Editing essentials: revising, reworking, revitalizing

~ donaleeMoulton ~ Leave a comment

by donalee Moulton

Great writers don’t need an editor. They demand one. What first-rate writers understand is that another pair of eyes or a fresh pair of eyes are essential to successful communication. This second looks brings a new perspective, the distance that only time (even a little time) can offer, and renewed energy to improve content.

cover of Thong Principle by donalee Moulton

In my book The Thong Principle: Saying What You Mean and Meaning What you Say, I suggest readers try this exercise. You’ll need a piece of paper, 8.5” x 11” if possible.

Now transform that flat piece of paper into the world’s most wonderful flying machine. The goal is to soar, specifically to fly as far as possible. Take a few minutes to play with different designs, then stand up and launch your creation. How far did it go?

Now let’s rethink, or edit, the exercise. What did your flying machine look like? Something similar to a paper airplane?

Let’s review the instructions, the language. Nowhere did it say to build a paper airplane. It said a flying machine. The goal was distance. What would be an easier way to build a flying machine? What would get us great distance?

Crumpling the paper into a ball would.

That’s what editing does. As we write, whether for a reader or a listener, we dive in. Ideas flow. We create content. We think about our audience. We identify important points to make. We’re in the midst of our content, our characters, and our creativity.

When we edit, we take a step back. We come up for air. We have a different perspective – and a draft on which to overlay a fresh set of eyes. Even short pieces of writing should be edited. We need to think before we walk away. We need to give ourselves time to review and revise. To take one last read through (or think through). You’ll be surprised at what you missed or decide to revise.

Editing is essential to clear, concise, compelling writing. But editing isn’t just one thing. Just as pizza isn’t just one thing. There is deep dish pizza with red carnival spinach. Thin crust pepperoni and Bloomsdale spinach. New York-style pizza with Tyee spinach. Notice though that although the type of pizza is different there are common elements.

That’s also true when it comes to editing. There are three broad types: substantive editing, stylistic editing, and copyediting.

I thought we could spend a little time exploring these different types of editing in future blogs. Until then, I’d love to hear from you about your editing process, what drives you nuts, what makes your heart sing.

What a Character!

~ lanamfox ~ 4 Comments

What makes a reader fall in love with a character? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I write my sixth book, hoping that this will be my breakout novel. You know, the one that people can’t quit talking about.

I thought about Louise Penny’s early books. I read the first one and wasn’t that impressed. Yes, the characters were quirky, but the story was simple and didn’t hold my interest. Later, someone suggested I listen to her books on audible and I fell in love with Inspector Gamache and the rest of the cast. The narrator’s voice brought the story to life for me. But other readers loved the early books and continued to read and beg for more, making Louise Penny a household name for those of us who love mysteries. Do we all need a duck who spits profanity, a quarrelsome old lady who is a renowned poet? What is it about these books that readers love so much? Is it that the characters are larger than life?

I also love JA Jance’s Sheriff Joanna Brady books. I love the interaction between Joanna and her husband, Butch, and their children. I love that she can be a tough cop at work and a warm wife and mother at home.

Lisa Regan writes the Detective Josie Quinn series. Josie is such a great character. Even though she’s had to overcome so much—being abducted as an infant and raised by a cruel, vindictive woman— she never gives up.

There are so many books with so many great characters. I’m sure we could go for days naming our favorites and why they are our favorites.

In my first book, a standalone titled, The Truth Will Set You Free, a young woman is looking for her birthmother and travels to the small town of Cascade Locks, Oregon, where her mother grew up. It’s a dual timeline, told from the young woman’s perspective, and thirty years earlier from her mother’s perspective. Even though, Natalie, the young woman searching for her birthmother is broken because she had been lied to by the woman who raised her, the real star of the book is her mother, Colleen. Colleen makes all the wrong decisions, but you fall in love with her because her heart is so big. Even though she’s made so many mistakes in her life, when she loves someone, her boyfriend, her mother, she loves with all her heart.

I recently binge-watched Roseli and Isles. I know, I’m way behind in my TV viewing. But I fell in love with the characters on the show. I enjoyed each episode, but mostly what I loved was the relationships between the characters, and I really loved the friendship between Roseli and Isles.

I’ve watched a lot of cop shows over the years. Blue Bloods was probably my all-time favorite. I loved the family and how they interacted. I’ve been thinking a lot about acting and how actors take a character and bring them to life. Maybe an acting class would be a good way to learn how to write outstanding characters.

What makes a great character? Maybe it’s just people doing people-y things. Being scared and courageous and mean and kind and smart and doing stupid stuff, all the things that really make someone human. Or maybe it’s making each character bigger than life. Creating something inside them that makes readers sit up and take notice.

Now I’m going back to work on my characters and see if I can make them even more real. What character traits can I give them to make them stand out? I’ve heard that mysteries are more about plot than characters, but I believe characters are what bring the plot to life.

