Category: Editing

Comic book cusswordsAs a writer, I have a love-hate relationship with my first published novel. I’m proud I wrote a solid PI tale set in my hometown of Cleveland. But I published badly, alienated an agent because of it, and also…

There is too much damn swearing in that book. It’s out there now, still with Clayborn Press, but if I were to go to, say, Down & Out Books to republish it, I’d do a complete rewrite. 

“Wait. Because of swearing?”

Yes and no. There’d still be swearing in it, but especially after taking on editing duties, I’ve found a lot of manuscripts have little swearing in them. And Marcus Sakey, an author with whom I was acquainted for a time, told me about his “F Bomb Check.” He took out every other F bomb, or every third one. I started doing that with my crime fiction. In scifi?

The Children of Amargosa was initially presented as a YA novel. By Storming Amargosa, that had gone into the rearview mirror. The moment it changed, however, came when I wrote Suicide’s rant to JT Austin about disobeying orders and joining the mission to find a fallen starship (a very Harry Potter thing to do in a story more like Lord of the Rings. With aliens. And dirty polygamists.*) JT, still reeling from his wife’s death, pleads a promise he made to take back her family’s farm. Suicide explodes, “F*** your promise, little boy! We all lost someone in this war!” It’s actually the only F bomb in Second Wave, but writing it was the moment I stopped pretending this was a YA series and JT forced himself to become an adult.

Meanwhile, Nick Kepler, my original PI character, needs a bleep button in his pocket. So, how much swearing is too much?

Most newer writers–That would be me in the early 2000s–use profanity to sound tough or earthy. But like Ralphie’s dad in A Christmas Story, you have to learn to work in foul language like some artists work in oils or water colors. It didn’t help us crime writers religiously watched The Wire, which had a writing staff composed partially of the cops the characters were based on, along with some of the criminals they tangled with. Cops and gang bangers tend to swear a lot, though having witnessed two less-than-pleasant encounters with police in the past year, I’ve noticed they tend to yell more than swear. At least in the suburbs. 

So how do you handle swearing?

  1. Know thy audience. Yes, you’re free to say what you want how you want. You are not free from the consequences. No one is obligated to like your book or buy it. If your audience is primarily Sunday School teachers, you may want to avoid swearing altogether. But even hardened veterans who have been to Afghanistan or Syria tend to back down from the language. One veteran I know who writes scifi had a book where a female soldier was brutally raped by her captors. Leaving aside the question of how to handle such a scenario, the book had very little swearing or graphic depictions of violence (except in the sequel, where a corrupt admiral came to a sticky end. Don’t think he will ever mend.**) 
  2. If you’re going to swear, do it on page 1, or at least in the first three pages. You don’t have to drop an F bomb. A mild profanity like “shit” will do. (Editing tool PerfectIt repeatedly tries to edit that out but doesn’t seem to care about F bombs for some reason.)
  3. Swear in the first draft. Clean up in revision. The rough draft is where your tough guy protagonist finishes fighting bad guys and stops off at the vet to pick up his pet unicorn because you were feeling goofy that day. Revision is where you might want to change that unicorn to a cat or a dog. The same with the language. Write whatever you want in the rough draft, even swearing so thick it would scare off Quentin Tarantino. Edit it out in revision. First draft is for you. Subsequent drafts are about the eventual audience.
  4. The F Bomb Check – Start with yanking every third one. Or every other one. You’ll find most of the time the prose and dialog are stronger for it.
  5. Don’t overthink it. If you put rules on it, you’ll just end up with stilted, flat prose. If you take the audience, the publisher, or even your own preferences into account, you can easily modify what you’ve written in revision. Revisions should not be scary. They should be making your story better.

 

*It’s a lot more complicated than that. Even polygamists who bathed often didn’t like these guys.

**Apologies to the late John Entwistle

Wadded paperAs a reader, I try to keep my TBR stack wide in its variety. At the moment, I’m reading the last Mark Twain book on my list, Short Stories and Tall Tales. On audio, I’m listening to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As an editor, I keep thinking, “I wouldn’t publish any of these. They break all the rules.”

