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.
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is indicative of many writing samples from unpublished writers: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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