Where Normal Need Not Apply
It’s almost time for NaNoWriMo, and if you’re anything like me, you might be freaking out a little as November nears. So here are several quick links to posts helping us plan, start, and get unstuck with our story.
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I’ve offered several posts here about balancing various elements of our story, but there’s still room for debate because we have to find the right balance for our voice, genre, tone, and style—for our story. That means there is no perfect amount of backstory or description or emotion.
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We often think about the purpose of backstory in terms of “what do readers need to know?” But with that perspective, it’s too easy to include too much backstory. Instead, we might be better off if we think about backstory from the perspective of what the story needs.
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When we end up with a “dud” of bad writing from a book we’ve purchased, what should we do? Should we treat it as a learning experience or just close the book? My answer has changed over the years, so let’s take a closer look at when we might want to slog through bad writing to try to learn what not to do—and when we wouldn’t.
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When it comes to learning about point of view and how to avoid issues like head-hopping, it doesn’t help that half the information out there is confusing and contradictory. Let’s take a closer look at how we can find and fix these issues.
Pin ItHow to Edit Yourself Into Print — Two editors step through the process of editing your own work
Whether we won NaNoWriMo or not, we survived November, and I want to take a moment to gasp—er, breathe. After everything that went wrong with my month, winning feels like a miracle. So let’s talk about how we can move forward from any draft, NaNo or not.
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The trick to sharing setting information (which our readers do need) without dragging down the pace is to write active descriptions. Active descriptions let the reader imagine the setting in their mind, keep them anchored in the story, and slip in information so seamlessly that they never realize they’re reading descriptions.
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We want to clean up our story the best we can because copy editors often charge a “messy manuscript” premium. Yet it can be difficult to self-edit at this “polish” stage. For one thing, this step can be tedious to the extreme. Even with MS Word’s “find and replace” functionality, there are many words to check, and it’s hard to remember them all.
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I was going to rant about poor editing today, but I closed the wrong window in my computer and lost all 1000 words. *sigh* So I’ll try it again later when I’m not so sleep deprived from WANACon preparation. Instead, I’m revisiting a different topic today. We’ve heard the saying: Life is a journey. Often this […]
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