May20

The Various Levels of Editing–Part 1

by Administrator on May 20th, 2013 at 9:44 PM
Posted In: Basics of writing, Editing techniques, Novel writing

From Scott:

Today, I’m going to talk about editing, or more specifically, the different levels of editing. Rick and I have mentioned before how important editing is to your work. Your readers expect a clean novel when they buy it, and you don’t want to disappoint them. They will likely forgive an error here or there, but if your book comes out looking like a first draft (as many books on Amazon do), you have likely sold your last book to anyone who reads it.

There is a common misconception among novice writers who submit their work to a traditional publishing house the publisher will handle the editing. While a good publishing house will have an excellent staff of editors on hand, taking a sloppy book and correcting all of the writer’s mistakes is not their job. First of all, an editor handling submissions will take an error-laden project and toss it in the garbage. But beyond that, it is your responsibility, as a writer, to make sure the work you turn in is the best it can be.

[RICK ADDS: Many publishers today farm out the editing to freelancers, so you can't always be sure what you'll get. This may be one reason the quality of editing you see from publishers is not always stellar and seems to have declined in recent years.]

Keep in mind, also, that just because your novel looks good in the MS Word file, there’s no guarantee that accidents won’t happen. My first novel, The Killing Frost, went through the editing process and looked flawless. The publisher’s editors did an awesome job with it. However, something happened when the file was converted to the format that used for printing, and a lot of mistakes popped up.

If you’re planning to self-publish, then it will fall to you to find every mistake and inconsistency in the entire novel. I like to have a few extra sets of eyes on my work as I go along, just to help pick out what I miss. And I can count on Rick for a full review when the book is finished. But in the end, I have to make sure that everything is as it should be.

Once your rough draft has been completed, the first stage falls on you. Edit the book again, and again…. I usually make four or five passes through the entire book after it’s finished. And keep in mind, I’m also editing chapter-by-chapter as I write, as well. Once you feel like you’ve done the best job you can, it’s time to move on. In the case of traditional publishing, it will be handled by the publishing house. But when self-publishing, it’s all on you.

One of the most basic levels of editing is line editing. The editor is ensuring that certain areas are of a high standard.

Characterization: Do you have a deep point of view character who the reader will sympathize with? Or is your POV character flat, distant, and unsympathetic?

Consistency: If you set up a rule in the third chapter that you claim can’t be broken, and you break that rule later in the book, you have a problem. Either you had better come up with a solid explanation for why the rule changed, or your readers will be highly disappointed.

Pacing: Does the story move the reader right along, or are their sections that drag and don’t seem to take the plot anywhere? Alternatively, do you have a sub-plot that was moving along nicely, but you forgot to resolve?

A special note for those of for those of you who plan to self-publish: grammar errors and spelling mistakes are fairly easy to find when self-editing. In a word processor like MS Word, spelling mistakes are underlined in red, and many grammar mistakes are underlined in green. I say “many grammar mistakes” because (as we’ve said before) Word will frequently indicate a grammatical error where none exists. It also misses a number of grammar issues, apparently finding nothing wrong with them. But even without this aid, if you read the book out loud to yourself, most of these types of mistakes pop out at you.

Finding the more technical issues, as a line editor does, is much more difficult in your own work. You tend to read what you meant to say, and when you have an inconsistency in a character or a plot idea, they can be very difficult to find. This is why it’s so critical that you have someone else look your work over.

Keep these thoughts in mind, but remember, we’re not finished yet. In my next installment, I’ll cover a few more areas of the editing process that are critical to producing a solid bit of work.

[RICK ADDS: Scott is one of the best self-editors I've seen. He knows what he's doing. Every piece that he posts for critique is impressively edited. Sure, he misses a few things from time to time, but I'll put his editing work up against anything I've seen from most traditional publishers. So, I know it is possible to self-edit and to self-edit very well--if you know your English spelling, grammar, and punctuation. I'd trust him to edit my work anytime, and I plan to use him as a second set of eyes on anything I self-publish in the future.]

–Scott

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May13

Writing great dialog–Part 4: proper dialog formatting

by Administrator on May 13th, 2013 at 8:37 PM
Posted In: Dialog, Formatting, Novel writing, Punctuation

From Rick:

In this post, I’m going to cover formatting dialog, which some new writers get wrong. For purposes of this blog, I’ll assume the American English style of formatting, that is, double quote marks, where British English may use single quotes. The current UK trend, however, seems to be moving toward double quotes.

NOTE: Occasional literary authors will omit quote marks completely, which makes reading the work somewhat difficult. Lest you think it’s the latest trend in writing, it’s not. I’ve never been able to come up with a compelling (or logical) reason for the practice, and I don’t recommend it.

