Over the past several years, I've joined critique ("crit") groups, on-line crit exchanges, or simply traded work and crits with various writers. In the process and with the help of several good books and articles I've learned a ton about writing and, perhaps more importantly, self-editing.
Self-editing may be one of the hardest skills to master in the writing business. After over twenty-five years of being paid to write (and nearly twice as long writing for my own enjoyment – ouch), I still haven't come close.
Yet I see books and articles published with writing errors ranging from the subtle to the egregious – errors that cause manuscripts of less well-known writers to take swan dives into the slush pile of rejection. Some good works go unpublished because the writer failed to recognize their writing tics that deaden prose, distract readers or simply fail to hold a reader's attention.
Too frequently, rejections take the form of "great idea, but I didn't absolutely fall in love with your writing" or "I can't take this to market right now" – something to that effect. Sometimes authors, frustrated with these vague excuses and agents' and editors' apparent timidity, jump into self-publishing, determined to show the idiots in the publishing world what they're missing.
In both cases, manuscripts go out to agents and editors, and books go to print, before they're ready.
Too often, it's not what the agents and editors are missing that is the problem. It's what the book is missing: editing.
Not good writing. Good writers get rejections all the time. Yes, good writers. People that:
- have written a good story with strong characters and an interesting story arc
- want to get their story published, either by a traditional publishing house or though a self-publishing channel
- write in an active voice as much as possible
- do not have serious problems with grammar, spelling, syntax, sentence and paragraph construction, and noun/verb agreement
- SHOW rather than TELL
- avoid clichés and find fresh ways to tell their stories
But…
- Their manuscripts aren't being snapped up by agents and editors.
- Their self-published book with its fascinating characters, great plot twists and gorgeous layout … isn't selling.
There's one other thing most of us in this situation have in common: we edit our own work.
Earlier this summer, I compiled a list of self-editing tips to address the problems I see good writers making all the time. I put the list up for a nominal fee on my website (http://bit.ly/d9zA5b) and meanwhile have been dripping the tips out one at a time to entice the more patient among us to keep checking out the page.
Then it occurred to me: why not post them here, too?
So, that's what's going to happen. Whenever a new tip is posted on the website, you'll see it here, too. (And the full list will still be available for download on the website.)
Here's this week's.
- Avoid Rhetorical Questions
Sometimes writers want their reader to know that their point of view character is unsure or undecided about something. In an attempt to avoid simply TELLING that to the reader, they try to SHOW it by stating the question directly to the reader—in effect, asking the reader a rhetorical question. Such as:
Unfortunately, this strategy solves the initial problem by creating a different one. The reader's natural reaction when confronted with a question is to answer it. That takes the reader out of the story and gives the reader something else to think about. A strong enough question could even distract the reader to the point of not reading, at least for a while—something no writer wants. A weak question, by contrast, is simply that—weak. That's even worse.
A better strategy is to SHOW the reader that the character's ambivalence using declarative statements that reveal the character's attitude—fear, indecision, confusion, etc. For example:
