What a production team can accomplish: author, editor, book designer
18 November, 2013 More analogies on moving to a new home – a process which allowed no time to blog last week. The biggest one is the endless paring down. Asking over and over: “What serves the finished product?” For a book, that question is a bit easier to grasp than...
Moving: How Writers Write and Editors Work with Writers’ Words
November 4, 2013 There are a lot of parallels between moving and the editorial process. I’m taking a month off from my clients to deal with changing location after fifteen years, so I’m in the middle of discovering these. In the beginning was the raw idea that I...
Enticing Your Reader or Being Blunt. Foretelling: Timing is Everything
October 28, 2013 [A brief note on Blog Titles. For SEO (search engine optimization), limit title to 70 characters, including spaces. And choose words that people are likely to search for. If that’s a corset that you need help squeezing into, welcome to the fashions of...
Response to a Manuscript Submitted for an Estimate: First Impressions — 21 October, 2013
When I prepare an estimate for a client, I almost always write up some first impressions that will orient how I go about the editing process. I may or may not also include a scan of three or five pages that I have marked up in hardcopy. (Part of preparing an estimate...
Power in Shifting Point of View: NoViolet Bulawayo “We Need New Names”
Don’t miss We Need New Names. Enough said, but here are some quotes and why writers can learn from her brilliant voice and kaleidoscopic point of view. Not quite as wild as Eve Ensler’s (see last week’s blog), but unsettlingly dramatic. The novel is written in first...
Universal Themes: An instructive review of Eve Ensler’s Memoir, “In the Body of the World”
If you write or read memoir, In the Body of the World will reshape what you think memoir can be or do. A lot of my memoir clients are writing about sexual abuse. And there is an enormous need in our culture for people to clear their souls of the distress of invasion...
What a Private Library Is Doing for Writers
Last night I attended Booktoberfest – a gemütlich gathering for writers to learn about local self-publishing support and to meet published authors, editors, book designers, and publishers – all of whom had display tables. Local microbreweries provided samples of their...
Building Tension in Your Writing
September 23, 2013 This week I’ve been doing a read-through of a novel about sexual abuse of boys. The reason the author feels this is a topic not much written about is at the heart of the book: the shame. Especially in a culture that treats homosexuality as aberrant,...
Editor’s Nightmare #5: Writers Whose Words Say Nothing, or: Write Directly –September 16, 2013
I could have titled this “Beautiful Beyond Words.” I’m curious what you would make of that phrase if you saw it in a book. I’m afraid I interpret it as: the writer doesn’t fully understand what s/he wants to say the writer has no imagination the writer has limited...
Writers: Pardon My Commas
I’m mortified. The headline for last week’s blog had commas following close-quotation marks. I subscribe to my own blog in order to know when it has been posted. And there was my embarrassment spread across the networks of the world, shamed in front of every...