice, it might have been wise to leave some of the phrasing as it was.  But none of the cuts confused the meaning – good to know if you’re ever up against a word limit.

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How to edit your novel: 5 more practical tips that really work

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 Continued from last week’s Part One: The Forest

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photo by David Mellis

Now we move in for a close up, a focus more on the words and sentence structures than on the story itself. But let’s say you’ve got the grammar stuff down. How else do you clean up your prose?

Part Two: The Trees

Clarity and Flow

1. Compare sentence and paragraph lengths.* Take a sample chunk of your manuscript—say, one to two pages—and, highlight each sentence in alternating colors. The first sentence blue, the second red, the third blue again and so on. Then, take a step back and look at it. There should be a variety of long and short sentences: if all your sentences are about the same length, that’s a sign of bad flow, and you’ll need to do some tweaking.

Bonus tip: Different parts of the story may require different types of flow. Intensify action scenes, like fights or chases, by using more short sentences.

Then, take a sample chapter and do the same thing, but highlighting paragraphs this time. There should be a variety of paragraph lengths.

2. Compare sentence starts.* Using the same samples outlined in #1, highlight the first word of every sentence and then compare them. This helps you ensure a variety of sentence structures. Be on the lookout for pronouns and names. I’ve often had four or five sentences in a row beginning with “She did such-and-such.” Yuck. It makes the prose choppy and repetitive. Rearrange a few of these sentences to improve flow.

3. Search and replace words you use too much. Create a word cloud of your manuscript on wordle.net. ** The biggest words are the ones you use the most (Wordle automatically filters out naturally common words like the and and). Your main character’s names will unavoidably be huge, but look out for others. My most recent test revealed “like” to be pretty big—a sign I may have too many similes. There’s no magic number for how many is too many, but try taking the two or three biggest words in your word cloud, and then searching your manuscript for them (the “Find” feature in MS Word). If you see a pattern emerging, work on editing out at least half.

4. Read aloud. This is what critique partners and writing groups or for: an excuse to read chunks of your writing out loud. Bonus if you can get one of them (who is good at reading aloud) to read it for you while you stand by with a red pen. This way you can make sure an objective reader will:

  • Emphasize the right words. If not, try restructuring the sentence, altering punctuation, or italicizing the words that need to be emphasized.
  • Pause in the right places. If not, you need to add punctuation—commas, semicolons, periods, etc.
  • Doesn’t stumble too much. Passages that are tricky on the tongue can be tricky on the brain, too.
  • Doesn’t repeat the same words too close together. The same adjective, for instance, should not appear twice on the same page.
  • Doesn’t rhyme. Unintentional rhymes sound awful and interrupt flow.

5. Commit to cutting words. You may be horrified at the idea of slicing phrases out of your so carefully crafted masterpiece. Don’t be. Force yourself to cut, say, 100 words per chapter. This doesn’t necessarily mean cutting whole paragraphs, or even whole sentences. Get crafty. See if you can find a word here or there that you can cut without sacrificing meaning. Here’s what will happen as a result:

  • You’ll start to recognize patterns of superfluity and be able to avoid it in the future.
  • You’ll start to recognize when to cut bigger passages that are dragging the story.
  • Your writing will tighten up: it will be clearer, more powerful, and easier to read; which means readers will keep reading.

If all that doesn’t convince you, I’ll appeal to Strunk & White to back me up: rule #17: Omit needless words. Here are examples of words you can cut.

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What editing tips have you picked up? Tell me in the comments!

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* I owe these two tips to my first writing teacher, Miss Judy. Thanks, Miss Judy, wherever you are!

** I owe this tip to Jubilare—pay her a visit; she’s got a new blog!

How to edit your novel: 7 practical tips that really work

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You’re drowning in words. There are a million things wrong with this book. And you’re so busy trying to figure out why page thirty-five sounds so blooming doofy that it’s months before you notice the whole first half of the book drags and your characters are totally flat.

Further down the road, after countless rewrites, you will finally realize you’re the wrong person to edit your work. You’re too close to it. The picture of what you want your novel to be is so huge in your mind’s eye that it leaves no room for what the novel actually is. You can get your friends to read it, but they’re not editors either, and can’t tell you much. And you sure as heck can’t afford to pay a professional a few thousand dollars to take a look at it.

So…a hopeless case?

Not so.

You just need a plan.

For starters, forget about your novel for a couple of weeks, at least. You need a break. Use the time to catch up on your reading and write a short story or some flash fiction. When you’re ready, take a deep breath and proceed to the next paragraph:

Nathan Bransford has the excellent advice of starting with the biggest stuff and working your way down from there. You don’t want to waste time making a bunch of tiny changes in a section you’ll end up cutting or completely rewriting later on. Nathan also has a fantastic editing checklist.

But if you’re like me, you need help seeing the big stuff. Because right now, you can’t see the forest for the trees (er…the story for the words?).

