Category: Writing tips

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

  By ,

 Continued from last week’s Part One: The Forest

 –

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.

–

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

—

* 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!

Yikici’s Character & Voice Experiment

  By

If you already know what’s going on, skip to “My Entry.” Otherwise, read on!

This piece is part of a game devised by Voice Week writer Yikici. Yikici had a theory that if you gave two writers the same character sketch and told them to write some dialogue for that character–without letting either writer see what the other had written–that their pieces would still be similar; the voice of the character would shine through.

She tested this by providing setting, background, and situation, then having her participating writers create two characters, and write a 200-300 word dialogue between them. Each writer would then send the character sketches to another participant, who would write another dialogue based on the same characters. She graciously invited me to join in on the last round–and I didn’t even have to write character sketches!

Yikici gave us this:

Setting:  A small quiet village approx 200 miles from the nearest city adorned with thatched cottages and surrounded by vast empty fields.  Not much happens here, except for their festival –the festival of colour, this happens once a year; tourists and families from afar visit, no one misses this event.  This is the highlight of the year for the villagers; they prepare for this the whole year.

The Dialogue Prompts:

  • No children live in the village.
  • A child hides in a barn and stays after the festivities.
  • Your character(s) interacts with the child.
  • The child has a secret.
  • Add a surprise of your own -in keeping with your character(s) profile.

I got character sketches from veteran InMonster Billie Jo. Click here to see the character sketches and the dialogue she wrote.

Yikici will be posting her thoughts, contrasts, and comparisons over the next couple of weeks. Catch up, keep up and offer your own opinions on her blog.

My Entry:

—

“Need any help?”

Hank looked up from packing up his unsold wooden animals to see the redheaded festival organiser bouncing on her heels.

“Haven’t you been here since dawn? You should go home. Get some rest.”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly sleep for the next twelve hours, at least. I just get so excited about the festival. And being in charge this year, it’s even worse!” she laughed. “What do you call that?”

“An Iberian Lynx.”

“Beautiful. How do you think it went?”

“What?”

“The festival of course. Was it as magical as ever?”

Hank sighed. “What flower is this that greets the morn, its hues from Heaven so freshly born? With burning star and flaming band it kindles all the sunset land.”

She gaped at him. “Did you write that?”

“It’s Oliver Wendell Holmes.”

“Oh. Your name is…Hank, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m Lucy Hale.”

“Honored to make your acquaintance, Miss Hale.”

“So it went well then? The festival?”

“Beautifully.”

She smiled—she had a beautiful smile—and insisted on helping him carry the packed crates to his wagon in the barn. He was just turning to retrieve his horse when Lucy grabbed his arm.

“What’s that?”

Hank followed her gaze to a shadowed hole, from whence came a rustling noise.

“Probably just a rat…” he said, but just then, a much larger shape emerged.

It was a little boy.

The boy froze, as surprised to see them as they were to see him.

“Is…” Lucy whispered, “Is that…?”

“It’s a child,” Hank supplied. Lucy had probably never seen one.

The boy dashed for the door, but Hank was quicker, getting a hold of both the boy’s arms.

“Hey, now,” he said gently. “I won’t hurt you.”

Lucy knelt and inspected the boy’s face and fingers with wonder. “He’s so small!”

“Children generally are, yes. Where did you come from?” he asked the boy.

The boy glared at him and held his mouth shut.

“What are we going to do? Should we turn him in?”

“We can’t. Don’t you know what they’ll do to him?”

“But it isn’t his fault. Surely someone can make them see reason. My father—”

“No one can make them see reason.”

“But surely—”

“Believe me. I know.”

—

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

  By ,

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.

—

Got any editing tips? Leave them in the comments!

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

—

7 tips for naming your characters

  By ,

StanleyYelnats. Dreadful Spiller. The Artful Dodger. Lemony Snicket. Ebenezer Scrooge. Arwen Undomiel. Atreyu. Ender Wiggin. Their names are sealed in our hearts forever. So how do we find names for our own characters that have the same staying power?

Baby Name Books

Yes, people actually buy entire books to help them name the two or three children they will have. And then they give the books to used book stores where us hardcore namers can pick them up for half price. These books have lists of first names with meanings, and often etymology, associations in popular culture, and Most Popular lists. There are also several websites that do the same thing. This one, for instance. Or this one, which has popular names from a variety of countries.

Phone Books

Yes! Printed phone books still have a purpose! The residential white pages offer a plethora of options for last names. So if you don’t want all your characters named Smith or Jones or Garcia or Nguyen, pull a real phone book out of the paper recycling and stash it on your bookshelf. Any old edition will do (YellowPages.com isn’t exactly browse-able).

Translation Dictionaries

If your story takes place in a fictional world that presumably speaks a different language, pick up a couple of translation dictionaries in some languages that strike your fancy. Then find a cool sounding word, and change the letters around until it sounds right for your made-up culture. This can work for first and last names.

The Thesaurus

If you want to get a little more whimsical, play around with some synonyms. This often works best for nicknames, but there are no rules.

