Hire a hit man. Yes, you heard me. Go find a scary guy with scissors who can slash those condescending redundancies out of your writing. Unless you do, readers will feel patronized, like you don’t trust them enough to use their God-given brains to figure things out on their own. Keep in mind, however, that even big-name authors like Daniel Silva are guilty of using these. So if you struggle, you’re not alone. Maybe you’re one of the few who doesn’t make these mistakes, but given the hundreds of manuscripts I’ve edited over the last decade, trust me when I say I’ve seen a lot of the same flaws. And redundancy is so common. Let’s get right down to what I mean. These are some of the common ones I see every day. He squinted his eyes. He nodded his head. He waved his hand. He shrugged his shoulders. What’s wrong with these…
Each novel manuscript I edit for my day job is a learning experience. It either reveals what doesn’t work in fiction writing or reinforces what does. In this post I want to talk about the speech tag. I briefly wrote about it in this post, but I wanted to expand on some key ideas here. Why? Because strong dialogue is so important for good fiction. It reveals character, it depicts drama, it reveals vital information, and it pushes the story forward. Used correctly, it can do so much for a story. But use it unwisely, and it can really be a drag. Of course, the primary purpose of speech tags is to ID the spakers, but I’ll just come right out and ask it. Are speech tags even necessary? What do they accomplish other than giving the reader more words to read? Because, I would argue, there’s a better way…
Over the last few weeks I’ve been making some excellent progress on my third novel, tentatively called Drone. I’m hoping to finish the first draft this year. But lately I’ve been facing a problem. What some readers may not know is that I’m self-employed and work my day job as a book editor. This type of job requires that I edit numerous pages of text on my computer screen every day. This job demands an ever-vigilant internal editor. My problem is learning to turn off that internal editor when it’s time to work on my own book. When I reread what I wrote during my previous writing session, a little voice in my head says, Oh, that’s stupid. The writing here is really sad. This scene is falt. Your story stinks! I don’t need the negativity right now. I struggle enough with self-doubt and insecurity with each project. That internal…
Have you ever wondered what a novel looks like in a spreadsheet? The outline, I mean. Maybe you’re wondering what a novel outline even is. When I say outline, what pops in your head? Is it something like this? I. This is the first heading. A. This is a subheading. 1. This is a subsubheading. No, I’m not referring to an outline for a high school English term paper. I’m referring to a novel. When I say outline, I’m merely referring to some kind of organizational structure behind the story—a blueprint, if you will, that shows all the critical ingredients that must work together behind the scenes for the story to work. You may be surprised to learn how many organizational details must work together to make a good story, especially for a suspense novel with multiple characters and settings on a timeline. There are actually lots of ways to…
