6 Steps to Balance Your Editing: Plot vs. Characters
When starting a revision, we often struggle to see the underlying issue to know how to fix it. Do we need to change the plot? The characters? Both?
Pin ItWhen Should We Skip a Scene in Our Story?
Every story beat or turning point scene—when events affect the main story question, conflict, or goal—needs to be included in a story. But what about non-turning-point scenes? How can we tell when to include them and when we can skip ahead?
Pin ItBuilding a Theme through Character Arcs
We normally create stories where the point—the theme—is in line with our worldview. But it’s not unusual for our characters to hold opposite beliefs, even our protagonists. At least to start. And their story journey is often where our theme lies.
Pin ItStory Themes: What’s Your Worldview?
We often struggle with identifying a story’s theme, and when it comes to including themes in our own stories, we might be at a loss for how to do so. This past weekend, a writing workshop for preteens included lessons on how to write with themes. The processes the kids went through to discover how to incorporate themes in their stories might help us too.
Pin ItFix Showing vs. Telling with Macros & Word Lists
Many writers will search in MS Word for red flag words that indicate telling. But there are a lot of those words, and that would be a lot of searches. That’s where macros can help, and today we’ll learn how to build our own trouble-searching macros with a few secret weapons.
Pin ItMS Word Trick: Using Macros to Edit and Polish
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.
Pin ItHow Can We Identify a Good Editor?
Back at the start of the ebook revolution, self-publishing was still a “no-no” and only a handful of small and e-publishers existed for my genre. Since then, our choices for publication have exploded, from self-publishing becoming accepted to dozens of small and e-publishers hopping on the ebook train. Before, we […]
Pin It3 Tips for Skipping the Boring Parts
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 […]
Pin ItWhy Story Structure Matters
Story structure isn’t just about the “rules” of story beats. It lies at the core of our ability to tell a story. Let’s take a look at what that means.
Pin ItFix 4 Common Writing Problems with “The Emotion Thesaurus”
A couple of weeks ago, Becca Puglisi, one of the co-authors of the fantastic Thesaurus books, shared her tips for using the new The Positive Trait Thesaurus and The Negative Trait Thesaurus books. Her advice can help us develop our characters at all stages of planning, drafting, and editing. But the […]
Pin It
