Silencing the Inner Critic

Prolific author Barbara Brown Taylor admits being a perfectionist. This can be a real handicap if we keep revising and tweaking, unable to let go. Taylor was asked recently what she does to silence this inner critic. “I give it $50 to buy a pair of shoes and tell it to come back later,” she said. 

I had to do this with my first book, which I kept polishing and enlarging until my late wife Judy appeared at my shoulder to watch what I was doing. She eventually said, “I think it’s time to let this child go out and play in the street.” I knew she was right, so I sent the manuscript off to my publisher and didn’t look back.

Don’t get me wrong. I think every writer needs enough objectivity to evaluate and improve a manuscript; but if our inner critic paralyzes us, our work will never speak to the world. It becomes like a floundering swimmer who grabs an able swimmer and pulls him underwater. How do we get the benefit of our inner critic without allowing it to drown us?

I suppose there’s no hard and fast rule, but try this: Heed your inner critic as long as it builds your confidence, clarifies your meaning, and engages your reader. But when the inner critic becomes a voice of self doubt, pay it no mind. Take that as the cue to let your child go out and play.

Joe Allison writes both fiction and nonfiction, and has been a member of the Indiana chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. His most recent book is Hard Times (Warner Press: 2019). He lives in Anderson, IN, with his wife Maribeth.

The After Story Curbside Debrief

In today's post, I describe a short, but simple exercise to help you edit for the desired impact your story can have on your audience.

In my current profession, we have a self-assessment procedure that we do walking out of every retailer store visit. During this "Curbside Debrief, " we ask ourselves these 5 questions after walking out of the most recent store:

1. What did I do well and how would I know?
2. What didn't I do well?
3. What will I always do?
4. What will I never do again?
5. Did I leave the store better than I found it?

This is a great self-assessment that can be morphed into many different applications. I would postulate that you could apply this to either your rough draft, finished article, manuscript, or short story. Once you complete that process, go back and then write in another color ink what you wish it would have said (assuming you wished it had said something different). The differences can help you tune in on where you might want to do some edits.

Just a short and simple exercise that can have a much larger impact on your writing.

Did you leave your audience better than you "found" them? :)

Well Begun

Since the advent of its Nook e-book reader, Barnes & Noble has allowed visitors to read any e-book in its inventory for an hour at no charge while they’re in the store. In fact, one can come back every day to read the book in hour-long installments.

On my most recent visits to B&N, I paid careful attention to people in the coffee shop to see how they sampled new books on their e-readers. None of them spent a whole hour that way. In fact, most came with 3 or 4 print books under arm as well as their Nooks, then sampled all of them as they sipped a cup of Starbucks and munched their Danish. Cups emptied, they bought 1 or 2 books and left the store.

First impressions are quickly made.

When I served as a book-contest judge several years ago, I promised myself to read the first 50 pages as a courtesy, no matter how I felt about an entry. Even that small amount of reading seemed burdensome with certain books. With others, the self-imposed 50-page quota flew past in no time and I was eager to read more. You can guess which books got my vote!

Typical book browsers spend little time sampling a new novel, so the opening pages are critical. If you want to invest extra time polishing a manuscript for submission, your time will be well spent at the beginning. 

Joe Allison writes both fiction and nonfiction, and has been a member of the Indiana chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. He lives in Anderson, IN, with his wife Maribeth and daughter Heather.

What Color Are Those Eyes?

One of my tasks as a fiction editor is to spot discrepancies, and by far the most common one I see has to do with a character’s eye color. In beginning chapters, our heroine has blue eyes, and somewhere in the middle of the book her eyes are brown. This also happens frequently with hair color. He’s a blonde. No, wait! He’s a redhead. Or sometimes a shade of blond changes from strawberry to honey—and maybe even back again. Eyes are azure and later navy.

Harder to spot is when a character’s look changes between novels in a series, which is impossible for an editor to know without having edited previous volumes. And even then, the editor isn't necessarily the keeper of that information or has the memory of that proverbial elephant. Yet rarely, although dye can be involved, do characters change their hair color (other than maybe the blue, purple, green, or pink we see so often these days), and as far as I know only contact lenses will change eye color.

Discrepancies are common in fiction; after all, most everything in novels is made up, and manuscripts are revised multiple times. Discrepancies happen easily. A character has left the house by the front door yet is standing on the back porch. The family is having roast beef for dinner, but the children eagerly eat their lasagna.

But for characteristics like eye and hair color? Like height and build and facial hair and age? What to do?

