Category: Editing Rant

Editing Rant: God In The Machine

Erin Penn

Image courtesy of cooldesign at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Following DragonCon this year, my publishing house, Falstaff, moved me from line editor to content editor. Not more challenging or less challenging, just different. Now I can make the content corrections I’ve been wanting to. Now I need to really watch out about stepping on a writer’s voice.

One of the things I can address in the content editing state is “Deus ex machina” or “God in the Machine”. Ever been reading a book when something happens having no connection with the story, but saves everything – like the eagles in Tolkin’s Lord of the Ring trilogy or when the hand of God literally appears in King’s The Stand, setting off the nuclear warhead? A writer can push and push and push the limit until they have no idea how to get back. Until they just fix things the way they want them outside the narrative.

Readers read to see how things can be solved, not how the writer can ignore the entire worldbuilding process. As a content editor, I may be able to save a book from god-in-the-machine.

One book I ran into clearly had the writer wanting to hit certain scenes and no logical connection between them. The heroine gets motion sick when spun around by the hero, but then goes on a carousal ride. Another motion sick attack has her in the hero’s trailer to recover and then on the back of his motorcycle to ride home after a single drink of water for recovery. At home, she immediately gets drunk. Because I know I want to get drunk after being motion sick, the two feelings are not related at all (sarcasm font implied).

And the worst offender of the writer just putting things in with no real attachment to the narrative, or a toe dipped in the reality pool: The hero comes across her drunk, and she immediately passes out. After carrying her back to her bedroom, she wakes up hangover free and totally sober so the hero isn’t taking advantage of her when they kiss.

Characters exist in the world. They need to be believable within the world. Reaction follows action. Consistency of character, action, and objects are required. Fixing things by just inserting what the plot point requires without integrating the things into the plot story arch is wrong.

Editing Rant: Clean Up #2 – Double Space

Erin Penn

What to Clean Up before Sending to Editor #2

Before final publication, all the formatting needs to be pristine. Translating a file to multiple ebook formats (mobi, .epub, .pdf, .azw, .lit, etc) and hardcopy format takes time and effort. Dealing with extra formatting of spaces at the end of paragraph, chapters, or sentences delays the transformation from final words to publication where money is made. Remove any formatting issues, especially extra spaces and returns, prior to the editor working.

If you are self-publishing, you don’t want to be paying an editor to find double-spaces. Nor searching out the invisible extra returns or too many tabs. That is money out of your pocket for cleaning up emptiness,

If submitting to a publisher, formatting issues could mean the difference between an editor annoyed enough to eject your three-chapter sample from the slush pile or asking for full manuscript. You know you have read books where formatting issues made you toss it aside. Editors trying to pick books to work with are no different.

The biggest offender is the double-space after a period. If you are old enough to remember typewriters, you were taught to type with a double space after a period. Modern standards require only a single space.

Why the change?

Fonts on typewriters were monospace.  Each letter takes up the same amount of room, “i” and “m” for example.  To clearly see the end of a sentence, a double space was required.

Computers allow smart fonts. Letters vary in area usage. During the creation of the font, the combination of periods and spaces have been adjusted for easy reading. 

Double space is a dinosaur.

Courier New: Mmmm.  I love ice cream.

Times New Roman: Mmmm. I love ice cream.

Other posts in the Clean Up series
#1 – Commas
#2 – Double Spaces
#3 – Chapter Headings

Book Review: Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Erin Penn

Amazon Cover - Eats Shoots Leaves

Book Cover from Amazon

BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON

Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

We all know the basics of punctuation. Or do we? A look at most neighborhood signage tells a different story. Through sloppy usage and low standards on the internet, in email, and now text messages, we have made proper punctuation an endangered species. In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Lynne Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty, and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to George Orwell shunning the semicolon, this lively history makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with.

 

MY REVIEW

I laughed and laughed from preface where the author describes her reaction to producing a runaway best seller on punctuation to the final chapter describing how writing is changing from print to Internet medium leading to a flash on the Punctuation Murderer. Verily, I giggled, cackled, chortled, snickered, and tittered like a fiend: while she is not a disciple of the Oxford Comma, I will forgive her the heresy for the rest of her punctuation doctrine is sound.

You should seek out and read this book. Discover how the words “best seller” can and should be bestowed on a grammar book.

If the mene “I like cooking my family and my pets. – Use commas, don’t be a psycho.” tickles your fancy, this is the book for you. 

Note: Uses British grammar rules, not American.

Editing Rant: Weaving Plotlines

Erin Penn

Image courtesy of wowspix at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Internal and external plot lines apply here at the long-form. Single plot lines go to the short story entrance on the side.

Anything longer than a short story should have multiple plot lines woven together, and even the best short stories have more than one thing happening. The most obvious is an internal emotional journey of the main character, such as coming-of-age, and the external situation needing resolution, for example a killer needing to be found in a mystery. Outside of the internal and external (emotional and action) plot lines, most stories include multiple relationship interactions including family and romance.

Adding additional story lines is easy. Keeping them all advancing and interacting with equal tension is not.

This is where the plotter has the advantage over the pantser. An outline indicates where beats happen, the need to circle back and concentrate on the mystery and allow the romance to take the back burner in the science fiction thriller. A pantser after completing the book often needs to find all the stray plot lines and trim them or weave them in to the story cloth.

One thing you should not do is concentrate on only one part of the story until running out of steam then switching to the next plot. Maybe during the rough draft, just so all the information is on the page. You can’t rewrite until the writing is done. But after the initial writing is finished, the internal and external and relationship plot lines should be integrated. A reader shouldn’t look at a scene and say “this scene was written to advance the emotional growth plot line”.

The only thing a reader should know is they need to read the scene so they can move to the next scene because everything is woven so tightly together the story pulls them from the beginning to the end.

WRITING EXERCISE: For your present work-in-progress (WIP), define all the plot lines occurring.

MY EXAMPLE: In Honestly, the following plot lines are occurring:

Book Cover for Honestly

1. Internal – Kassandra’s acceptance and adjustment after her breakup. In particular, but not limited to, her sense of self-worth and worth of being loved.
2. Relational – Kassandra’s relationship with her son and their relationship with her ex; adjusting to the new dynamic.
3. Internal (indirect) – Troy’s ability to reveal his physical vulnerability to others. 
4. Relational – Development of Troy’s and Kassandra’s relationship, revealing the past and figuring out the future.
5. External – Kassandra’s job situation and balancing her needs of being a parent against the need for income.
6. External – Troy’s physical therapy and injury recovery requirements, his ability to accept them, and the ongoing impacts medically to his life.
7. External (indirect) – Troy’s ongoing job with the military.

Not every plotline in Honestly is fully developed, nor is every plotline directly visible to the reader. Number seven, Troy military job, may have impact in future stories within the universe they come from. Kassandra originally appeared in Light it Up, part of the Atlantis Warden urban fantasy universe.