writing

Before You Submit: He – She – They

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 9 Comments

Do you have a draft of your novel or short story and are thinking of submitting to an agent, publisher or writing contest? My series called Before You Submit might help. This series contains hints and tips I’ve received from professionals in the publishing industry. Each week I’ll share a new tip.

This week I’m going to highlight advice I received last week when I posted my blog. One reader kindly pointed out my mistake, and to me it re-enforces how important it is to have someone else edit my work before submitting the words. Of course, I don’t have an editor for the blog, so I’m on my own.

The rule I broke: Plural and singular must match in a sentence.

The sentence containing my error was:

As usual, this advice is coming from an editor who knows what they are talking about.

If it’s not clear whether the editor is female or male, the corrected sentence is:

As usual, this advice is coming from an editor who knows what he/she is talking about.

I know the editor was a female. so I could also have written:

As usual, this advice is coming from an editor who knows what she is talking about.

I mixed the singular ‘an editor’ with the plural ‘they’. Even at this stage I’m making errors when I know better.

I hope this helps improve your writing.

See Before You Submit:Likeable Characters for the first blog in this series and an introduction the benefits of submitting even if you get a rejection letter.

 

Thanks for reading . . .

 

 

Before You Submit: Should Your POV Look

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 4 Comments

Do you have a draft of your novel or short story and are thinking of submitting to an agent, publisher or writing contest? My series called Before You Submit might help. This series contains hints and tips I’ve received from professionals in the publishing industry. Each week I’ll share a new tip.

This week I’ll write about Point of View Characters looking at things.

As usual, this advice is coming from an editor who knows what he/she is talking about. In an early draft of my novel, I had too many places where the POV looked here, looked there, looked everywhere.  The editor pointed out that if the writing describes something, then the reader assumes the POV can see it.

So a sentence like this:

Kendra submerged herself in the hot tub behind the chalet and waited for dawn. A twig cracked. She turned and looked as a cougar sauntered under the dome of light and silently lifted its upper lip, displaying an impressive array of fangs.

Turned into a sentence like this:

Kendra submerged herself in the hot tub behind the chalet and waited for dawn. A twig cracked. A cougar sauntered under the dome of light and silently lifted its upper lip, displaying an impressive array of fangs.

The second sentence is tighter and hopefully more suspenseful. This is similar to what I posted last week, but I thought I’d include the advice to reinforce checking for ‘saw’ and ‘look’.

I hope this helps improve your writing.

See Before You Submit:Likeable Characters for the first blog in this series and an introduction the benefits of submitting even if you get a rejection letter.

Thanks for reading . . .

Before You Submit: What a Character Sees

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 2 Comments

Do you have a draft of your novel or short story and are thinking of submitting to an agent, publisher or writing contest? My series called Before You Submit might help. This series contains hints and tips I’ve received from professionals in the publishing industry. Each week I’ll share a new tip.

This week I’ll write about What a Character Sees.

The advice I received is not to write that a character saw something. Just describe whatever ‘that something’ is. The reader knows you are in a character’s point of view and that the character ‘sees’ what you are describing. For example:

Kendra walked toward the office door and peeked inside. She saw her new boss throwing his phone against the wall.

The recommended change to the sentence was:

Kendra stood in the open doorway to her boss’s office. Her new boss threw his phone against the wall.

This not only shortens the sentence, thereby not wasting the reader’s time with boring details, the change gets rid of stating what the character saw.

I hope this helps improve your writing.

See Before You Submit:Likeable Characters for the first blog in this series and an introduction the benefits of submitting even if you get a rejection letter.

Thanks for reading . . .

Before You Submit: Paragraph Breaks and Dialogue

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 2 Comments

Do you have a draft of your novel or short story and are thinking of submitting to an agent, publisher or writing contest? My series called Before You Submit might help. This series contains hints and tips I’ve received from professionals in the publishing industry. Each week I’ll share a new tip.

This week I’ll write about Paragraph Breaks and Dialogue.

I was reading through an editor’s notes on an early draft of my novel and had to laugh at my mistake.

The editor’s advice:

Start a new paragraph for each speaker.

This is simple advice and something I don’t think about now. It comes naturally, but when I started writing, it was one more skill I needed to learn. The skill of paragraphs breaks.

I hope this helps improve your writing.

See Before You Submit:Likeable Characters for the first blog in this series and an introduction the benefits of submitting even if you get a rejection letter.

Thanks for reading . . .

Before You Submit: Tighten Your Sentences

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 2 Comments

Do you have a draft of your novel or short story and are thinking of submitting to an agent, publisher or writing contest? My series called Before You Submit might help. This series contains hints and tips I’ve received from professionals in the publishing industry. Each week I’ll share a new tip.

This week I’ll write about Sentence Tightening.

The sentence I’d written in my manuscript was:

A dense wooded area lined both sides of the ski run.

The editor changed the sentence to:

Dense woods lined both sides of the ski run.

The meaning is the same, but of course, uses fewer words. This type of change must be done carefully. In Before You Submit: Sentence Length I wrote about varying sentence lengths. Your change has to be made in context with the sentences around it. You want to ensure your writing still flows.

Just to illustrate at little more, the second sentence to be changed was:

The roar of the avalanche swallowed a scream that escaped from his lips.

The editor suggested the following:

The roar of the avalanche swallowed his scream.

Of course it’s his scream, and where would it come from but his lips? The first sentence didn’t even make sense, and now it uses fewer words.

See Before You Submit:Likeable Characters for the first blog in this series and an introduction the benefits of submitting even if you get a rejection letter.

I hope this helps improve your writing.

Thanks for reading . . .

 

Before You Submit: Questions in Dialogue

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 1 Comment

Do you have a draft of your novel or short story and are thinking of submitting to an agent, publisher or writing contest? My series called Before You Submit might help. This series contains hints and tips I’ve received from professionals in the publishing industry. Each week I’ll share a new tip.

