In the middle of creating an important content? Maybe a book or a memoir? Roberta Edgar offers some amazing advice on how you can best write and edit your important piece. A prominent writer, ghost-writer and editor, Roberta has successfully donned several hats over the span of 20 years in engaging content creation. She has expertise in the areas of fiction, non-fiction, articles, web contents, screenplays, business materials, and several more. VP of Independent Writers of Southern California (IWOSC) and longtime member of the Writers Guild of America, West, Roberta is also a dear friend who has offered tremendous support in my writing projects over the years. This is what she has to say on writing and editing compelling content:
Before hiring an editor, co-author, or ghostwriter follow the checklist below.
- To save time and money, do a pre-edit on your own.
- Consider the editing process as a game. The trick is to make your writing as clear as you can, and as strong, smart, concise, and compelling.
- Read the material aloud. Is there a consistency of pattern, cadence, and rhythm?
- Omit spare words and you will be more effective expressing the same thought.
- Be careful not repeat the same thought in different words. Or to overuse the same word or phrase, which often happens with personal pronouns.
- Keep adjectives to a minimum.
- Empower your sentences by starting them with an action word.
- Avoid using clichés.
- Avoid using outdated phrases or slang expressions unless you are writing for a different time and/or place.
- Make certain that each sentence conforms to current rules of grammar and style. Use Chicago Book of Style or another appropriate stylebook choice for reference.
- Review each chapter individually. Make sure it contains everything you planned to include. Check for chronology. You may find that a paragraph works better elsewhere than where you originally placed it. Words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and whole chapters can be moved around to improve flow, consistency, and overall impact of your message. Some you would do well to omit entirely.
- Look out for new areas of weakness resulting from changes and modifications.
- Read your material over again, leaving a day or even a week or more between readings. Often a sentence reads subtly different from the way you thought you had written it, even after a revision.
- After finishing your first run-through, repeat the process. You may discover things you overlooked the last time around. Even if you found only one error on the last go-round, there might be something similarly suspect lurking in the shadows.
- Recruit people to read your book and give you their comments.
- Compile comments from both groups and add thoughts from your own list. Then, make an action plan.
- You have completed your editing task and are ready to submit your material to a professional editor.
- Re-examine your initial goal for writing the material. Are you satisfied that it meets your expectations and your goals? If not, where does it fall short? Make a list, and keep adding to it.
- Consider your target market. Are you planning to submit your manuscript to major publishers? Small presses? Do you need or want an agent? Or are you self-publishing, at least as a first step?
- If you are self-publishing, you will need marketing plan.
However sharp your writing skills, it takes another pair of professional eyes to examine your work more subjectively and to focus not only on what is right with your material but also where it falls short. So, while your end goal is to hire an editor to review and revise your material where necessary, you can save time and money by first giving your manuscript the benefit of your own professional eye. The simplest set of problems is the typos. These are not always due to missed keystrokes, but that your brain generally works faster than your fingers. The good news is that the hours you spend doing this represents money you will not have to pay someone else.
The main challenge is to acknowledge your material as randomly flawed. Nothing more than a piece of raw material which you, in your valiant quest for excellence, seek to liberate from its imperfections—vanquishing every blot and blemish crossing your path. You gain multiple points for persistence—and ultimately win the game.
As with most competitions you face a daunting adversary, which you must subdue from the outset. That enemy is your own ego. If left unchecked it will vigorously tempt you to justify, rationalize, overlook, and underestimate those defects that keep the brilliance of your words from sparkling to their maximum. Once aware of how much better you can make the material by being objective, you begin to enjoy striking out against every false word or comma that stands between you and your ultimate goal.
Do you ever read aloud? Do the sentences flow from your lips with ease and precision, or does your mind stop on occasion at a particular word or phrase that seems awkward or misplaced? Reading your material aloud allows you to listen to the rhythm of your writing, and to discover those places in which it doesn’t ring true. Words are arranged best when they perpetuate a beat, which is why, when they fail to do so, they are likely in need of fine-tuning. Sometimes by merely removing a word or two from the end of a sentence and relocating it to the beginning or middle you can make a vast difference in the overall clarity and effectiveness of the piece. It’s why writers are sometimes told their words “sing,” and it’s that degree of reaction you are seeking. So, read the material aloud, and you will hear the things you didn’t see in print.
The shorter the sentence, the likelier it is to be understood and to comply with rules of grammar. You may embellish your thoughts for the sake of imagery, introspection, or information, but you want your sentences to be messengers of your creative thought process with the sole intention of elevating the reader’s experience.
Practice minimalism and scrutinize your sentences for excess. The following sentence can do with a word cut: “When you go through the painful process of grieving, it would be helpful for you to enlist the support of close family and friends.” The following conveys the same thought, but in half the number of words: “You can relieve your grief considerably with the loving support of family and friends.”
