Strangers vs Relatives

I do free-lance editing, and there are differences between editing the work of a stranger and editing the work of a relative, like a spouse.

Some things stay the same; I am always careful not to make changes just to suit my style. I haven’t written this manuscript; it belongs to somebody else. But I don’t have problems taking out unnecessary commas, or putting one in where it is needed; of keeping verb tense consistent; of changing ‘shuttered’ to ‘shuddered’ when a character is cold - of making sure they really are saying what they intended to say.

When I edit, I try to give some guidelines to help them improve as a writer, so I won’t have to work so hard with their next manuscript. If I want them to change a sentence, paragraph, or scene, I explain why, and give at least one example of how (I think) it could be improved.

Strangers, so far, have been pretty easy to convince. Relatives... not so much.

There have been other challenges when editing for a relative that - so far - have not happened with a stranger. Like the time I was editing a 400+ page manuscript, and asked my relative to clarify/change a paragraph on page 151. He had already changed that paragraph and had apparently given me the wrong version of his manuscript. I had to start over.

Another time, I explained to a relative that when a planet’s moon is in the ‘new’ phase, it is (relatively) between the sun and planet, and so would not be in the sky at 1 AM, the middle of the night. I don’t think he believed me.

The difference might be a matter of perception. To the author who doesn’t know me, I am an editor, one who respects him/her as an author, and they listen and return that respect, especially if they are fairly new. To the relative, I am a sister, cousin, parent, daughter, or even a spouse. Yes, I’m intelligent, but they are, too, and while they love me, they don’t necessarily view me as knowing what I’m talking about.

Despite the challenges of editing the work of either a stranger or a relative, I would rather do that than edit my own work! Because in that case, I turn into an idiotic despot... on both sides.

The Mechanics of Writing

I have the honor of being trusted enough to edit other people's manuscripts from time to time. Occasionally, I find myself giving mini-lessons in the mechanics of writing as I do so. Here are some examples:

In fiction, dialogue does not go on a separate line just because it's dialogue.

When one character is speaking for several paragraphs, do not put end quotes at the end of each paragraph, save them for the very end of that person's dialogue. Do, however, start each paragraph with opening quotes. This is a subtle indication to the reader that the same character is speaking these paragraphs.

Generally, past tense verbs are preferred over present tense verbs. Whichever tense you choose to write in, stick with that tense. Don't flip between present and past tenses.

If you are writing from Character A's point of view, he cannot tell the reader things he does not know. If B & C secretly meet to discuss something, A must overhear them - or be told about the meeting - in order to tell the reader about it.

'I' is for the subject. 'Me' is for the object of the verb. If you lump yourself with another person, and can't decide if you've chosen the correct pronoun for yourself, try reading the sentence without that other person. 'Mother and me went to the park.' = 'Me went to the park.' I don't know about you, but that grates on my brain. It should be 'I went to the park,' therefore, 'Mother and I went to the park.'

The best source I have found for learning some of these mechanics is the book, Elements of Style by Strunk & White. It is a whopping 85 pages long. It is clear and concise, without a lot of fluff to clutter it up. I try to read it every couple of years, just to remind myself of things.

This book, however, is not written with fiction in mind, so sometimes, a punctuation question comes up that is not addressed in its pages. This past month, I have discovered a blog by 'Grammar Gal', which has answered a couple punctuation questions I had. She seems to know her stuff, and explains it clearly. She has joined my 'resource' list as well.

My dad used to say, "If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right." I have to agree. So if you want to write, brush up on your grammar rules. It makes it much easier on the editor, who can then concentrate on finding any plot holes you might have missed.

Even if you aren't writing books, just emails to friends and family, being aware of the grammar rules will make those emails easier for them to read.

Practice What You Preach

I read a lot of e-newsletters. Some give me tips on how to write better, some give me clues about markets I might submit to, and some try to tell me how to market my work, once it gets published. Most of them I can read fairly quickly. But one of them I read this week... !

I don't remember which newsletter I was reading, possibly one on marketing, because the article seemed to be on what type of website to make announcements, timing and the type of announcement. After almost every website type/announcement type that it listed, the author expanded by saying you should edit, edit, edit everything before you sent it off into the world. The reasoning was that if you make an impression on potential readers with poor grammar, spelling and punctuation, they aren't likely to look up your book and buy a copy.

