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More Notes From An Editor…
Again a Lot of Reading Tonight… Story after story after story so far tonight, the writing was good if not great. But I would be reading along and suddenly go “where is the story?” Oops… Another thing I noticed is flashbacks in openings. I guess the writer thinks that is a good way to help explain a character, but the reader (in this case me) is not grounded in the present of the story so when I am taken back to some event in the past, I quit reading. And back to point one, that flashback is a long ways from any story. Oops… You know, writers, you don’t have…
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Editing and Reading Observations… Part 9…
Bad Choices by the Writer… In previous parts of this series, I have been talking about why I will stop reading a story. I have mostly focused on craft issues in the telling of the story. Craft issues can be solved with learning and study and putting a lot of words through your fingers (combined at the same time with the learning and study). But for this part, I want to talk about the lack of understanding by the reader of two major elements of commercial fiction… 1…THERE ARE READERS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORDS… In the early stages of writing, writers only focus on the words and…
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Editing and Reading Observations… Part 6…
Kris and I Have Fun Brainstorming… These days it is usually over lunch, working out stuff we need to talk about in a workshop. (We never talk about our own writing… just never… she has no idea what I am working on and I have no idea what she is working on… You all should protect your own writing in the same way.) But we do talk a lot about publishing and teaching, all the time actually. Tonight I was sitting here at my business computer, getting ready to work on a publishing product when Kris walked by and mentioned the series of Editing and Observations I have been doing.…