Pacing in writing is the key to creating stories your readers can’t put down. Think of how many times you’ve heard someone comment on a book they’ve abandoned by saying “I tried to get through it, but it was just so slow” or “It just raced along, but it didn’t have any substance.” What is [...]
Stephen King said, “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs.” Hemingway, known for his spare writing style, used -ly words far less often than the average writer (42% as often, according to LitCharts.) But what are adverbs? And are they really that bad? What are Adverbs? Adverbs are words used to modify [...]
Self-editing is a challenge for even the most skilled fiction writers. Once you’ve poured your heart and soul into a draft, it’s difficult to slash and revise the words you’ve become attached to. But, as the famous writers’ expression goes, you must kill your darlings if you hope to create a work of fiction readers [...]
Take a quick browse through a bookstore or Amazon’s virtual shelves and you’ll discover that there are hundreds of books about how to write fiction. But when you need to get serious about self-editing your manuscript, pickings are slim. Still, a few fantastic books stand out as tremendous guides to help fiction writers self-edit. Here’s [...]
If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to get your proofreaders and editor on your case with a vengeance, it’s falling prey to homophone confusion. Homophones are words that sound alike when you’re speaking out loud but have different spellings and completely different definitions. It might seem, to some, like a small thing – but using [...]
When you sit down for each editing pass on your manuscript’s first draft, you’re going to be working your way through a series of elements (if you’re taking our advice, that is). And one of the elements that demand the utmost scrutiny and determination in editing is dialogue. In this article, we’ll be approaching dialogue [...]
