Writing Exercise: All the Trimmings

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

All the Trimmings at Thanksgiving usually means so much good stuff: stuffing, cranberry sauce, gravy, homemade mashed potatoes, heavenly hash, yeast buns, and pumpkin pie.

Trimming when writing is cutting things down. Sometimes it is done to control word count, other times to get rid of dead words which add nothing to the book, and still others to slay the dreaded adverb and copula monsters.

Sewing has a saying: As you sew, so shall you rip.

Writing should have a saying of: As you write, so shall you trim.

Modern writing is lean. Trimming words down is a required skill.

WRITING EXERCISE: Pick something you wrote but haven’t cleaned up yet. At least 250 words. Cut the words down by 10%. (e.g. For 250 words, you want to end up at 225. For 500 words, only 450 in your final product.)

REVIEW EXERCISE: What words did you remove? Dead words like “that”? Changing out the weak copula for a stronger verb buried in the sentence? Fixing adverb+verb combinations for a specialized word (she ran very fast – she sped; he walked slowly – he sauntered)? Dropped extra dialog tags like “said” and “asked”? Something else? Comment below.

Editing Rant: Clean Up #3 – Chapter Headings

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

What to Clean Up before Sending Your Manuscript to Your Editor #3 – Chapter Headings

First – Numbering

Verify all your chapters are numbered right. Please – no missing chapters, no double chapters. The one I am editing has two chapter 18s.

About 10 to 15% of the books I have edited have chapter counting errors. This issue is common enough it is on my check every time list. If you are paying me for my time and writing out the problems with the manuscript, do you want to be paying me for telling you there are two chapter 18s? I know, yes, if it is the case, but I’m sure you rather have caught that before you sent it for a professional read.

Second – Titles

Get the capitalization right for the titles – or at least consistent. Also the punctuation. Don’t capitalize all the words in one chapter title and then have a full sentence with a period for the next. Your editor usually won’t care what you choose, so long as it is consistent. You don’t even need chapter titles at all – but if you do have one chapter with a title, they all have to have it.

Three – Returns after Chapter Header

Do you have one or two line returns between the Chapter Header and the start of the document? Be consistent. Your editor usually won’t care what you choose, so long as it is consistent.

Four – New Page Start

Most publishers want chapters to start on a new page. Put a hard page break in there, not a dozen returns until it’s at the top of a new page. Your publisher might have different printer settings, and the pages may change by one line each, destroying the manually created page returns. For Microsoft Word, go to the Insert Tab, then Pages section, Page Break. Check on the submission page if you have a question – and even if you don’t. Always check the submission page in case the rules change. You never know when a publisher will have a software upgrade or downgrade.

Five – Formatting

Many people work each chapter in a separate file – to prevent massive data loss and also because the bigger the file, the longer saves take. They then need to assemble everything into one file for sending the manuscript out. This leads to inconsistent formatting including, but not limited to: font size changes, font changes, margin adjustments, and paragraph indenting variations.

In this case, your editor does care what the formatting is – it needs to be consistent with the publisher’s submission guidelines – in every.single.chapter.

If you have to strip the formatting and redo it, that is better than getting your submission rejected because your margins changed in width from one inch to two inches then went to half an inch before returning to one inch. While you might not like dealing with the formatting errors, your publisher REALLY doesn’t want to deal with it while uploading to three different types of eBooks, plus juggling the paperback and hardback printing. Which is why manuscripts with this type of problem get rejected early in the submission process. Don’t be in that statistic.

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

Other Cool Blogs: Magical Words 6/2/2009

Photo by Justin Luebke on Unsplash

Big Changes Required

Editing is a mix of making sure the story is the best it can be without imposing your personal voice on the author’s voice. Like a sculpture where you take stuff away until the art of the marble is there. And sometimes that means telling the author a HUGE chunk of their story needs to be rewritten.

This happened with prolific author C.E. Murphy, and she shared her feelings on Magical Words 6/2/2009 in “A Conversation with my Editor”:

I think most telling about the process is in her comment (6/3/2009 at 1:06 am) to Faith, David where she wrote:

y’know, I really didn’t feel like she was asking for something huge. Maybe because I wasn’t comfortable with how the beginning of the book fit with the rest of it,

She knew something was wrong with the book; it had been eating at her on some level. I’m betting the editor coming back with the reason and a solution was something of a relief (after getting over the shock of needing to rewrite 20% of her manuscript to fix the issue). I don’t normally ask for big changes from my authors when I edit, but the few times I have, they have been really happy when they responded after a couple days – usually with “I knew something was wrong but couldn’t figure it out”. Once it was a nearly immediate “THAT’S IT!!! Thanks.” – and I didn’t hear back from the author for two months.

First hint: Take a couple days after getting the editing letter back to mull on the issues.

Second hint: Ask questions.

If you notice Ms. Murphy asked questions and discovered a deeper problem. The editor didn’t gel with the main character. The romantic element being front-loaded into the novel kept the main point-of-view character’s relationship with the reader from fully forming. The problem wasn’t so much about the romantic elements existing, but the room they took away from other elements.

Again the Magical Words link is:

Editing Rant: No Squiggles

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It’s okay to ask submission editors why they rejected your work, especially if you reached the full manuscript stage.

You might not like the answer, but you can ask.

I had one person whose unsolicited submission made it past the three chapters. I asked for a full manuscript. After reading and finding multiple problems, I gave general instructions on how to fix them and asked for a Revise and Resubmit (R&R). This is a huge stage to get to. Say out of 100 submissions, three make it past the full manuscript stage. Sure the R&R isn’t exactly happy, and there is no guarantee of sale even with an R&R (so don’t do it unless you agree with the changes recommended – more on that another day), but that is a long, long way into the process. You have something that someone enjoyed reading enough to give it a second chance.

When I rejected it, they very politely asked “if something is standing in the way of my manuscript being accepted.”

Yep. Those blue and red squiggles in Microsoft word. Sure a fantasy or sci-fi will have some for the weird words and names, but basics? Fix them. No squiggles.

The submission had gotten so far, and the author didn’t bother cleaning it up before hitting send.

***

My Full Response: Your voice in the manuscript was fine. I asked for an R&R because I enjoyed the story and thought it had merit for a second consideration. I’m nice, but not re-read a manuscript just to be nice type of nice.

The copula issue is common – I mark it on over half of all authors I work with. And one of my favorite authors, I am constantly reminding him that Word has this thing called spell-check and he really needs to turn it on and use it before sending stuff to me.

The spell-check errors killed the submission. If a writer doesn’t care enough to make sure Word isn’t marking errors, I have a problem caring about editing. Can I trust them to listen to editing advice when they don’t even look for it when it is right in front of them?

Does that make sense? Again, one of my favorite authors sets off this pet peeve of mine – so the peeve gets fed pretty regularly. I try to slim it down when I can (it gets so heavy if I am not careful, and I hate to carry it around), so I stopped reading when those squiggles got to be too much.

Good luck.

Erin Penn
Editor

***

So this poor soul shot themself in the foot. I had given them a second chance with the R&R; they didn’t get a third. The favorite author is under contract and can get away with being a computer Luddite. New folks, not so much.

About one in five unsolicited submissions fail this test. If the squiggles aren’t cleaned up, the writing has to be so amazing I don’t notice the squiggles. And that hasn’t happened yet. Remember your manuscript is passing two tests (1) is it a good readable story that the publisher can market and sell, (2) does the author show they have what it takes to be edited? Those squiggles tell a different tale than you want the publisher to read.