Except…Those weren’t the rules in 1857 or during the Gilded Age when Twain wrote. Stowe wasn’t a conscious stylist. She simply wrote what she knew of and put it out there for the reader to judge. This book makes me angry, which is what Stowe was going for. Twain, on the other hand, brought a newspaper man’s sensibility to storytelling, coupled with an ear for dialog and dialect and a talent for letting us know what the speaker sounded like. But Twain broke the rules of his day.

He wrote short, declarative sentences, in dialect, and in a conversational style that make him easy to imitate even though most people have never heard him speak. Doesn’t hurt he died recently enough that even older Millennials might have met someone whose parents actually heard him speak. But…

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would not fly today, not in its current form. I don’t mean the embedded racism of society when Twain writes about. Newer versions have  omitted a certain slur in favor of the word “slave” without any damage to the meaning. If anything, it drives the point home. What I do mean is you have to read that one out loud to know what Huck and Jim are actually saying.  And therein lies the reason you did it back then and not now. Twain intended for his works to be read aloud or have them read aloud. In audio narration, you’d spend most of your time cringing at the characters attitudes (and realize Jim is waaaaay smarter than his vocabulary suggests), but the right reader would make you forget the dialect after about five minutes. Now? People sit and read in small sips, often on electronic devices. That use of apostrophes and well-placed malaprops that work so well out loud and on Audible suddenly become a barrier. It didn’t help Huck narrated the two later Tom Sawyer novels (which weren’t exactly classics.)

But Twain’s journalistic tendencies reshaped English literature. The heavy, ponderous, hard-to-read prose of the past (Looking at you, Henry James! You still owe me an apology.) gave way to crisp, visceral writing by a guy used to thinking in terms of column inches and above or below the fold on the front page. That brings us to Hemingway. And Raymond Chandler. Hemingway’s sentences were bullets. Very short. Get to the point. Sometimes fragments. On purpose. Chandler pioneered, then made cliche, the use of simile as a literary shorthand. Author Les Roberts, himself a decent crime writer whom I’ve had the pleasure of editing, sometimes parodies this in his own writing. One description of the month of April in Cleveland went on for a paragraph and ended with “was as urgent and persistent as the throbbing of an infected hangnail.” I almost stopped reading. Then laughed my ass off.

But Hemingway came up in the 1920s while Chandler began writing around 1930 (and shame on me if I missed any earlier short stories.) The world, roaring or in depression, moved quickly then and hasn’t slowed down since. The prose reflects that. Take the most famous American novel of all time, The Great Gatsby. I’ve read it. It packs a wallop. It’s less than 180 pages. Wow. Hemingway’s contemporary, F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote that one. And his prose is even leaner than Hemingway’s.

And yet… I’d yank out most instances of “that.” I’m also aggressive about ripping out “very” and “just,” which have been overused to the point of near-uselessness. Gatsby has too much passive voice, too much description. Get to the point. Except Fitzgerald did get to the point. But he died before my mother was born, never mind me, and left behind one of the greatest American novels ever. Rules simply changed since.

Why? People still sat down and read books back then. They had radio, but no television. Most news came from newspapers. (I miss newspapers.) 

Since the 1990s, though, editors started getting more aggressive. Passive voice was the enemy. (And yet that last sentence would likely pass muster.) They would cut the word “that,” along with “very” and especially “suddenly” without mercy. I myself get angry when I have to put “suddenly” back into a manuscript. I love my clients, but that word is so useless I’d rather keep an F bomb in a Sunday school primer than “suddenly.” And the dreaded run-on? Forget it. Run-ons must die.

Some of this is good. Some of this is a fad. We don’t write in dialect much anymore (Walter Mosley a stubborn exception), or we do with the lightest touch. Some of this is good. It makes the writing clearer for an audience with declining attention spans. And therein lies the issue.

