The Angels Present: Editor Proof Your Writing

Please welcome Don McNair author of Editor Proof Your Writing

Don will award one randomly chosen commenter their choice of books from his backlist. The books can be seen at his website.

HOW TO EDITOR-PROOF YOUR WRITING

By

Don McNair

   

Most editing manuals are like geography books. They give great information, but don’t show how to get from place to place.  Editor-Proof Your Writing: 21 Steps to the Clear Prose Publishers and Agents Crave is a GPS that leads you through the writing jungle to solve your specific writing problems.

Most editing manuals are like dictionaries from which you’re asked to select words to write the Great American Novel. This book shows what words to use and what words NOT to use. 

Most editing manuals are loaded with mind-numbing theory.  This one presents knowledge a step at a time and asks you to apply what you learned—a step at a time—to your manuscript’s first chapter.  Along the way you’ll also edit a nine-chapter melodrama and check your editing against the author’s.  When you finish, you’ll have an editor-proofed first chapter and will be ready to edit the rest of your book. 

This system was proven to work in three years of weekend and online classes, titled Editor-Proof That Chapter and Twenty-One Steps to Fog-Free Writing. They are parts One and Two of this book. Part Three discusses finding and working with critique partners, professional editors, publishers, and agents.  The students loved the concept! 

This book is perfect for use in classrooms. The information is presented in bite-sized lessons which can be assigned daily. See what students say about their classroom experiences on the back page.

Dialog tag adverbs?  You don’t need them!

Back in my newbie years I heard someplace that I should eliminate -ly words—adverbs that qualify our characters’ utterances—from dialogue tags. I had no idea why, but that was the common advice, so I accepted it.  Later, I realized my writing was sharper.  But why would that be?  Years later, while writing dialogue for a scene, the reason hit me.  It can be explained by two words: author intrusion.

To illustrate, consider this sentence, which is indicative of many writing samples from unpublished writers: 

“I’ll advise you to stop doing that,” he said, angrily.

How do we know he said this angrily?  Well, the author told us!  After the character said his line, the author poked his reader’s shoulder and said, “That thing the character said?  It was said in an angry manner.  I just wanted you to know that.” 

Here’s a more vivid explanation.  You’ve just taken your seat at a theatre on opening night.  The lights dim and the curtain opens on two actors.  The female actor steps forward and says, “John, I wish you hadn’t done that.” 

The theatre lights go bright and the director bounds onto the stage, waving his arms.  He stares at the audience.  “That thing the character said?  I just wanted you to know it was said in an angry manner.  Do we all understand that?”  Satisfied that we do, he disappears behind the curtain and the actors again take their places.  John says, “Well, it wasn’t my fault,” and that director prances back onto the stage to tell us John was miffed, perhaps even a bit petulant. 

Could you settle in and enjoy that play?

What’s the solution?  The way our sample dialogue is now, with those -ly words, the author is telling us how the lines were said.  Let’s let the characters themselves show us their frames of mind, perhaps like this:

“I’ll advise you to stop doing that.”  His hands formed fists at his sides.

Let’s look at another way to show the character’s feelings.  Consider this dialogue: 

“Don’t you think we’d better stop?” she asked, anxiously.

There’s that author again, telling us how a characters thinks.  What’s another way to show she said her line anxiously?  Well, we can alter what she says so that there’s no question, and no need for the author to butt in.  Perhaps like this: 

“My God, shouldn’t we stop?”

Author intrusion is only one problem with using -ly words.  Redundancy is another.  The above quote uses an adverb (the -ly word), a frequently seen redundancy.  If someone said, “Now, now” to you, wouldn’t you immediately classify it as a mild statement?  Do we really need an outsider—the author—to tell us it was, by telling us it was said mildly?  We are being told twice, and that makes it a redundancy. 

The adverb adds nothing, and in fact detracts from our story involvement.  If a quote seems to need an -ly word, change the quote so that it doesn’t.  Edit the above example to:  “Now, now,” he said.

Here’s another example: 

“It’s none of your business!” she said hotly. 