My solution for tracking characteristics is to create a spreadsheet with each character down the left and categories such as eye color, hair color, age (for each book in a series), and height across the top—or the opposite, if you prefer. If applicable, add a category like scars (over the left eye or over the right eye?) or piercings (nose, lip, ears, other?). When any one of those characteristics or a new one is determined, make an entry. This shouldn’t slow you down much, especially if you review the day’s work and then record those characteristics. Then refer to that spreadsheet often as you revise, and especially during final self-editing.

I’m curious, though, to know what other solutions novelists might employ to avoid characteristic discrepancies. Please share your routines or ideas; I’d love to pass them on to my clients who feel eye-color challenged. As I said, it happens!

photo credit: https://publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=16148&picture=blue-eye-detail

Jean Kavich Bloom is a freelance editor and writer for Christian publishers and ministries (Bloom in Words Editorial Services), with more than thirty years of experience in the book publishing world. Her personal blog is Bloom in Words too, where she has posted articles about the writing life. She is also a regular contributor to The Glorious Table, a blog for women of all ages. Her published books are Bible Promises for God's Precious Princess and Bible Promises for God's Treasured Boy. She and her husband, Cal, live in central Indiana. They have three children (plus two who married in) and five grandchildren.

Listen for What You Want the Reader to Hear

If you're certain one more post about self-editing will make you a bit bug-eyed and crazy, stop reading. On the other hand, you might want to start listening, although I don't necessarily mean listening to me.   

Recently, a speaker hired someone to transcribe audio recordings of her recent engagements, and then she hired me to edit the transcripts. 

In some places, what the speaker supposedly said made little sense, so I assumed the transcriber had either misheard or made what seemed like a strange guess. In other places, question marks indicated the transcriber gave up trying to understand what had been said. 

To do this job, I had to listen to the audio myself. That made all the difference between just reading the transcript and hearing what the speaker expected her reading audience to hear. I suspect English isn't this transcriptionist’s first language, and that's okay. But for instance, “copy and paste” became “cut a piece,” and “pace yourself” rather humorously became “paste yourself.” 

***

English is the first and perhaps only language for the authors I work with. Sometimes, though, I don’t understand what they’re trying to say. After some thought and digging into context, I can usually determine what the author probably means to say, but that’s not what the words convey.

I don't care who we are as writers, transcribing exactly what we mean to covey from our brains to the page every time is a challenge.

“The pit in my stomach expanded with fear,” a writer might write. Mmm. You can feel the effects of fear in the pit of your stomach, but unless you’ve swallowed an actual pit, you won’t have one expanding there no matter how scared you are. A sentence like that can sound almost right at first, but when you really listen to it, you know it's not. (Again, no shame here. It happens!)

Or sometimes a single word is off. Did the author mean to say “she felt down the fire escape in the dark” or “she fell down the fire escape in the dark," and right at the end of a cliffhanger too? Was she one of the most adept criminals to ever make a getaway? Or did she trip and plunge to the ground below? 

Someone's got to question what could be missteps, and maybe it should be us writers first.

Consider going off somewhere alone, with coffee, chocolate, or whatever it takes, for one more read-aloud, self-editing pass of your work. Listen to specifically catch what might cause a reader to guess what you meant, give up on guessing what you meant, or hear what you never meant. (If you have time, you might want to record yourself reading, and then listen to the audio later.)  

But don’t, I repeat don't, make yourself bug-eyed and crazy! I don't want to be responsible for that.

Jean Kavich Bloom is a freelance editor and writer for Christian publishers and ministries (Bloom in Words Editorial Services), with thirty years of experience in the book publishing world. Her personal blog is Bloom in Words too, where she sometimes posts articles about the writing life. She is also a regular contributor to The Glorious Table, a blog for women of all ages. Her published books are Bible Promises for God's Precious Princess and Bible Promises for God's Treasured Boy. She and her husband, Cal, have three children (plus two who married in) and five grandchildren, with foster grandchildren in their lives on a regular basis.

Photo credits: https://publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=177191&picture=young-man-read-book; https://publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=239748&picture=coffee-cup

7 Quick and Easy Ways to Clean Up Your Manuscript

By Jean Kavich Bloom

Self-editing is important. With a cleaner manuscript, you’ll get better results from your beta readers. If you hire an editor —especially one who charges by the hour—you’ll save a little money. And even if you decide to pitch to an agent or self-publish without professional editorial services (though I can't  recommended that!), your chance for success will improve. 

Yet I’m often surprised how many authors skip the easiest, quickest, most elemental methods for self-editing. Here are seven:

1.       Run a spell check. We all know spell checks don’t catch everything, but authors too often fail to run them. Words with several i’s seem particularly vulnerable, such as the words responsibility and eligibility. Why not let our computers catch what we might not see? 