To clarify, a double quote mark means ” not two apostrophes next to each other: ” . I’ve seen these occasionally and have always assumed it to be some sort of weird typographical error, but I’ve also seen it repeated throughout a story, so I’m not sure what actually happened.

Dialog begins with an open quote as either a straight quote ” or curly open quote (sometimes called a smart quote) “ followed by the dialog line or lines, some punctuation, and ends with another straight quote ” or a curly close quote ” .

If no dialog tag follows the dialog line, place a period, question mark, or exclamation mark–as appropriate–before the close quote mark. Examples:

“I can’t go to the party with you tonight.”
“I have better things to do than to watch you get drunk!”
“Can I bring a friend?”

Most writers get these right. It’s when a tag follows that confusion seems to exist.

INCORRECT:

“I can’t go to the party with you tonight.” He said.
“I have better things to do than to watch you get drunk!” He said.
“Can I bring a friend?” She asked.

CORRECT:

“I can’t go to the party with you tonight,” he said.
“I have better things to do than to watch you get drunk!” he said.
“Can I bring a friend?” she asked.
He said, “I can’t go with you tonight.”
She asked, “Can I bring a friend?”

Two rules apply here:

(1) A comma always separates a dialog tag from the dialog, regardless of whether the tag precedes or follows the dialog. Never use a period before a dialog tag. If ? or ! is required in the dialog line, use that in place of the comma.

(2) The dialog tag NEVER gets capitalized except when the speaker is mentioned by a proper name. (“I can’t go tonight,” John said.)

The confusion about capitalizing tags after ? or ! arises because we’re used to treating ? and ! as equal to the period when, in this case, they’re really replacing a comma. In dialog, these two punctuation marks are clarifiers, not sentence terminators.

The sentence really ends with the dialog tag, which is why the period follows the tag. If you remember that the tag is part of the sentence, then you’ll remember not to capitalize the tag unless it begins the sentence:

He said, “I can’t go tonight.”

Note the comma after the tag in this situation.

This brings up to question of how to handle tags inserted in the middle of the dialog. The answer is that it depends on the sentence. Basically, you treat it as any other sentence, by counting the tag as part of the sentence. Some examples will illustrate:

“I really don’t care,” he said, “if you go. That’s not my problem.”

“I really don’t care if you go,” he said. “That’s not my problem.”

“I really don’t care if you go.” He shrugged. “That’s not my problem.”

He shrugged. “I really don’t care if you go. That’s not my problem.”

Notice in the last two examples that He shrugged is an ACTION, not a speech tag, since you can’t “shrug” words. These are therefore three separate sentences, two of which are dialog, and they are punctuated as complete sentences, not with commas.

Here are some more examples.

“Raise your hands real slow,” he said, pointing the gun, “and don’t try anything stupid.”

He pointed the gun at me. “Raise your hands real slow…” Glancing sideways at his partner, who also had a gun aimed at us, he smiled. “… and don’t try anything.”

Lips trembling, I started to speak, “W-what d-do you–?”

He thrust the gun forward. “Silence!”

NOTES: In the second example, the … (ellipsis) represents a pause in the speech. In the third example, the dash (–) shows interrupted speech (interrupted by the one pointing the gun, not paused speech. Don’t confused the two.

Finally, I’ll end with how to handle dialog the extends over multiple paragraphs. Let’s say one character is explaining something to another, and you don’t want to dump it all in one long paragraph. How you do punctuate it? Here’s a modified passage from the prologue of my novel More Than Magick to illustrate. Bryce Duncan is explaining a technical point to Jake Kesten. They’re standing at an archeological dig site Bryce found in Upstate New York.

==========

Bryce grinned evilly. “The x-ray of the black stone showed what we think is a microchip embedded in it. There’s another twist. I sent a bone sample of the skeleton for carbon dating. It came back with a carbon-14 content one point three times greater than what a living specimen should contain.”

“I don’t understand,” Jake said.

“While an organism is alive, the carbon-14 ratio in its body maintains an equilibrium with the environment,” Bryce said. “After it dies, the radioactive decay takes over. Every 5700 years, half of the C-14 decays.

“Any organic material should have a C-14 content equal to or less than what’s in the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If it’s greater, then either the lab screwed up—but they said they ran it three times to be sure they hadn’t—or the sample was exposed to radiation. The black stone was not radioactive, and my Geiger counter picked up no radiation around the area.