Today, books and articles are competing with video games and TikTok and the Twitter clones. There are a lot more types of content out there, and the content itself has exploded exponentially. I myself read books usually 15  pages at a sitting. I have to. Like everyone else, I’m pulled in a dozen directions. Will they change again?

I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time with ChatGPT. Love it. Hate it. It will affect how we read and edit, too. (Also, it knows who Robert Fripp is. If this is Skynet, the apocalypse will have a killer soundtrack.)

 

Wadded paper“We’re developing a situation where a whole group of young people is growing up having no real sense about how our system of justice works.” – Chief Justice John Roberts

That line’s been quoted in several news sources and is included in a lot of Facebook rants about the Supreme Court’s performance of late. Without getting into what I think of the current Court, I do want to point out this showed up in someone’s latest rant. Before launching into why the poster thought Roberts was out of line, he stated even the grammar is wrong.

This is an editing blog. Did you think I was going to waste space on the undeserving crooks in Washington? Specifically, he said it should have been “a whole group of young people are…” instead of “is.” Actually, the poster is wrong. But you can’t fault him. The sentence looks wrong. It has “people” and “is” next to each other in the sentence. But “people” is not the operative word. “Group” is. And group, by definition, is a singular object. The members of a group are plural. And “people,” in most cases, is plural. But the subject of the clause is “group.” Therefore, the correct verb is… Well, is.

Bill Clinton must feel vindicated. (Google it. I remember that incident, and I’m still scratching my head.)

Roberts is, before anything else, a lawyer. I learned to edit from a lawyer, and believe me, it’s a great way to learn how to clean up your prose. However, the law has its own quirks and sticks to rules even corporate writing no longer recognizes. Like capitalizing every other noun in a sentence and not using contractions outside of quotations. I’ve had one editor flag that in my manuscript and stetted the hell out of it. But the bottom line is lawyers almost always get their grammar correct. So while it took me a decade to shed the legal habits of editing, the core of what I learned remains.

So why bring this up? Well, first, I needed a topic this week. And odd noun-verb pairings seemed obvious when I read the chief justice’s quote. Yes, they slip by sometimes when I edit. One could make a case for AI taking over the job, but having had some recent experience with ChatGPT for a project, make sure you stamp your passport for the frying pan on your way to the fire. AI is worse at it. Go Google “Hallucinations” and “AI.” Some of the results are hilarious.

But why is this so hard? Your brain sees “people” right next to the word “is” and goes, “That ain’t right.” But before “people” in the above quote is “group.” The group is growing up, but the people aren’t. “People” is only a descriptive noun telling the reader what group this is. So do I ever let this slide knowing the right way will hurt some people’s heads? Yes, actually. 

A good editor can forgive a lot of rule-breaking in dialog and first-person. The person is talking, and I don’t give a damn what your English teacher told you (unless it was Mr. Murphy, whom I had in the 11th grade. He was cool!) People break rules speaking. They mismatch tenses. They swallow words and syllables. They use the wrong words. They even use the same word to start too many consecutive sentences. Your goal is to make it readable, not please Mrs. Chaucer (not her real name, but suck it, Clara.)  

But once in a while, the right way is going to sound wrong. Leave that to third person narrative. (Send me second person, and I’ll print it out, shred it, and send back the shreds. I am not an avant-garde editor.)

Sentence fragments. Annoy some people. Found in Dickens, though. Bad writing? Or stylistic choice?

Why not both? Girl meme social reaction | StareCat.com

It’s both. My current assignment comes from a writer who breaks a lot of rules. And it’s clearly done on purpose. He writes present tense, which drives a lot of readers batty. And he writes almost completely in sentence fragments, especially when his story gets going.

“Wow, TS. It must take you an hour just to get through one page!”

