What Do I Do Next? (Part 2)

By Iola Goulton

Last week, I answered a question from a client: is my manuscript publishable? Yesterday, I started to answer her second question: what do I do next? The one-line summary is I said to delete all adverbs and overused words. If you’d like to check that out in more detail, click here.

Today I’m looking at three more issues I often see in manuscripts: interior monologue problems, repetition, and creative dialogue tags.

Repetition

Repetition can be an effective method of emphasis, a stylistic choice designed to enhance the writing. Margie Lawson is the expert in this area, and I do recommend her Deep Editing course for showing you what good repetition looks like (because showing is better than telling, right?).

But repetition is often unintentional. And unintentional repetition is usually bad repetition, whether it’s repetition of a single word, repetition of an effect, or repetition of something a little more complex, like sentence structure.

Simple sentences, complex sentences, sentences with clever rhetorical devices ... 

They all get repetitive if used too often, and risk boring the reader. Even if your readers can’t articulate what is wrong, they will subconsciously notice something is wrong, and it will affect their reading pleasure.

One common issue is –ing words. 

These indicate an ongoing action, so should only be used at the start of a sentence if there are two actions occurring at the same time. But a lot of new authors use them for consecutive actions, which is a physical impossibility. For example:

Gathering her hair back from around her shoulders, she tied it back into a ponytail.

GatherING indicates an ongoing action, while tiED which indicates a past action—which doesn’t make sense. It would be better written as:

She gathered her hair from around her shoulders and tied it back into a ponytail.

Other authors get the word order wrong, so the sentence becomes a dangling modifier, as Kathy Ide explains:

A “dangling modifier” is a phrase that does not clearly and sensibly modify the appropriate word. For example:

"Changing the oil every 3,000 miles, the Mustang seemed to run better."

The subject of this sentence is “the Mustang.” The modifying phrase is “Changing the oil . . .” A Mustang cannot change its own oil. So you’d want to rewrite that as something like:

"Changing the oil every 3,000 miles, Sandra found she got much better gas mileage.”

Another common and overused sentence structure is starting a sentence with as. Brown and King give this as examples of a sentence construction that weakens your writing:

Two common stylistic constructions are:

Pulling off her gloves, she turned to face him.

and

As she pulled off her gloves, she turned to face him.

Both of these constructions [as and –ing] take a bit of action (“She pulled off her gloves”) and tuck it away into a dependent clause (“Pulling off her gloves”). This tends to place some of your action at one remove from your reader, to make the actions seem incidental, unimportant.

Again, use Ctrl-F or Ctrl-H to find and change offending sentences. Search for “As” and for “ing”. Any time these come up at the beginning of a sentence, revise the sentence to remove them.

Dialogue Tags

Dialogue tags are how we show the reader who is speaking. Back in high school, our English teachers encouraged us to use lots of creative dialogue tags to show the reader how the character was speaking: she cried, she thundered, she growled, she barked.

This advice is now outmoded, and there is no easy way to identify all the creative tags you may have used (after all, your English teacher wanted each one to be different!). So you’re going to have to do this the hard way: read your manuscript, and delete or change all but the following dialogue tags:

• Said
• Asked
• Whispered
• Shouted

Either replace your tags with one of these, or use an action beat so you don’t need a dialogue tag. I cover dialogue tags in more detail in this blog post, and I cover action beats and dialogue cues here.

Interior Monologue

Interior monologue is the thoughts of your character expressed in his or her own words. This means the interior monologue has to sound like your character—not like you. Does the interior monologue sound like something your character would say? If so, great. If not? It needs revising so it does. Again, there is no easy advice here. You know your characters better than anyone, so you know how they think and speak.

This might be an area where you ask for help from a friend—someone who knows you well enough to identify when your character stops sounding like your character and starts sounding like you.

Then What?

The next stage of editing after a Manuscript Assessment depends on the client. Some want another Manuscript Assessment (e.g. if they have undertaken major edits). With this second Manuscript Assessment, I read on the computer and use Word’s Comments feature to comment on what has been done well, and what still needs fixing.

Other authors are happy to move straight to the copyediting stage, either the full manuscript or a staged mentoring process, where I copyedit a portion of the manuscript, so they can see if they’ve understood and implemented my earlier suggestions.

It depends on the client, but the important thing is to work on your own revision and self-editing skills to fix the simple mechanical issues, which will allow your editor to make your work shine.