“After the C-14 results, I took a second bone sample to a biochemist at Stony Brook who works with ancient DNA. To cover my ass, I told him I thought it might belong to a Pleistocene mammal. He said it was more human than anything, but it matched nothing in the databases. He was curious about where I’d gotten it. I said I’d get back to him. Meanwhile, I had given a small piece of the uniform and the scroll to a forensic chemist I know.”

“What scroll?” Jake asked.

Bryce reached into a crevice and pulled out a cylinder six inches long. “Feel.”

==========

Take a close look at those three large middle paragraphs (paragraphs 3-5 of the passage). Did you notice the lack of a closing quote at the end of the first two of those? This is how you handle extended dialog. As long as the speech continues and no actions or tags intervene, you open each paragraph with quote marks, but you do not close the quote otherwise until the whole speech is done.

Also look at paragraph three of the passage (beginning with “While an organism” and note the punctuation around the dialog tag. But since he’s still speaking at the end of the paragraph, we don’t put a closing quote.

Punctuating dialog is not difficult once you know these few simple rules.

NOTE: The choice of straight or curly quotes is up to you, but in published material, the curly/smart quotes generally look better. Be careful, however, because MS Word sometimes gets them wrong. For example, Word will do the following:

“I’m sorry but I can’t go tonight. “ (This happened because I put a space after the period. A quote should follow the end punctuation directly.)

“I’m sorry but–“ (Word doesn’t recognize an em-dash or hyphen as the end of a sentence, hence it incorrectly uses an open quote.) So, how do you fix this? Simple. You add a period after the –, insert the quote marks, then delete the period. MS Word will put in the correct curly quote because it sees a period.

But there is a another way to manually enter “ or ” into the document.

For the open quote (“), hold the CTRL key and press the ` key (next to the 1). Release CTRL, then hold SHIFT and press ” .

For a close quote (”), hold the CTRL and press ‘ (the apostrophe). Then hold SHIFT and press ” .

All of the points, and more, covered in this post will appear in our “Punctuation For Fiction Writers” book, along with further examples, including how to punctuate quotes within quotes.

–Rick

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May06

We extracted the extraneous (part 2)

by Administrator on May 6th, 2013 at 8:07 PM
Posted In: Good writing techniques, Novel writing

From Scott:

In my previous post, I discussed the inclusion of unnecessary clutter in your novels and how this can be detrimental to the quality of your work. If you put emphasis on something in a particular scene, it’s generally a good idea to make sure that object is important to the plot. Failure to do so can disappoint and frustrate your readers.

This week, I’ll take a look at a few examples of how this works, both properly and improperly. Showing this in action will help me demonstrate how important this facet of your writing can be.

I’d like to start with a movie that most of us have seen: The Bourne Identity. I have to confess that I haven’t read the book, but I found the entire series of movies to be riveting. However, despite all of its strengths, the director included a couple of examples of extraneous clutter that leads movie viewers (or book readers) astray.

When Jason Bourne and Marie leave the apartment in Paris, there is a body on the street (the man who jumped from Jason’s window). They skirt the area around the body and walk away. However, as they leave, the camera zooms in on one of the people crowded around the body. He gives the pair a suspicious look as they hurry off. This is the movie equivalent of an author placing extra emphasis on a certain point. As I was watching the movie, I expected this man to notify police about the suspicious couple. But the man is never heard from again.

The same happens when Jason and Marie unexpectedly exit a taxi a couple of blocks shy of their destination. Jason hands the driver a wad of cash, and the driver protests, saying it’s too much. As Jason and Marie run off, a police officer comes over to speak to the taxi driver about parking where he did. Again, I expected this to lead to another chase scene, but nothing further happened.

You can see how this is bad for your novel. By inserting the emphasis on these two instances, you have built the expectation that something will come of it. Readers will try to guess what is coming next, so they will anticipate a major event coming from what you have shown them. When you fail to deliver, it will reflect negatively on your work.

Now, I would like to show some examples of how this looks when the extraneous information turns out to be important. Sometimes, it leads to an immediate change, as those two scenes in the Jason Bourne movie should have. In some other cases, it turns into a bit of foreshadowing. Be warned, there are spoilers in the following paragraphs. If you haven’t read these novels, but plan to, please keep this in mind.

In his Star Trek: Destiny series, David Mack sets up a situation where several members of Starfleet are scattered across time and space. One group ends up thousands of years in the past, deep in another quadrant of the galaxy. With no way to return, it would seem natural that Mack would simply leave the characters out of the rest of the story, or have them die in their vain efforts to return. Instead, he kept returning to their struggles to survive in a harsh environment. At the time, I kept thinking that if he continued to follow this group, something significant had better come of it. And it did, in a major way. Those stranded officers, along with some alien companions, formed a race that came to be known as the Federation’s greatest enemy: The Borg.