Not really. The point of editing is to make sure the writer not only gets their point across but also doesn’t get in their own way. In other words, cutting out all the writing for the sake of writing. Mind you, I edit mostly fiction. Non-fiction requires a different set of rules, and let’s not get started on corporate editing, which means the Chicago Manual of Style is a polite suggestion when the company has a style manual to be treated like the Bible. (Which most translations probably violate. ‘Cuz, yanno, God never went through the mandatory employee orientation.) 

So occasionally, you get people who break rules on purpose. Is this bad writing? Well, it depends. Your ultimate audience is your reader. However, reviewers may or may not get to your work first. So guess what? The lady on the beach might think you’re just swell, but the reviewer will be leaving a two-star review because you insist on ending every sentence with a preposition. While I think that’s a fake rule, it is annoying when writers do that too often. They should check out the Elements of  Style from the library, assuming they know where the library’s at.

Where were we? Sentence fragments.

Much of what a writer puts down is dictated by rhythm and cadence. Most of us who write hear the words in our heads. That’s why that last sentence occasionally gets out in the wild as “Most of us who write here the words…” Sometimes, the brain just picks a spelling and runs with it. So, as in the case with my current author, you sometimes get long blocks of prose written in punchy, short phrases. And yet in context, it works. It might not get over the transom, but it works. (This one, by the way, did get over the transom, or it wouldn’t be on my desk.) Now, if this person wrote bestsellers, one of two things would happen: hundreds of acquisitions editors would be flooded with similarly written stories (most of which would be badly written) or publishers, smelling a buck, would insist their writers adopt the style (also resulting in a flood of bad imitations.)

Fragments are the more readable version of the run-on sentence. The difference is, writing in an age of declining attention spans, where it’s hard enough to get people to cue up a book on a Kindle, never mind a print book, run-ons are an abomination that should be weeded out. An argument could be made for chopping up that last sentence, though technically, it’s not a run-on.

 

Cold beerBack in the old days, when my dad would take us all out in his LaSalle to the five-and-dime for a grape Nehi while Rudy Vallee warbled “Whole Lotta Love”… Um… Wait. They didn’t make LaSalles when my dad was born, Rudy Vallee had given way to big bands, and my earliest memory of a new song was “Something” by the Beatles when I still had not known the horror of kindergarten. Let’s start again. Back in high school, before the age of word processors, cloud storage, and AI, we were taught to write in drafts. In fact, my favorite English teacher Mr. Murphy (still going strong at 90!) told us to write out the first draft by hand before sending it across the typewriter.  Subsequent drafts, after chopping up with a red pen*, were to fix flow, spelling, typing, etc. If the truth be known, I was 30 before I could type, and by then, word processors and computers were a thing. 

But I stuck with the draft concept, though I rarely wrote longhand. My wrists don’t like it. And starting with the original Mrs. Hottle’s Canon word processor, the concept of typing all drafts took off. I no longer had to worry about margins. You could set a default font. You just typed, then saved to disk. Then came the PC and Microsoft Works. Then Word Perfect. Then Word. Many took it a step further with Scrivener. I’ll talk more about the various tools later.

As I started getting into professional markets, I met a writer named Dave White, now a school teacher in New Jersey. At the time, Dave was a grad student and just getting started as a novelist. Dave decided to abandon the draft concept. Everything is stored electronically, so you’re not rewriting (except when you are. Then you’re overwriting the original or copying and pasting. Or cutting.) So why make multiple files?

It’s a fair point. He’s been a more successful novelist than I’ve been, and, most importantly, the system works for him. Yet I still do drafts despite working in IT for [mumble mumble] years. Why?

Versioning. As Jim Winter, I wrote Holland Bay over a 12-year period, starting with a 105,000-word first draft that did not have a minor character who just had to spin up their own subplot. I didn’t so much finish the draft as stopped when a couple of the main characters finished their arcs. Additionally, I make much of how this series was inspired by 87th Precinct and The Wire. Rereading it, I realized at least two scenes were inadvertently copied from The Wire. You will never read that draft unless my family does something stupid like file my drafts with Wilmington College or my old high school. (Please don’t do that.) The second draft, while still considerably different, looks more like what you would buy today. But not entirely. Some point-of-view characters had to be pared down, extraneous scenes cut. And then an agent looked at it. She asked for a rewrite. Then I tweaked it to run past a Big Five publisher. Then Down & Out Books had some changes. All these versions are different files. Why? 