About Iola Goulton

I am a freelance editor specialising in Christian fiction. Visit my website at www.christianediting.co.nz to download a comprehensive list of publishers of Christian fiction. 

I also write contemporary Christian romance with a Kiwi twist—find out more at www.iolagoulton.com.

You can also find me on:
Facebook (Author)
Facebook (Editing)
Instagram
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What Do I Do Next? (Part 1)

By Iola Goulton

Last week, I answered a question from a client: Is my manuscript publishable? Today I’m going to answer her second question:

For background, this author has ticked off the basics. She has a solid plot with plenty of conflict (internal and external), and her main character has undergone significant character change by the end of the novel. Her structure is sound. The whole novel is written in the point of view of one character, with no headhopping or author intrusion.

Characterisation is solid, with a few minor tweaks needed (mostly arising from only having one viewpoint character—a good stylistic choice for a young adult/new adult novel, but one which limits the author’s ability to show what the antagonist is thinking).

I’ve provided her with a Manuscript Assessment

... which means I’ve read her novel and given her 8,000+ words of feedback. Some of that is specific suggestions, but I don’t provide an actual list of steps—partly because those steps are variable depending on how she wants to publish. There is no point in her paying me to copyedit a manuscript if she wants to submit to a publisher who might have different style preferences, e.g. … vs … vs . . . (any of which could be correct, depending on the publisher and their preferred style guide).

The manuscript isn’t yet ready to be submitted to a publisher, but there are a lot of things she can do to improve it. These changes will both increase her chances of getting a publishing contract (if that’s what she wants) and reduce my copyediting fees (if she decides to self-publish, or decides she does want a full copyedit before submitting to a publisher or agent. It’s not unheard of).

You might think this advice is specific to her manuscript, and it is. But I see many beginner manuscripts with these same errors … and some not-so-beginner manuscripts as well. And these are the errors that mean an agent or publisher will add your manuscript to the reject pile, as they indicate an author who hasn’t done their homework in regard to writing craft issues. The view is that if an author can’t get these mechanical issues right, they are likely to have other, more serious, issues which are going to be even harder to fix.

I’m not going to explain why these things are wrong (I did that in my letter to the client, and have discussed self-editing in some of my previous posts). Instead, I’m going to focus on how to fix these issues.

Today I’m looking at adverbs and overused words (sometimes called weasel words). I’ll be back tomorrow to cover interior monologue, repetition, and dialogue tags.

Adverbs

The easy way to find adverbs is through Word’s trusty Find and Replace feature: Click Ctrl-H to bring up the dialogue box

• Enter “ly” in both boxes (and keep your cursor in the Replace box)
• Click on More
• Click on the Replace button at the bottom right-hand corner
• Click Highlight, and Replace All

… and all your ly’s will turn yellow (or whatever colour you have the highlight selected to). Note this will pick up names like Emily, and will also pick up non-adverbs like silly.

Now you can work your way through the document and revise your manuscript to delete all the unnecessary adverbs.

But which are the unnecessary adverbs? Almost all of them.

• All adverbs in dialogue tags (if there are one or two you can’t bear to part with, leave them in and I’ll delete them for you). You may need to revise and strengthen the dialogue to show, rather than using the adverb to tell the reader how the speaker is feeling. Alternatively, show through action or body language.
• All adverbs in narrative or description. Again, you may need to revise the manuscript to show better.
• Most adverbs in dialogue—we do actually (!) use a lot of adverbs when we speak, so while adverbs may be indicative of the way a character speaks, we don’t want to overdo it.

Ideally (!), you’ll be left with no more than a handful of adverbs, and none of them will be telling where you should be showing.

Overused words

Most writers have words they use too often. These are often weak adjectives, which should either be deleted, or replaced with stronger adjectives. Examples include:

• Really
• Quite
• Only
• Just
• Very

In fact, there’s a quote about “very” …

Other weasel words are words which don’t add to the sentence—“that” is a common example. As a general rule, if the word can be deleted without changing the meaning of the sentence, it should be deleted.

Other common overused words include:

• Began (and begin)
• Start (and started)
• Sudden (all of a sudden or suddenly)

Sometimes these words are telling us what is already happening:

“I’m starting to come down with a headache.”

In real life, this means “I’ve got a headache.” So cut the excess.

Again, use Ctrl-F or Ctrl-H to find the offending words, and see how many can be deleted or replaced.

I’ll be back tomorrow to discuss interior monologue (briefly!), repetition, and dialogue tags.