We all have a tendency to overuse “you” and “I” and “she” and “he.” Cut those down to a minimum, and your writing automatically improves. The same is true for repetition of most any word or phrase, except when used for emphasis. How many times in one paragraph or on a single page do you use a particular word relative to your subject matter? More often than you are aware. You should also seek different ways to refer to a single character. For example: “Alice went to the cupboard and found George looking for a box of cereal. George stared at Alice and wondered where she had been.” Try it this way, instead: “Alice went to the cupboard and found George looking for a box of cereal. He stared at his wife and wondered where she had been.” Now, not only does the second sentence read more smoothly, but it reveals information that the first one did not—that Alice is George’s wife.
Just as common is repetition of thoughts from one paragraph to another. When reading the material over, you will likely find that something said in one paragraph was already stated in a previous one, but differently. Read carefully for comprehension.
While the same rule holds true for dialogue, some writers take the opposite path—going out of their way to avoid the “he said/she said” conundrum. However, this is one case where sameness is desirable. In the spirit of originality, writers often seek substitutes for the verb “to say” that, upon reading, can seem artificial and forced. “Don’t leave me,” she wept. “I don’t love you anymore,” he reasoned. “I’ll change,” she vowed. “There’s someone else,” he confessed. “I don’t want to know,” she sniffed. You get the idea.
Adjectives can enhance the reading experience, but their overuse is legendary. Writers often fall into this trap when introducing a character. An old man can be described as “gray-haired, hunched over, with fading blue eyes, heavily veined hands, and a missing front tooth.” But Hemingway made a case for minimalism in his short story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in which he referred to an old man simply as “clean,” leaving the rest to the reader’s imagination. In another example, a building can be described as “a stately, proud, 50-story edifice of glass and concrete” or “a towering monolith.” An automobile might be “a sporty, fire-engine red, diesel-fueled British-made compact convertible” or a “sleek, imported dream car.” Choose carefully.
Try using an action verb as the first word of your first sentence instead of positioning it where it provides the least impact. You will likely engage the reader more quickly.
When you begin with a pronoun, it reads like this: “He stormed out the front door, dragging an over-sized bag behind him, and headed for his van.” Try, instead: “Storming out the front door dragging an over-sized bag behind him, he headed for his van.” It’s subtle, of course, but with the action verb at the beginning, the character and his intention are already in play. Another example: “Mary woke from a bad dream, sweating and shaking.” Shifting the verb to the beginning, it might read like this: “Sweating and shaking, Mary awoke from a bad dream.” Third and last illustration: “The girl was running across the street when she slipped and fell.” Or: “Running across the street, the girl slipped and fell.”
A cliché can be defined as an overused expression that lost its effectiveness. Ironically, the reason it has been used with such frequency is that it does its job so effectively. Your goal as a writer with a keen imagination is to come up with a substitute for each of those worn-out expressions that manages to say the same thing, but in a fresh manner.
Some common expressions that you likely use without realizing they are clichés are: “Money can’t buy happiness,” “Love makes the world go round,” “It’s raining cats and dogs,” “Wishing doesn’t make it so,” “Time waits for no man,” “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” “Time will tell,” and “All is fair in love and war.” The list goes on into the thousands. A good rule of thumb when using one of these expressions is that if it sounds too familiar, avoid it like the plague. Oops. Did you notice that cliché I slipped in there? While it is difficult to avoid their usage 100% of the time, it is possible and desirable to keep clichés to a minimum.
A major weakness of some writers, primarily those who are either stuck in the last century or for whom English is a second language, is their frequent use of words or expressions that are either awkward, too formal for contemporary tastes, or considered antiquated or passé. “Henceforth,” “forthwith,” “moreover,” and “thusly” immediately come to mind as being out of touch with today’s reader. “The cat’s meow,” “picture show,” “shake a leg,” “dowse the light,” “crank up the sound,” “lip rouge,” and hundreds more slang expressions and outdated words and phrases that were coined in the first half of the 20th century never rolled into the 21st.
Chances are you would never start a sentence with “As one might come to expect …” or “It goes without saying ….,” but if you are an older writer or if you spoke another language before learning English, you are advised to read and listen carefully to the way English is spoken in today’s society. In particular, you should become keenly aware of the latest words and expressions that are modifying our language on a daily basis. With the constant infusion of new buzzwords and tech-speak into our everyday speech, even those of us born in the U.S. are struggling to keep up.
English is a living language, and being watchful of what works and what no longer does is essential to the way you are perceived as a writer. Ultimately, your material will be richer for your having done your homework, and far more engaging to your reader.
The rules of grammar and style are in a constant state of change. A classic example is the ongoing battle of the commas, which is all about when and where to use them—or not. Other such conflicts have been raging for some time, while new ones are constantly erupting. To illustrate: We have always been taught that a properly constructed sentence must have a subject and an object. Not anymore.
