Editing - Story Tips - Publishing

Engage Your Characters in Their Setting When you’re characters interact through dialogue, make them interact as well with their surroundings. There should be a continual interplay of character and setting. Examine your dialogue sections to ensure they don’t just take place in a vacuum. What are your characters holding in their hands? If they’re not...

Benefits and Drawbacks of Each POV in Your MS As a beginning writer who chose to write my first book in first-person narrative, I discovered the drawbacks of such an approach the hard way. Halfway through the book, I started all over in third-person – something I wouldn’t recommend. Briefly, Point of View – when...

The Three S’s – Scene, Setting, and Senses Stories don’t occur in a bubble. They have to be set in a real and believable place. And what makes a scene or setting, is detail. And what makes the details, is work. Hard work. A lot of time and effort, in other words. Settings aren’t just...

Editing Your Final Draft Whether you’re self-publishing your book, sending to an editor, or to a publishing company — ideally you want to send your ultimate best work — even if you’re having someone else edit it for you prior to publishing. I have done a lot of editing. Editors are people too — just...

How Many Manuscript Drafts Should You Go Through? When working on a book of any kind, if you haven’t gone through a minimum of three drafts, you probably don’t have a finished product. The first draft should be seen only as an opportunity to articulate and develop ideas in a rough form. This tells you...

The Dreaded LYs When discussing adverbs in regards to writing fiction, the kind we’re usually talking about are the ly words – like clearly, dearly, and madly. Many high-brow critics complain that the use of adverbs like this is a lazy man’s (or woman’s) tool. I remember the first time I turned in some of...