Too Much Imagination?

~ patyjag ~ 4 Comments

Writing has always been therapy for me. A way to put my vivid imagination to good use instead of making me fearful and worried.

Early in my married years, when my hubby was a truck driver, my imagination would play scenarios in my head about things that happened to him while he was driving. Or if my parents were coming to visit and they were late, my mind would jump to all the tragic things that could have happened.

Once I started writing, sitting down nearly every day and putting my imagination to work writing stories, I rarely envision harm coming to people I know anymore.

What does happen is that my mind is constantly finding ways to bump off people in my mystery books. Ways that are unusual or that are everyday things that can become deadly. I haven’t asked other murder mystery writers if they do the same thing. I need to do that the next time I’m at a conference.

My latest was an innocent trip to the local theater group to watch the play “Oklahoma!” I had been toying with going, and then a friend said the Elgin Opera House put on the best plays, that most of the actors were actually people wanting to get into the field, and used the Opera House as a way to pad their résumés.

So I called my daughter, who lives halfway between the Opera House and me, to ask if she wanted to go with me. She said yes and I purchased the tickets online.

I have driven by the Opera House a hundred or more times, but I’ve never been inside the historical building built in 1912. We parked and entered the building, purchasing water and popcorn before finding our seats in the balcony section. I was impressed by the tin ceiling, the sloped seating, and the excellent sound. Very historical looking. The chairs were a bit hard, even though they were padded. I’m pretty sure it was the old wood shaving stuffing that had been packed down over decades of use!

We were a little bit early and entered the balcony from the top, found our seats, and took in the surroundings. After visiting and talking about the stage and my daughter having been in the building before, when her daughter was in a play, we decided to use the restroom before the play started. I stayed seated as my daughter went to use the facilities. The balcony didn’t have any lights on. The light came from down below on the stage. My daughter doesn’t like heights,. She came back from the restroom and said she didn’t like walking along the edge of the balcony to go to the door leading down to the restrooms.

I laughed at her and said, at least it wasn’t as high as the Church tower we’d climbed up to in Holland. Then I went down to walk along the balcony railing. It came to my knees, and the walking area between the railing and the front row seats was maybe 24 inches. I stopped to look down at the seating below and felt a little dizzy from the darkness above, the light below, and the sense that I was tipping toward the railing.

I continued on and then as I came back, the idea hit me that having a character be at the opera house for a play and seeing a person fall from the balcony would make a good start to a murder mystery. And as I sat in the balcony watching the play, more and more scenes flashed through my mind.

At the end of the play, when the spectators in the balcony had left, I sat in the front row and envisioned how someone could orchestrate an accidental fall.

So stay tuned for book three in the Cuddle Farm Mysteries. The death at the beginning of the book may or may not have been an accident! 😉

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In Search of a Writing Routine

~ Margaret Lucke ~ 4 Comments
Banner showing author Margaret Lucke and some of her books

By Margaret Lucke

“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.” — E. B. White

The other day a nonwriter friend asked me if I write every day. With regret and some embarrassment I had to admit that despite my desires and good intentions, days (okay, weeks) often slip by without my having written a word. I mean, sure, I jot down grocery lists and dash off responses to emails, but that’s not my friend meant. She was referring to making progress on my current novel.

It’s not hard to come up with reasons not to write. Important and meaningful reasons. Errands need to be run, laundry must be done, good friends deserve a visit, the genius level on the New York Times Spelling Bee game insists on being achieved. But something feels off when I reach bedtime and realize that my protagonist has done nothing all day except sit there and twiddle her thumbs

I do believe in the value of writing routines. I’m convinced that having a good routine ensures a writer will be more productive, more focused, more intelligent, more witty and clever, more successful …

If only I could come up with one.

It’s not that I haven’t tried. In fact I’ve made quite a study of what works for others in the hope that I’d find a routine suited to my habits and temperament. What I’ve discovered is that routines are as varied as writers themselves, though they tend to fall into several categories.

>> The up-before-dawn writer

“Do they know I get up at five o’clock every morning to write 1,000 words before breakfast?” — Margaret Meade

These are the people who set the alarm for 4 or 5 a.m., get up and write for two or three hours, and then go off to report to their day jobs or whatever else places demands on their time. Anthony Trollope, who worked as a civil servant, wrote 46 novels this way. I have several friends who swear by this method and write fine books in the tender hours before sunrise.

>> The grab-bits-and-pieces-of-time writer

“The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything.” — John Irving

Another friend, before she retired, spent all of her lunch hours at work in the parking lot, where she would sit in her car and write. Mystery writer and attorney Michael Gilbert wrote 23 novels on the train as he commuted from his home in Kent to his law firm’s London office. William Carlos Williams, a physician, scribbled stories and poems on prescription pads in between patients. I admire the way writers who do this can shift gears so quickly from other activities and home in on their writing.