For a second, and much simpler, example, I’d like to refer back to my first novel The Killing Frost. Early in the book, the main character (Arano Lakeland) is attacked by a swarm of stinging insects. Another character later explains to him that many insects will inject their targets with a hormone that other insects can follow, which is why the swarm followed Arano and continued to attack. Had I never returned to the topic, this bit of information would have been wasted space. However, later in the book, a race of bipedal aliens with features akin to insects is able to track Arano and his friends over a long distance–all because one of those aliens stung one of Arano’s friends before the chase began, and they simply followed the scent of the hormone.

I hope this will help to demonstrate what I tried to explain last time. I’m not trying to say every last tidbit in your novels should be a crucial part of the plot. Just be careful not to overemphasize that which is not overly important, and you’ll minimize the risk of disappointing your readers.

–Scott

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Apr29

Writing great dialog–Part 3: tags & attributes

by Administrator on April 29th, 2013 at 9:11 PM
Posted In: Dialog, Editing techniques, Good writing techniques

In Part 2 of this series I said I was going to cover slang and dialect this time. Well, I decided to move that to a later post, primarily because I want to do more research on that.

Before I get started with this week’s topic of dialog tags, I’d like to note that nearly every blog on writing that I’ve come across, at some point will tackle the subject of dialog. Many books on writing discuss it, and some have been devoted exclusively to it. Most general workshops on writing will cover it. So, why am I doing it yet again?

Well, despite there being so much devoted to the subject, all too many new writers seem ignorant of it. Since, as I mentioned previously, much fiction writing contains a high percentage of dialog, it’s therefore one of the most important topics in writing.

=====

What is a dialog or speech tag? Essentially it’s designed to tell the reader who is speaking at a given time. A secondary use is to indicate speech attributes that tell how the dialog is delivered (shouted, whispered, calmly, softly) and sometimes to show actions accompanying the dialog.

You’ll find a lot of advice about not using tags for these secondary purposes, or at least that you should keep such usage to a minimum.

Let’s explore speech attributes first. Many feel that if you have to tell the reader how the line is spoken, then you, as a writer, haven’t completely done your job.

“Get back here!” Bob said, shouting.

An exclamation mark usually indicates a raised voice, so why does the tag need to repeat it? One could argue that, in some cases, saying “Get back here!” Bob said. might feel weak. If so, consider a better the following construction.

“Get back here!” Bob shouted.

We hear all the time that we shouldn’t use attributive adverbs in tags: he said calmly; she said angrily. Yes, I know you’ll find copious examples of these in published books, but as Scott and I constantly remind you, just because it’s been published doesn’t mean it’s the best way to write. Sometimes, though, adverbs can serve a purpose, such as in humor or when you want to overstate. In most circumstances, it’s best to use adverbs and attributes in dialog tags sparingly and only when you can’t make the point with the dialog itself. One example: “Get back here!” she whispered.

Here’s a reference that backs up and expands on these points.

DIALOGUE TAGS

Before we leave this topic know that in modern writing, “said” generally follows the noun or pronoun (“John said” instead of “said John”). The article link above says it’s okay to put “said” first, but most modern writers don’t, and doing so can make the writing feel “old.” Nevertheless, if this is your aim, by all means do so. You’ll sometimes see constructions such as “said John” used by some British authors. However you decide to write your tags, be consistent in your style and don’t use “said John” in some places and “John said” in others. I do recommend that you avoid using use “said he.” It tends to sound awkward in modern writing. In those cases, it’s acceptable to use “said John” and “he said” forms in the same piece of writing.

TIP: Keeping your dialog tags as simple as possible makes for smoother, leaner prose.

This brings us to another point. The use of actions in dialog tags is certainly acceptable–when not abused–but generally the action and the dialog should be kept separate. Which of the lines below reads better?

“Stop right there,” he said, drawing his gun.
He drew his gun. “Stop right there.”

The second case gives us a more immediate picture of the action. In the first line, we hear the dialog before we know about the gun being drawn, and this feels weaker than the second case where we see the physical threat followed by the verbal one.

Now, a word of caution is in order. Using either of these patterns repeatedly in a dialog passage is going to result in your developing a bad writing habit.

I recently reviewed a story where the writer fell into a habit pattern. I’ve extracted a passage below, but I removed the actual lines of dialog and replaced them with only quote marks and punctuation. After doing this, I realized that it’s an excellent technique to help a writer analyze his writing patterns. By isolating the tags and actions, you can see the problems. In this case, you see certain attributive words repeated. I should add that the dialog itself was decent, but the tag and attribute issues quickly overshadowed it.