I have to agree with that sentiment.

A lot of people never learned these things in school well enough to know how to follow the rules, and therefore, they don't think it's really important. Texting, when it required hitting the same button a number of times to get one letter, further eroded people's ability to spell, it seems. But as long as the idea gets across, anything goes these days, right?

No, I can't agree with that sentiment.

I have re-worked and proofread and edited enough to be pretty familiar with most of the rules of the English language. It doesn't bother me to get a text on my phone with 'u' for 'you' and 'ur' for 'your'. I consider that a kind of slang.

But when I'm reading something that purports to be informative and professional, I expect it to be well edited. This particular article in this newsletter was NOT. Here it was, expounding on the idea that everything you put out there should be edited, and the author did not appear to know the difference between [its] and [it's], or where commas belong, or how to spell.

Now I'm left in a dilemma. Do I believe this author was knowledgeable in the field and take the advice offered? Or write the article off as a waste of time because the author couldn't be bothered to take his/her own advice?

Stuck in Rewrite

There are several steps to writing, but one of the first steps (not necessarily THE first step) is to scratch out a rough draft. It can be great fun, to let my imaginary imagination wings take flight and show me a new world filled with new people. Occasionally, the rough draft can also be a real headache, as words simply refuse to come to describe what my mind sees, or – even worse – my mind isn’t focused and therefore doesn’t see anything.

But the fun outweighs the headache (or I wouldn’t continue writing). It’s easy to see your progress with a rough draft, because your word count goes UP. Even if you have a bad day, by the end of a week, your word count will most likely be greater than what you started the week with. You feel like you’ve accomplished something.

For me, the 2^nd draft is where I add in every piece of description, explanation, background and all the modifiers I can think of, just to make sure everything is understandable to the reader. My word count can double from rough and 2^nd drafts, so obviously, I’m doing something.

Then come the further rewrites. I generally do a 3^rd and 4^th rewrite, and then a polish. Occasionally, I do a few more rewrites. I have one story in its 9^th or 10^th rewrite, and I’m still not happy with it.

Rewrite is not as much fun as roughing, but it seldom drags badly, either. It’s during these rewrites that I check for redundancies, passive verbs, -ing verbs, adverbs and that my pronouns refer to the correct antecedents. I might lengthen or shorten sentences, rearrange paragraphs. I might delete words, phrases, sentences, or change a 6-word phrase to a 2-word phrase.

It’s harder to keep track of your progress when your word count is going down. If you try to judge your progress by the difference in word count, it might take you days to cut a thousand words. That always made me feel stuck. So I started counting the number of words in the section I rewrote that day. I probably went through a section of 1200 words or more to wind up with 1000 words by the end, but each one of those words were carefully considered, so I have done a bit of work.

As you can see, 1 rough draft needs several rewrites. Most of my time as a writer is spent re-writing. I try to balance this out by working on 3 projects at a time; 1 short story rewrite, 1 novel rewrite, and 1 rough draft. Somehow, this past week, I have found myself doing 3 re-write projects, with no time left in my day for the rough draft. I suppose it was bound to happen, but it still leaves me feeling kind of ‘stuck’. Re-writing doesn’t set my imagination completely free. But it does still use it, so I do get some pleasure from re-writing. And since my short stories generally range around 5000 words, I should soon be done with that project, and can then return to that rough I was working on.

I won’t be ‘stuck’ in re-write much longer.

A Writer's Work is Never Done

I’ve talked about my To Do list before. Yeah, yeah, it’s pages long, in part because I have things on it that won’t come due until 2016, when I have a reminder that that’s about as long as we can expect the ‘new’ dishwasher to last. No, it’s not 9-11 pages of things for me to do today. I try to keep the chores for any one day down to a page.

I was looking at some of the chores that had somehow all cropped up on today’s date. Not the housework, not the personal chores, but the ones related (however slightly) to writing. Things like writing this blog, checking out several websites in search of tidbits to improve my writing, reading other people’s blogs about writing and leaving comments, looking for writing seminars, checking out some softwares that others have suggested I try, researching markets, sending out short stories, researching agents and composing queries .… It doesn’t even count actually writing.