Here are some practical steps that work for me.

Part One: The Forest

Plot, Tension, and Character Development

 

1. Summarize. Quickly skim each chapter and, in a separate document, list everything that happens, in order (incomplete sentences are fine). My Chapter 3 summary looks like this:

Meets R. Discovers language problem. Walks to castle. Intro J, planning to leave. They meet. J shocked. Debates his life or hers. Tells her truth. She doesn’t believe it. Hear ship outside.

2. Highlight tension and clues. Pick two colors and highlight the parts of your summary that indicate either an escalation of tension (dramatic stuff like explosions, death, getting fired, or discovering a cheating spouse) or the revealing of clues (interesting information that will be important later, like footprints, mysterious notes, or snippets of conversation). The colors may overlap sometimes.

3. Highlight character development. With a third color, highlight everything that indicates character development. That includes background, expressions of love or hate, and any important decisions the character makes. You might use different colors for each major character. Do each character’s actions fit with his or her personality? Do they change as the story progresses?

4. Review the plot. Looking over your summary (highlighted in at least three colors by now), pay attention to the progression of the plot. Which characters cause which events? Did those characters have logical reasons for acting that way (plausible motives)? Does each event lead logically into the next? If not, hold a brainstorming session to find a way to make it work (critique partners are invaluable for this kind of thing).

5. Rearrange. Once you’ve got your plot squared away, again look at the highlighted portions. Make sure you have an increase in tension at least once in every chapter, preferably at the end (keep readers reading). Make sure your “clues” are spread fairly evenly throughout and not clumped together (nothing worse than a huge pile of plot exposition at the climax). Move chapter breaks around if necessary.

6. Compare each character’s dialogue separately. Now back to the actual manuscript. Using the “Find” feature of your word processor, search for your main character’s name. Stop at each place you find dialogue by that character. Copy and paste it into another document if necessary. Make sure everything that character says consistently matches his upbringing and personality. Tweak as necessary. Then, do the same for the next major character down, and so on.

7. Contrast dialogue between characters. Make sure your characters don’t all talk the same way. Adults speak differently from children, blue collar workers from desk jockeys, Northerners from Southerners, and aliens from dragons. Play around with accents, slang, and verbal ticks.

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Got any editing tips? Leave them in the comments!

Now posted: how to look at the “trees” of your novel.

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Word search: the magic diet pill for novels

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 DailyWritingTips.com recently published a guest post I wrote called 3 Things the Novelist Can Learn from the Copywriter, roughly 1/3 of which was about brevity. Let’s expand on that!

Brevity is the soul of wit. The fewer the words, the harder they hit.

You’d be amazed how many unnecessary words are weighing down your manuscript, clogging up your sentences and tiring your readers. Fortunately, modern technology has given us an easy way to trim some of this grammar fat: word search!

How do you do a word search? In MS Word, click “Edit” then “Find…” and type in the word you are looking for. If you use a different program, try typing “word search” or “find and replace” into the “Help” search bar.

Got it? Here are eight examples of word calories you can cut:

1. Very

“Very” is a very evil word that sucks the power out of nearly every sentence it appears in. Just look at how very unnecessary “very” is in these sentences from a very old draft of my book:

It would very soon become the same for her.

She vaguely remembered seeing a very bright light coming at her.

He would have to decide very quickly how much he could tell her.

Very soon. Very bright. Very quickly. “Very” is overkill – modifying modifiers.

It would soon become the same for her.

She vaguely remembered seeing a bright light coming at her.

He would have to decide quickly how much he could tell her.

Do a word search in your novel or story for “very” and eliminate all that you can.

2. That

Not as bad as “very,” but still often unnecessary. Try eliminating this one as well.

3. By

“By” is a sign of passive voice, which should almost always be avoided which you should almost always avoid. (Except to preserve clarity or to break up a monotonously-active paragraph.) Search “by” and reword all you can.

      Passive: The ball was thrown over the fence by Billy.

      Active: Billy threw the ball over the fence.

4. –ly

Never use an adverb when the right verb works fine on its own. “Very” is just one example; most adverbs end in “ly.” Do a word search for “ly” and pay special attention to phrases like “walked quickly.” Search thesaurus.com for the root verb, “walk.” Keep clicking words within your results to find the right one. “Trotted” is descriptive enough to replace “walked quickly” – it sounds better, too.

5. In order to

Almost always cut “in order.”

6. The fact that

Depending on the context:

            “Owing/due to the fact that” – replace with “since” or “because”

            “In spite of the fact that” – replace with “though” or “although”

7. The question as to whether

Cut “the question as to”

8. The reason why is that

Replace with “because”

The Elements of Style by Strunk & White gives additional word-trimming advice (rule #17, p. 23-24). This book is the writer’s bible. If you don’t already own it, read it free here.

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