Bible Names

There are tons of cool names in the Bible—and not just the obvious ones like Adam, Abraham, Sarah, and David. Ishmael is a Bible name. Or there’s Nimrod, Mor’decai, and Eleazar. Start in Genesis 4-5, 10-11 for some good lists, and flip around at your leisure for more.

Choose Different Initials

Characters named Mark and Matt and Mary and Molly can confuse your readers pretty quickly. Make sure to choose names with a variety of first letters to help your readers keep characters straight. Sometimes, however, giving siblings or other family members similar names helps readers to remember how they relate to each other (like Fili and Kili and Oin and Gloin and so on).

Choose for Phonaesthetics

Phonaesthetics refers to the beauty or ugliness of words based on the way they sound, not on their meaning (for instance, beauty and pulchritude are synonyms, but the former is far more phonaesthetically pleasing than the latter). Giving an evil villain an ugly name, or your hero a noble-sounding name, or your comic relief a name that’s fun to say can make those names stick in your readers’ heads.

—

What are some of your favorite character names—read or written?

—

How to kill your hero

  By , ,

SPOILER ALERT: The following includes spoilers for City ofAngels(Sparks), Message in a Bottle (Sparks), A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens), The Brothers Bloom (movie), and Stranger Than Fiction (movie).

—

I’ve blogged about sadism, I’ve blogged about happy vs. sad endings, but this recent InMon piece from LoveTheBadGuy made me want to hit on a more specific topic:

When—and how—to kill a main character. Because sometimes you have to.

But here’s the thing: if you find yourself choosing between preserving the integrity of the story, and pleasing your readers—you are doing something wrong. Readers (the only ones you care about, anyway) will only be pleased if you preserve the integrity of the story.

Or maybe you just want to avoid the clichéd happy ending. But if the ending is that predictable, the ending isn’t the problem; the rest of the book is. Killing the hero because letting him live is cliché is like painting your daughter’s nursery black because pink is cliché. It’s a stunt. Controversy for its own sake, instead of what’s good for the story.

What you’re really looking for is surprise—a twist the readers weren’t expecting. But ask yourself what kind of surprise you’re giving them—good or bad?

Nicholas Sparks’s Unfailing Examples:

  • An angel falls in love with a human, eventually decides to become human himself, so they are finally free to be together when suddenly she gets hit by a car.
  • A reporter finds a heartbreakingly romantic message in a bottle and goes on a search to find its writer, who turns out to be a rugged sailor in the throes of depression over the death of his wife. As he finally opens himself up to love again, he suddenly dies in a shipwreck.

We’re on the edge of our seats rooting for these people to get together, and then—whammo! Sorry, kids, here comes the rainy funeral scene!

Two Reasons This Sucks:

1. While many people like sad endings, nobody likes rude surprises.

2. It’s the same as the pot-bellied uncle who begs “gimme five,” and pulls his hand back at the instant you go to slap it. It’s not clever. It’s just mean.

The Surprise Death

If the death must be a surprise, then it must be meaningful, and the whole story should lead up to it.

When Sydney Carton dies in A Tale of Two Cities, we look back and see that his resemblance to Charles Darnay, his love for Darnay’s wife, and his regret that he has wasted his life, all lead him to give his life for Darnay, so Darnay and wife can live happily ever after.

The Brothers Bloom appears to be a charming heist movie—we aren’t expecting any good guys to die. Bloom, who has wanted out of the crime business for a long time, reluctantly follows his big brother, Stephen, into yet another con. Bloom doesn’t discover until the end that the con involved Stephen sacrificing himself to get Bloom out of the business for good—with a pretty girl, to boot.

“You don’t understand what my brother does. He writes his cons the way dead Russians write novels, with thematic arcs and embedded symbolism and s****. And he wrote me as the vulnerable anti-hero. And that’s why you think you want to kiss me. It’s a con.”

 – Bloom in The Brothers Bloom

The Expected Death

“The woman I loved is…dead.”

–         Christian narrating the beginning of Moulin Rouge

Like all of Sparks’s books, Moulin Rouge tells the story of two unlikely lovers who overcome multiple obstacles to be together—until one of them up and dies at the end, for no apparent reason. The difference? Moulin Rouge warns us at the very beginning. Do I miss the thrill of not knowing? No, because instead of holding out for a last-minute victory and then being sorely disappointed, I’m free to enjoy the story for what it is—a beautiful tragedy.

The Surprise Survival!

Or you can turn it around and hint—even state outright—that you are going to kill your hero, and then up and save him. Happy surprise! But be careful; the same rule for the surprise death applies for the surprise survival: it must make sense. In Stranger Than Fiction, for instance, Eiffel saved Harold Crick with his wrist watch, which had itself been a character since the beginning.

 

Hilbert: Why did you change the book?
Eiffel: Lots of reasons. I realized I just couldn’t do it.

Hilbert: Because he’s real? 
Eiffel: Because it’s a book about a man who doesn’t know he’s about to die. And then dies. But if a man does know he’s about to die and dies anyway. Dies- dies willingly, knowing that he could stop it, then- I mean, isn’t that the type of man who you want to keep alive? 

–         from the final scene of Stranger Than Fiction

—

Agree? Disagree? Tell me why in the comments!