Some of those chores I actually did tackle today. Some I put off for another day. I had enough of them all land on today that I could have kept busy for a full 24 hours, if I’d wanted. But I wouldn’t have gotten any actual writing done. And the best part of writing is the writing.

Working at home – and particularly writing – is a delicate balancing act. If you spend all your time writing, there’s no way to know if you are actually any good. If you spend all your time doing the other stuff, you never get anything written. Either way, nobody gets to read your stories.

Also, as a writer, you are supposed to be reading whatever you can get your hands on. This gives your imagination ideas to work with, introduces you to new styles and voices. Lots of reading, in fact, taught me quite a bit about sentence structure, punctuation and other facets of writing. Alas, ‘reading’ is not on my To Do list.

I think I need to fix that.

Peek a Boo

I've been doing some critiquing for an on-line critique group I belong to, and this story is about to make me pull out my hair. It looks like a rough draft; incorrect punctuation, strange sentence construction, incorrect use of pronouns, wandering verb tense ... The list goes on and on. To my mind, this story isn't ready for a critique.
I understand that sometimes people want to get someone's opinion about whether a story idea is viable. Fine. Get a friend to read it for a general impression. But don't waste the time of a critiquer on a rough draft.
In my mind, a critique will point out blunders you haven't noticed as you've tried to craft this story, and some of those blunders might be huge, while others are really tiny. But when you send out something with lots and lots of grammatical errors that you couldn't be bothered to fix, you are wasting their time, as they attempt to find a tactful way to tell you to clean up your manuscript. You have to clean up all those punctuation and verb tense problems anyway, so why not look like you are at least trying to do a professional job?
Like all those other writers who are taking the time to critique your work for you, I would really rather spend that extra 5 or 10 minutes working on my own story. I don't mind helping a fellow writer, if that writer seems willing to do a re-write by hunting down and correcting what mistakes he/she can find without my help. Think of it as a quest to turn out a perfect manuscript. If you can do that much for a critiquer, you are that much closer to having a manuscript that's ready to be seen by an editor.
My husband has joined me on vacation, so now it's two of us cramming blog posts into our occasional visits to the local bookstore with free wifi. Still, it wasn't bad this time. See ya next week.
Trudy

Is it Happening Now?

When I am critiquing someone else's writing, I periodically come across a story written in the present tense. This is difficult for me, as I have a bias against present-tense stories. And I always admit, right up front, that I have trouble understanding how I can be reading a story that is in the midst of happening. It's kind of like having the point of view character giving me a blow by blow account by phone as he lives through the situations. If the point of view character changes, the person on the other end of that phone line changes, too, which is more grating in present tense than in past tense. How can the author foreshadow anything that might happen, since it hasn't happened yet? I just don't get it. My mind can wrap itself around a number of complicated ideas, but that isn't one of them.

Consider this: "Joe stubs his toe on his way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. He wonders if it's broken, realizes it's his little pinkie, not the big lug, and doctors won't do anything for a broken pinkie toe, so what does it matter? Little does he know how inconvenient the pain of that toe will be in the days to come."

Okay, that was present tense, so we, as readers, were actually there when Joe stubbed his toe. Why were we in his home in the middle of the night? Why were we headed to the bathroom at the same time that he was, because if we weren't, how is he telling us about the toe as he stubs it? And the last sentence – which would make sense in past tense, and would do a wonderful job of making us wonder what's coming up – makes absolutely no sense. Of course he doesn't know how inconvenient things will be; he hasn't gone through it yet.

What do you think? Does present tense not bother you? It is frequently – and erroneously – used in common conversation, so you might be used to it. How many times have you heard someone say something like, "…And he says, 'what do you mean by that?', so I say, …" That's present tense verbs, even though the person is obviously talking about a conversation they had in the past. It grates on my nerves, but others find it normal, and if I comment on it, they stare at me in complete non-understanding.

Eventually, present tense may be the accepted norm for writing. But I'm not in any hurry to get there.

See ya next week. Trudy