 

About Iola Goulton

I am a freelance editor specialising in Christian fiction. Visit my website at www.christianediting.co.nz to download a comprehensive list of publishers of Christian fiction. 

I also write contemporary Christian romance with a Kiwi twist—find out more at www.iolagoulton.com.

You can also find me on:
Facebook (Author)
Facebook (Editing)
Instagram
Pinterest
Twitter

The Writing Journey

By Dale Harcombe

It’s no wonder that the apostle Paul has been on my mind a lot lately. This year in our home bible study group we studied Paul’s letter to the Romans and then went onto Acts. There we  refreshed ourselves about the story of Paul’s conversion from one who hated those who followed Jesus and The Way, to being a commendable and committed servant of Jesus. Taken together it is a story that shows how great a change Jesus can make in a person's life.

Last week at our end of term get together for bible study, we were asked what stood out most to each of us. For me it was one of two things. One is a little story tucked away in among all Paul’s journeys and exploits. It tells of Phillip and the Ethiopian. I love that story because it is so specific. Phillip is told exactly where to go. He is involved in ministry at the time, so it’s not like he’s been slouching around doing nothing. But he’s told to go on the road leading south and he does. There he meets, talks with and coverts an Ethiopian eunuch.

That story shows me how important it is firstly to listen to the Lord and be obedient. It shows how important one person, one individual is to Jesus. It may be there is one special person only you can reach, either through a one on one relationship or through your words. Sometimes all it takes is one sentence that reaches out and touches a person’s heart.

The second thing that stood out was how Jesus transforms a life. Paul initially thought he was helping God by getting rid of those he believed were a new sect.  The Lord Jesus made sure he got Paul’s full attention on the Damascus Road. From that point on Paul never looked back. He went on with the work the Lord has set for him to do. Imagine if he had started out and then decided it was all too hard, he really couldn’t hack it! Or if he wanted to do something less strenuous and taxing.

Now I’m sure if you’re anything like me, you think writing isn’t the easiest life out. It’s not like we just sit down at a desk and the words pour out. Well, most of the time, that’s not what happens for me. Occasionally it happens like that. When it does it is a gift. Even when it does it doesn’t mean I can leave it and think it is perfect. There is still research, revising, editing, proofreading that needs to happen. Then likely more revision, editing and proofreading and that’s all before it gets anywhere near a publisher.

Eventually it is ready to submit. Off it goes. Then begins the waiting period. I’m in that waiting period with one project at the moment. But that doesn’t mean I’m sitting doing nothing. I have moved onto the next project which had been started but put aside till the last one was submitted

Assuming the project does largely meet the publisher’s criteria and get accepted for publication, there’s no doubt more editing and proofreading to come. Still that’s not the end of the author’s job. There’s time spent trying to drum up interest, so when the book comes up out there will be an audience wanting to read the book. For many that might mean interacting on social media, organising a book launch, arranging interviews, and  lining up book signings or talks, when really all you want to do is sit down and write the new ideas and characters that are circling in your head. That promotion and marketing aspect is easier for some than it is for others.

At times it seems overwhelming. You might be forgiven for wondering why anyone would want to be a writer. I’ve wondered that at time myself. I still do when things don’t work as I would like. But basically if we believe God has called us to write, and my guess is we wouldn’t be here unless we believed that to be the case, then we can’t leave the job half done.

Whether we write Christian fiction, mainstream fiction, bible studies, devotional, children’s books, mysteries, romance or some other genre, we want to do the best job we can. It’s important to remember that God doesn’t call us all to the same type of writing. We have to keep going and trusting the Lord God will open the right doors at the right time and will help us each step of the way.

At the moment the jacaranda in my garden looks just like a lot of dead sticks. But I now it is not dead. In God's time it will bloom with flowers the most amazing shade of blue.

We need to be like that jacaranda and wait for God's timing for us to bloom. For some of us that may take longer than others and may seem it is never going to happen. That's when we have to continue to trust God.

It also means He will pick us up and get us back on our feet if things don’t work out as we hope. Along the way He will teach us what He needs to and lead us into the next steps along the writing journey. The writing life is not for the faint hearted. It can be frustrating but it can also be a lot of fun.

Dale writes fiction and poetry. Her latest novel is Streets on a Map is currently available as an E book. She has also written children’s books, bible studies, Sunday school material, devotionals, and articles about marriage, home and Christian living. She is currently at work on a new novel, tentatively titled Sandstone Madonna.