Writing correctly is not as clearly defined as in the past. There is a general trend toward loosening up certain old constraints, while refusing to budge on others. The kind of writing you do will dictate the type of authority you choose for reference. In general, while journalism generally adheres to one style, creative writing refers to another. Determine the type of manuscript you are writing and the category of outlet you are targeting for submission. This will help you choose the best stylebook for your needs.
You can also access individual publishers’ guidelines by visiting them online. To be taken seriously, it is essential you comply with their requirements.
In the course of writing and rewriting, you may assume certain information has been included—whether about a person, place, or a thing. Because a specific point was already established inside your mind, you assumed that you had transmitted the thought to print. You hadn’t. Or maybe you had, but it’s chronologically out of place. Such things don’t always pop out at you on the first read-through. By the second or third or fourth time around, however, you are likely to start spotting a number of inconsistencies or missing elements.
Once you have reviewed each chapter and made changes, re-read the entire manuscript beginning to end. Do this not so much for inconsistencies anymore—although you may find a few stragglers—but for words or letters that you neglected to delete in the process of revision and those you deleted by mistake. For example: “The Los Angeles Dodgers is the best team in baseball,” when edited to “The Los Angeles Dodgers is one of the best teams in baseball,” requires more than the addition of “one of.” Since your intention was to change “the best” to “one of the best,” you have to remember to also change the plural of “team” to “teams.” Sometimes we forget to fix surrounding words to make them grammatically compatible with our revisions.
Your manuscript is now reading better than ever. All the inconsistencies, repeated words and phrases, uneven chronology, unclear information, and omitted data are edited in or out of the original and you may think you are ready to release your masterwork to the world—or, at least, to your editor. But now is when you let it sit and rest. The longer interval you allow, the more objective you will be when you take on that final reading. Once you pick up your manuscript again you will not necessarily find a number of issues in need of resolution, but chances are there will be more than you expected. One more time, you make your changes and you breathe a sigh of relief.
Apply all previous tips one more time. The process will go faster, as you are more familiar with the material and can probably recognize a glitch from 40 yards away. Then sit back and congratulate yourself for a job well done. You have probably gone as far with the creative process as you can. But in no way are you finished with your task. It is time to bring in outside forces with a fresh and objective eye.
Writers know from experience that asking their nearest and dearest to be objective when reading anything they’ve written is an exercise in futility. Whether it’s your mother, your wife, or your boss, no one in your inner circle wants to rain on your parade. What they don’t realize is that the more brutally honest they are, the bigger the favor they are doing you. In either case you want them among the first to comment on your work. Just remember to take it with a grain of salt when you get nothing from them but gushing praise and not a trace of constructive criticism.
At the same time, to balance the feedback, give your material to three or four people whom you respect as professionals and who you have reason to believe understand the process well enough to give you their candid reaction.
When you are finally satisfied with the revised material, you may have new ideas to add to the mix. Your project is still a work in progress. Add the elements you consider significant. Then declare victory and hire an editor to take it from here.
Unless you already have someone in mind, there are a number of sources through which to find an experienced editor to suit your needs, including personal referrals and a number of editors’ websites or professional organizations. If you Google “book editor” you will be inundated with more choices than you can possibly use. Follow through on two or three that appear most closely to meet your needs, then email or call them, and ask them how they generally work with a client and what they charge. The next step would be to send them a few pages of your manuscript and request a sample edit.
There are two major types of book editors: 1) a developmental editor helps an author produce a publishable book by taking raw material and turning it into compelling, readable text, or, in the case of fiction, resolving issues of plot, theme, dialogue, and structure; and 2) a copy/line editor resolves inconsistencies of grammar and punctuation, as well as improves the flow of ideas and polishes the overall content.
Creating a list is a good way to organize your thoughts. In a way, it is like a streamlined version of a business plan, hitting and summarizing the points you sought to cover, and providing an effective means of double-checking your material. By now, you should be satisfied that you have addressed everything according to plan.
There are a number of ways to publish, and the pros and cons are too numerous to discuss here. Major consideration should be given to matters of time, money, and the strength of your material and platform. When submitting your manuscript to a publisher, consider whether or not you need a book proposal. A memoir, novel, or collection of short stories will not generally require one, but a nonfiction work geared to a niche market most likely will. Your book proposal should contain your marketing plan.
If you are looking for an agent, check the Internet for an agency that is open to submissions from writers of your particular genre. The agency’s website will provide you with its unique guidelines, and the rest is up to you.
Your marketing plan should incorporate your various tools and strategies as well as a number of other topics, including your platform—which is essentially your potential community of readers. There are a number of books on this and related subjects, plus volumes of information on the Internet. Good luck to you and your book!
Credits: Roberta Edgar
Source: Here is the link to the original article: http://www.wordsalamode.com/blog/?p=213