That exclamation mark says she was hot, doesn’t it?  Change this to: 

“It’s none of your business!” she said.

Where possible, leave out the dialogue tag completely.  This is true especially when there’s a rapid-fire exchange between characters, like this:

“It’s none of your business!”

“Now, Betty, I was only asking…”

“You men.  You come in here and…”

Is there any question about who said what?  Or how they said it?

Adverbs are frequently overused in non-quoted material and often are redundant.  Compare this sentence:

Amy quickly jumped up. 

With this one: 

Amy jumped up.

 The latter is stronger, don’t you think?  Besides, how could one jump slowly?  Aha!  Another form of redundancy. 

One more: 

She quickly jerked the hat off her head.

 Compare that with: 

She jerked the hat off her head.

 Or, better yet: 

She jerked off her hat.

More action, less fog. 

Bottom line?  Use your word processor’s search tool to find “ly” dialogue tags and rewrite the dialogue so it doesn’t need it.  It’s that simple!

Don McNair is a professional editor and the author of ten published novels and non-fiction books.  His latest, “Editor-Proof Your Writing: 21 Steps to the Clear Prose Publishers and Agents Crave,” can be reviewed and ordered at his website, http://DonMcNair.com.

Over the next several months I edited many other paperback novels.  I joined critique groups and aggressively edited other writers’ fiction.  I plowed through all those manuscripts from pre-published authors and the marked-up paperback books I’d tossed into a dresser drawer, and painstakingly sorted thousands of offending sentences and other problems by type.  I eventually identified twenty-one distinct problems.  Today I call their solutions, appropriately enough, the “Twenty-One Steps to Fog-Free Writing.”

The inference staggered me.  Just as there’s a specific number of elements in chemistry’s Periodic Table and letters in the alphabet, there’s also a specific number of fog problems in writing.  I realized many unnecessary words are actually tips of bad-writing icebergs, and that eliminating those words resolves otherwise complicated editing problems.  In fact, almost half the Steps actually strengthen action while shortening sentences.  You can see it happen right before your eyes.  

So, here’s the good news.  You don’t have to be an English major to achieve this writing miracle.  You don’t have to diagram sentences or study verb declensions, whatever they are.  You don’t have to learn complicated rules, wade through thick manuals of style, or immerse yourself in the technical mumbo-jumbo of a book on editing.  Applying what you learn here will make you a better writer than would struggling with any of those. 

Here’s why.  Most editing manuals are like geography books that give great information but don’t show how to get from place to place.  This book is a GPS that leads you through the writing jungle to solve your specific writing problems.

Most editing manuals are like dictionaries from which you’re asked to select words to write the Great American Novel. This book shows what specific words to use and what ones not to use. 

Don McNair spent his working life editing magazines (eleven years), producing public relations materials for an international PR company (six years), and heading his own marketing communications firm, McNair Marketing Communications (twenty-one years). His creativity has won him three Golden Trumpets for best industrial relations programs from the Publicity Club of Chicago, a certificate of merit award for a quarterly magazine he wrote and produced, and the Public Relations Society of America’s Silver Anvil. The latter is comparable to the Emmy and Oscar in other industries. 

McNair has written and placed hundreds of trade magazine articles and four published non-fiction how-to books. He considers his latest, Editor-Proof Your Writing: 21 Steps to the Clear Prose Publishers and Agents Crave, (published April 1, 2013 by Quill Driver Books) to be the cap of his forty-year writing and editing career. It’s an easy-to-use editing manual that helps writers edit, step by step, their first chapter, then use the knowledge gained to edit the rest of their work.

McNair has also written six novels; two young adults (Attack of the Killer Prom Dresses and The Long Hunter), three romantic suspenses (Mystery on Firefly Knob, Mystery at Magnolia Mansion, and co-authored Waiting for Backup!), and a romantic comedy (BJ, Milo, and the Hairdo from Heck). All are published internationally, and are available at his website, http://DonMcNair.com . 

McNair, a member of Romance Writers of America, Mystery Writers of America, and the Editorial Freelancers Association, now concentrates on editing novels for others. He teaches two online editing classes.

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