BAD HABIT DIALOG PATTERN EXAMPLE–

“?” he asked calmly.

” ,” she said softly.

” ,” he said, looking into her eyes. “?”

She looked at him, then grabbed her purse, standing slowly.

“.” She smiled softly. He stood up slowly and walked toward the door, opening it for her.

” ,” she said quietly as she walked past him.

” ,” he said calmly. “?”

” ,” she said firmly then walked faster.

” ,” he said, watching her.

” ,” she said flatly and continued walking along the sidewalk.

” ,” he said bluntly. “.”

She stopped, letting out a long sigh of frustration.

” ,” she said calmly.

This sample also has some issues that Scott and I have discussed in previous blogs regarding the overuse of -ing forms.

Note that with only two people speaking, a few of these tags could have been eliminated for a smoother read because the back-and-forth delivery and paragraphing makes it clear that the speakers are alternating. As I demonstrated with examples in Part 2, when two people are speaking, tags are not needed every line.

Another trick for analyzing dialog is to remove all the tags in a passage, then read it through to determine where tags are absolutely necessary for clarity.

I want to make one final point here with regard to pacing. Use back-and-forth dialog, with few or no tags when you want a faster pace. Further, short lines of dialog will speed up the story, while longer ones will slow it down. Breaking up lines by putting the tag in the middle of the dialog and inserting actions will also alter the pacing.

Take some passages of dialog from one of your own stories and analyze them in these ways. Play with the pacing by adding or removing tags, shortening or lengthening the sentences, and adding actions at the beginning, middle, or end of the dialog. Then decide whether some of the experiments might serve your story better than your original lines.

–Rick

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Apr22

Extract the extraneous

by Administrator on April 22nd, 2013 at 10:30 PM
Posted In: Good writing techniques, Novel writing, Story Details

From Scott:

We’ve all read a book where a seemingly random object or event will suddenly interrupt the story. This interjection is so out of place that we know it has something major to do with the plot. We spend time trying to figure out what the effect on the storyline will be… perhaps even long after we’ve put the book down for the day. And finally, we come to the end of the story, only to find that the interruption was an extraneous loose end, having nothing to do with the book.

This is a mistake made by authors of all stripes. One particular best-selling author is notorious for it. I’ve read over a dozen books by this author (most of them more than once), and I find it very frustrating. Two or three times in every book, a character will find what appears to be a significant clue, proclaim that there is something important about it, but admit that whatever it is seems to be eluding him. Unfortunately, that’s the last we hear of it. When an author puts these types of things into a book, he lets his readers down. A promise was made, but there was no follow through.

There are many reasons an author might do this. The simplest reason is ignorance of the fact that the object is significant. By “ignorance,” I don’t mean stupidity. I’m referring to a lack of knowledge about something, which implies nothing about a level of intelligence. Like many of the mistakes we authors make, we simply missed them because we see the book the way we meant it to be, not the way it actually is. So something that appeared to the author as a minor detail turns out to be a major hiccup in the way the story unfolds.

A second reason is that the author might try to be too clever. She might be seeding the story with foreshadowing, but she doesn’t want to make it too easy for the reader to guess what is coming next–an honorable intention, but one that carries a very negative result. It’s true that you want to keep your readers guessing up until the last part of the plot finally unfolds. But carry that too far, and you may cost yourself readers in the future. I believe this to be the case with the author I mentioned above. Those books contain plenty of foreshadowing, all of which is much more obvious when you read them a second time. But many of the events are simply red herrings, with no further connection to the plot of the novel. This author let the readers down.

Another possible source is from an author going too far in his attempts to set a scene. I mentioned in an earlier blog that scene-setting is important, but that going over the top can be detrimental to the quality of your writing. In this case, perhaps you mention a gun positioned on a table in the corner of the room. Your intensive description of the gun leads the reader to believe the gun will play an important part, either in this scene or an upcoming scene. When that gun never shows up again, your readers will be unhappy.

Just keep in mind the concept of “Chekhov’s Gun.” I’m not referring to the Star Trek character, but to a Russian writer named Anton Chekhov. He carries the principal to an extreme, saying that nothing should be in your story unless it has a direct relationship to the plot. I wouldn’t go that far, but the idea itself is sound: if you build up an object or event in your story to the point it becomes significant, the rule of Chekhov’s Gun applies.

In my next post, I’ll show a few novel excerpts to demonstrate both sides of this rule.

–Scott

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