This week’s topic is Questions Within Dialogue Tags.

The advice:

Don’t end a sentence containing a question within dialogue with said. Use asked. A kind editor pointed out this easy fix to me. For example:

“He’s blaming me?” Kendra said

Should be

“He’s blaming me?” Kendra asked.

I hope this helps improve your writing.

See Before You Submit:Likeable Characters for the first blog in this series and an introduction the benefits of submitting even if you get a rejection letter.

Thanks for reading . . .

Before You Submit: Time Qualifiers

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 4 Comments

Do you have a draft of your novel or short story and are thinking of submitting to an agent, publisher or writing contest? My series called Before You Submit might help. This series contains hints and tips I’ve received from professionals in the publishing industry. Each week I’ll share a new tip.

This week I’ll write about Time Qualifiers.

The question is: do you need a time qualifier or not? You might want to use a qualifier for style, but you might not need it for clarity. The choice is up to you. I’m only giving you something to think about.

The following sentence includes the time qualifier, At that moment.

At that moment, Kendra heard rustling in the bunk above her. A pair of bloodshot eyes appeared over the edge of the mattress and peered at her.

Of course, this is happening at the moment. When else would it be happening? The easy fix . . .

Kendra heard rustling in the bunk above her. A pair of bloodshot eyes appeared over the edge of the mattress and peered at her.

In the example, I think the writing is faster and more interesting without the qualifier, so I chose to remove the first three words. Of course, I can’t take credit for the change. The editor suggested tightening the sentence and I agreed.

I hope this helps improve your writing.

See Before You Submit:Likeable Characters for the first blog in this series and an introduction the benefits of submitting even if you get a rejection letter.

Thanks for reading . . .

 

Before You Submit: Job Titles

~ Kristina Stanley ~ Leave a comment

Do you have a draft of your novel or short story and are thinking of submitting to an agent, publisher or writing contest? My series called Before You Submit might help. This series contains hints and tips I’ve received from professionals in the publishing industry. Each week I’ll share a new tip.

This week I’ll write about Capitalizing Job Titles.

Until a professional edited my work, I hadn’t thought about job titles and whether I should capitalize them or not.

An editor corrected a sentence by changing the first letter of a job title to lower case. Hmm? I used my handy Chicago Manual of Style to check the rule. It’s hard to know what to check if you don’t even know you should check something. This is where an editor comes in.

The rules for capitalizing job titles (and this is me summarizing so check a grammar manual for details):

If the job title is part of the name, then use a capital.

President Stanley likes grammar rules.

I decided I should be the president in this example 🙂

If ‘the’ is written before the job title or the job title follows the person’s name, then don’t use a capital.

Ms. Stanley, the president, likes grammar rules.

It’s not a hard rule. Job titles are sometimes capitalized for style or emphasis within an organization, and so we get used the look even though it’s incorrect. All I needed was an editor to point out my error, and I’ll never make it again. I can dream, can’t I?

I hope this helps improve your writing.

See Before You Submit:Likeable Characters for the first blog in this series and an introduction the benefits of submitting even if you get a rejection letter.

Thanks for reading . .

 

Before You Submit: Sentence Length

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 5 Comments

Do you have a draft of your novel or short story and are thinking of submitting to an agent, publisher or writing contest? My series called Before You Submit might help. This series contains hints and tips I’ve received from professionals in the publishing industry. Each week I’ll share a new tip.

This week I’ll write about Sentence Length.

My editor wrote: Simple declarative sentences are powerful but tend to lose power if repeated too often.  If all your sentences are the same length, the writing can come across as dull, and I’m going to guess none of us want to create a dull novel.

There are software programs that provide a graph of your sentence lengths. Autocrit and ProWritingAid are two of them. I haven’t reviewed either product fully, so this is not a product plug. If you don’t want to use another software program, you can take a section of your text, hit return after each sentence and “see” the sentence lengths on the page. This will give you an idea if you vary your sentence lengths.

If the text is shaped like a rectangle, your sentence lengths are too similar.

If all your sentences are short, try joining two sentences with a conjunction making a longer sentence. You can leave in or take our the subject if the subject is the same in both original sentences. This is a subjective choice. Just make sure you get the comma right.

If all your sentences are long, try breaking a sentence into two or even three sentences.

I hope this helps improve your writing.

See Before You Submit:Likeable Characters for the first blog in this series and an introduction the benefits of submitting even if you get a rejection letter.

Thanks for reading . . .

Before You Submit: Dialogue Tags

~ Kristina Stanley ~ 2 Comments

Do you have a draft of your novel or short story and are thinking of submitting to an agent, publisher or writing contest? My series called Before You Submit might help. This series contains hints and tips I’ve received from professionals in the publishing industry. Each week I’ll share a new tip.

This week I’ll write about dialogue tags.

Are you using too many dialogue tags? Does he said/she said sound repetitive? Here’s a tip on how to reduce the number of tags you are using.

Try using a character’s action to indicate who’s speaking. The following sentence uses a dialogue tag: Kendra said.

“You dropped this,” Kendra said. She held a crumpled piece of paper in her outstretched hand.

The editor recommended I rewrite the sentence as follows:

Kendra held a crumpled piece of paper in her outstretched hand. “You dropped this.” 

By  moving the character action to the beginning of the sentence, it’s clear Kendra is speaking. There is no need for the dialogue tag. When you remove a dialogue tag, you must update the punctuation. Don’t forget to change the comma to a period inside the dialogue quotes.

I hope this helps improve your writing.

See Before You Submit:Likeable Characters for the first blog in this series and an introduction the benefits of submitting even if you get a rejection letter.

Thanks for reading . . .