Editing
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To Be or Not to Be
This is a more in-depth tutorial of what I covered in Seven Simple Ways to Make Your Writing Rock! One of the simplest (although not easy) ways of bringing more life into your writing is to go on a hunt for forms of ‘to be’. Those pesky little words, if you don’t remember from grammar school, are ‘am, is, are, was, were, being, and been.’ So go ahead, print your latest story or pull it up on your screen, and highlight every single one of those buggers. You should have a lot of them. Those are some of the most common words in the English language. That is the reason…
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The Glory of the Beta-Reader
First of all, what is a beta-reader? Only this – someone that you allow to read your work before you send it out into the world. You should make at least one pass looking for typos and blatant inconsistencies. You might want to get it to the point of what you think is the final draft. I suggest that with longer works, you only do minimal clean-up. Take care of plot holes you find yourself on your own first read, and then send it on. Why? You don’t want to spend a huge amount of time editing and making language flow and brainstorming perfect metaphors, just to find out that…
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Why You Should Never Edit as You Write
Are you frazzled whenever you sit down to write? Frustrated? Ready to give up? Do you sit, thesaurus in hand, pondering the exact word to describe what you are trying to say? Are you vexed between the choices? Can you not decide whether your heroine’s eyes should be cerulean blue or azure? Please don’t. You should never edit as you write. Editing While You Write Conflicts with How the Brain Works One part of your brain is dominant while you write, and a different part is dominant while you edit. When you stop to examine what you’ve written, or to find exactly the correct word, you move from the creative…
