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10 Reasons Writing Fiction Is the Best. Thing. Ever.
You can explain away talking to yourself as “trying out a conversation between characters in my novel.” Your much-used acronym for “work in progress” is alarmingly similar to the acronym for “rest in peace” and this adds an air of clever mystery to your role when casually mentioning it among non-writers. (Plus, you only have to change one letter to appropriately re-categorize any book that’s going nowhere.) You can overindulge in any of the three “C”s with impunity: Coffee, Chocolate, Cocktails. You can do your job almost anywhere. While still stuck in bed, or at your desk in a chair. You can write in a car, you can write in…
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What Do You Mean by “Editing”?
This is the first in a series of “what do you mean by…” posts. I want to tailor this series according to your interests. So…queue up your questions and then send ’em along so I can make this as helpful as possible. I thought it would be appropriate to start with “editing,” since that’s kind of an important topic on this blog. So what do I mean by editing? Let’s start with a little quiz. When you tell a friend that you’re “editing” your novel, which of the following best describes what you’re doing: I’m going through the novel and making sure there are no misspellings or missing words. I’m reviewing the…
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Finding Stories
Where do you get ideas for your stories? If you’re like lots of writers, you probably draw from your own life experience. Someone once said that every writer’s first novel is autobiographical. I happen to think that every novel a writer writes is at least somewhat autobiographical. (What this says about Dean Koontz, I’m not quite sure.) But what if you have a boring life? Where do you find your ideas for non-boring novels? Start by coming up with a compelling protagonist. The really good ones write their own stories. But where are they? you ask. Well, they’re all around you. You know that quiet man down the street who…
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About Deadlines
It’s late Sunday night and my plan to write a week’s worth of posts has been foiled by the usual assortment of weekend activities plus the addition of a time-suck we in the freelance editing world call “gettin’ paid.” For a freelancer, deadlines are no respecter of nights and weekends. I might be able to steal another day or three if I really thought it necessary, but depending on how tightly the book is scheduled through the rest of the publishing process, doing so could put the release date in jeopardy. (Okay, that’s a worst-case scenario, but keep in mind that the author may have already pushed for an additional…
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Breaking the Rules
Just yesterday, an Internet friend asked me to read his short story and offer him a little editorial advice. Sometimes I get nervous when friends ask me to read their writing, but I’d shared enough of a conversation with him to expect he’d know his way around words. I was right. Even though it was a first draft, the observational story (non-fiction, but with the textures of a great fiction piece) had plenty of bite and surprising depth. One of the things that struck me about his story was the manner in which he introduced dialogue for the various characters. He didn’t separate it from the rest of the first-person…
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A Book, Some Editorial Advice and a Picture of a Kitty & a Puppy
It’s Friday, which means absolutely nothing to a freelancer since all days end up looking the same. But for the sake of the rest of the working world, I’m going to play along. Hooray for the weekend! (For the record, I almost never use exclamation marks. This is not because F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote of them, “An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes,” but because I rarely feel all that exclamatory. So, if you see one on this blog, it’s either a sign of the apocalypse or a snide comment on the sentence that precedes it. Listen for the sound of hoofbeats. If you hear them…
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Chasing the Flame
Note: I am a writer as well as an editor. Sometimes I wear my writer’s hat when blogging. This is one of those times. When the source of his fiction was autobiographical, Eddie could write with authority and authenticity. But when tried to imagine – to invent, to create – he simply could not succeed as well as when he remembered. This is a serious limitation for a fiction writer… But Eddie would make a living as a novelist, nonetheless. One can’t deny him his existence as a writer simply because he would never be, as Chesterton once wrote of Dickens, “a naked flame of mere genius, breaking out in…