2.       Replace two spaces between sentences with one. You might be old enough to have been taught to type in two spaces between sentences, but that’s old school. Modern typesetting does not require that much space. Use your search-and-replace function to change two spaces into one throughout your manuscript. Even if you know you habitually type in only one, sometimes a grouping of two sneaks in.

3.       Check chapter number sequence. The best policy is to check chapter number sequence . . . again. You might be surprised to find you’ve skipped or repeated a number, maybe because of revisions. It happens!

4.       Search for repeated words, especially “the the,” “and and,” and “to to.” Your spelling and grammar check may or may not pick up on repeated words, so a little extra effort can help. I've found the words most likely to be repeated are the three above. Give it a shot. It can’t hurt.

5.       Search for a name you changed or the traditional spelling you elected not to use. Did you decide to call Violet another name? Daisy maybe? Search for Violet to make sure Daisy’s former name isn’t hiding in some literary corner. Is your heroine's name spelled Jeniffer? Search for Jennifer to ensure your brain didn't tell your fingers to go with the more traditional spelling once or twice.

6.       Mind the squiggly lines. In Word, that squiggly line beneath a word really does mean the spelling or grammar could be wrong. When you see that line, right click on the “offending” word. The correct spelling (at least according to the Word dictionary) might show up. Oh! Left click on the correct spelling and it will pop right in. Of course, if you know the squiggly line is wrong, ignore it.

7.       Repeat steps 1 through 6 for every draft. Once is not enough for these simple checks. Most novels are revised numerous times, which is what makes them so good! But even if you think you’ve revised very little in that final draft, you could easily have made an error one of these checks will catch.

Maybe you already faithfully walk through every step above. If so, great. If not, give them a whirl to see if you can catch errors . . . before someone else does! They really are quick and easy.

Jean Kavich Bloom is a freelance editor and writer (Bloom in Words Editorial Services). Her personal blog is Bloom in Words too, where she sometimes posts articles about the writing life. She is also a contributor to The Glorious Table, a blog for women of all ages. Her published books are Bible Promises for God's Precious Princess and Bible Promises for God's Treasured Boy. She and her husband, Cal, have three children and five grandchildren. 

photo credit:  http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=2965&picture=magnifier

Revision versus Editing (Part 2)

                                                       By Kelly Bridgewater

Last month, I suggested some blanket revision techniques to help the process of revising your final manuscript. This month, I want to help you with the Editing part of your final manuscript.

Editing means looking closely at the format and the grammatical errors in your manuscript. Now, I know, some of you will hate this, while others look forward to finding grammatical errors in anything. (I enjoy finding grammatical errors.)

-Make sure your manuscript has one-inch margins and written in 12 point font with Times New Roman.

-Double space your entire document.

-Header should be Last Name/ BOOK TITLE/ Word Count

-One space after every sentence.

-Past tense. Your manuscript major verbs should be in past tense.

-No head hopping. This means, don’t start a section of the chapter in the heroine’s head, but then skip into the hero’s head because he would have more emotion during a certain incident. Maybe reevaluate why the chapter should be in the heroine’s head if you believe the hero would have more of an emotional response. Switch the perspective of the chapter. Quick fix.

-Don’t use explaination points! Unless having someone yell in a direct dialogue. (This bothers literary agent, Chip MacGregor.See “What Drives an Editor Crazy” by Chip MacGregor, April 9, 2013)

-Use the correct format of the word: Your (possession: your car, your house, etc); You’re (Contraction: You are)

-Use the correct format of the word: There (a place: go over there, the house over there); Their (possession: their car, their house, etc); They’re (contraction: they are).

 -One of my biggest pet peeves that I remind my students over and over: Don’t rely on your spell checker and grammar checker. They don’t find everything. Plus, I have found the grammar checker wrong on more than one occasion.

-Print out your manuscript. If every first word is the same, then you need to revise the wording. My biggest problem is I usually start every paragraph with a dependent clause, such as Starting the car, Walking to the store. I try to go back and fix this.

-Change your weak verbs, such as, was, were to more active verbs like clinched, stoked, loved, etc….

Of course, there are many more suggestions to fix the appearance and words of your manuscript, these are just a couple of suggestions.

Please share any suggestions you have that work. I would love to learn different strategies to apply to my writing. 

Kelly Bridgewater holds a B.S. in English and a M.A. in Writing from Indiana State University on the completion of a creative thesis titled Fleeting Impressions, which consisted of six original short stories. She has been published in the Indiana State University Literary Journal, Allusions, with her stories titled “Moving On” and “Life Changing Second.” In fall 2011, she presented her essay, Northanger Abbey: Structurally a Gothic Novel, at the Midwestern American Society of 18^th Century Studies Conference. Kelly’s writing explores the ideas of good prevailing over evil in suspense. Kelly and her husband reside with their three boys and two dogs.