>> The quota-system writer

“All through my career I’ve written 1,000 words a day — even if I’ve got a hangover.” — J.G. Ballard

These are the writers who set a daily goal and refuse to leave their desk until it is accomplished. The goal might be to write for a set number of hours or to achieve a specific page count or word count. This was the principal behind the sadly demised Nanowrimo, or National Novel Writing Month, which challenged writers each year in November to a produce a novel of at least 50,000 words. Producing 1,667 words a day would get you there. Note that the folks behind Nanowrimo didn’t insist that the novel be any good.

>> The ritual writer

“I had a ritual once of lighting a candle and writing by its light and blowing it out when I was done for the night.” — Jack Kerouac

Writers are not necessarily superstitious, but we know that sometimes we must do certain things to draw the muse to our side and appease her when she’s present. This can lead to some peculiar writing routines. Victor Hugo would shed his clothes and instruct his valet to hide them; being nude, he couldn’t leave the house so he might as well write. Charles Dickens carefully arranged certain items on his desk to foster his creativity, among them a vase of fresh flowers and a bronze statuette of dueling toads. Natalie Goldberg often wrote with a cigarette in her mouth; she usually didn’t smoke it but used it as “a prop to help me dream into another world.”

I’ve dabbled in variations from each of these categories, but I haven’t found the perfect routine for me. How about you? What works? I’m open to your suggestions.

Songs and Stories

~ Janet Dawson ~ 9 Comments

There was always music in our house.

Mom majored in music in college, until she dropped out during World War II to marry Dad. She played the piano and sang in the church choir. She also participated in a local singing group that sang standards and show tunes and performed around town.

Dad enjoyed the music of the forties, which was when he courted and married Mom. Sometimes he’d put a record on the hi fi, grab Mom, and they would dance around the family room.

I took piano lessons for many years. I bought a guitar once but couldn’t get my little fingers to fret properly, so I passed it along to my brother. He’s the musician in the family who plays with local bands and never travels without multiple guitars, just in case someone, somewhere, might want to jam.

I love listening to all kinds of music—rock, folk, jazz, country. I sing along. I first heard of the Beatles in 1963 (yes, I’m that old) and have been a fan ever since. The Rolling Stones, the Animals (Eric Burdon!), bring it on. Then there’s Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, and Gordon Lightfoot. I saw Lightfoot in concert twice, once at the University of Wyoming fieldhouse and the second time at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheater.

My best memory of that venue is a concert in the 1970s. As the sunset hit those massive, tilted slabs of red sandstone, making them glow even redder, John Denver came out on stage singing “Rocky Mountain High.”

I like songs that tell stories. There are so many of them, in all the permutations. Think of the tales we heard on the radio: Wake Up, Little Susie by the Everly Brothers. House of the Rising Sun, and no one sings it like Eric Burdon. Dolly Parton’s Jolene, El Paso by Marty Robbins. Ode to Billie Joe by Bobbie Gentry. Eleanor Rigby, the Beatles classic. Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie. City of New Orleans, the Steve Goodman song that’s been covered by everyone from Guthrie to Willie Nelson. And of course, Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Songs that tell stories, yes. I had a fling with opera at one point, but my longest love affair is with musical theatre. I was raised on Broadway musicals, particularly those of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.

A native Oklahoman, I spent my early years in that state. The state song is “Oklahoma!” Of course it would be, the title song of the groundbreaking R & H musical of the 1940s. I was about six years old when the movie version came out and spent my childhood hearing all those tunes.

So did lots of other people. I recently visited the Museum of Broadway in New York City. There’s a room in the three-story museum dedicated to Oklahoma! and I chuckled at the number of people who strolled through the exhibit singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.”

Before R & H came along, musicals were different. The Rodgers & Hammerstein website explains why.

The tradition . . . was largely a non-narrative one, i.e., revues and loosely constructed vehicles for singers, dancers and comedians.

Why was Oklahoma! groundbreaking? It was a narrative musical which:

. . . places a priority on telling a narrative – a story with a beginning, middle, and end. What made Oklahoma! groundbreaking as a narrative musical was not simply that it told a story (dozens of opera, operettas, and musical comedies had done that for decades), but the ruthless discretion that Rodgers, Hammerstein and their collaborators deployed towards dialogue, music, lyrics, staging, dances and décor in order to tell that story. Like Michelangelo chiseling away all the superfluous marble that wasn’t essential to his statue, the creative team was boldest in paring away all the obstacles that got in the way of their story.

We’re writing fiction, not musical theatre. But essentially, we writers are doing the same thing. We use every element at hand. First, we throw our plot, characters and story into the mix. Then we pick up that chisel and start working on that big slab of marble. Cut here, polish there. We eliminate everything that’s superfluous until we have the story we want to tell.

Grab your chisel and get to work. And sing along with your favorite show tune if the spirit moves.