I work in IT. In fact, I work in software. I’m of the mindset that every version of something should be backed up so it’s available if you scrap a new version. Believe me, in both software and writing, that’s a huge concern. Now, I may be splitting hairs. If you came up when PCs were a thing, you probably back everything up. In fact, you likely store it in the cloud. Is that drafts? Well, most of us who do actual drafts are a bit more systematic about it.

As an editor, I receive manuscripts that are labeled “v03,” which means Down & Out went back and forth with the author before sending it to me. Plus they send me partially formatted manuscripts. I always keep the original version, whether it’s from a publisher or a freelance client, and make a copy labeled “_edited.” That’s both a signal to the writer this has been worked on and gives me a fall back in case something goes horribly wrong.

It all goes back to the old adage “Don’t fall in love with your first draft.” Sometimes, someone turns in a clean draft, and people like me just move commas around. But normally, a rough draft looks just like that. Rough. Have a system for the revisions. And stick to it.

 

*A rather pretentious roommate a former spousal unit and I had protested it was a blue pen, and we were not aloud to argue because she edited. Badly. And every agent, editor, and writer I’ve spoken to since has said, “Red pen.” Blue was for making photocopies in an age when the copier couldn’t see blue.

Writers get a lot of inspiration from music. From other writers. From poetry. It’s only natural they would want to quote it.

But can you?

Short answer: No. Unless it’s public domain, you need the creator’s permission. (Looking at you, Mark Zuckerberg! Stole two of my books to train his crappy AI. That’s another rant.) 

Long answer: Sometimes. Let’s be honest. Creators should be paid for their work. So if you’re lifting lyrics from Led Zeppelin (a band that knows a thing or two about having to settle plagiarism lawsuits, both as defendant and as plaintiff), Mr. Plant is probably going to send his lawyer after you. Or maybe not. Half a line from “Stairway…” is probably not going to land you in court. On the other hand, if you base your epic fantasy on “Achilles Last Stand” or “Battle of Evermore” and quote whole snatches of the song, Messrs. Page, Plant, Jones, and the widow and son of John Bonham are going to want either a cut of your royalties or a licensing fee. Now, if you use those songs as jumping off points (“Achilles…” itself comes from The Iliad, public domain since the Roman Empire overran Greece), no harm, no foul.

Similarly, trademarks can get dicey. When does a pop culture reference turn into trademark infringement? Also depends. In No Marigolds in the Promised Land, I referred to a type of rolling drone as “daleks,” with the narrator wondering where that name came from. At the time, the BBC was the sole arbiter of the Doctor Who trademarks. Their tendency was to let it be as long as these were balky robots and not the encased aliens with a speech impediment. Also, without thinking, I overused a Star Wars reference that went from something that would give George Lucas a chuckle to bringing a giant mouse in dark glasses and his giant duck enforcer to my front porch armed with brass knuckles and a cease-and-desist order. That got purged. The daleks?

I was advised to curtail them by an editor I knew, though I’ve seen references to Tardises (Tardii?) that clearly were not the multidimensional phone booth David Tenant uses to commute to work. I left a few references in, but regularly call them trashcan drones because, well, canonical Daleks look like giant garbage cans. So it’s likely anything so shaped and earning a name from a centuries-old pop culture reference is likely to do also look like a trashcan.  And it’s obvious they’re not out to ex-terminate! Ex-TERMINATE!

Even Tolkien might come after you. Lord of the Rings, still copyrighted in 2025, has a lot of trademarks. I can name a mountain chain “Misty Mountains” on a distant planet because CS Lewis’s language-obsessed buddy wasn’t the first to use that name, but deciding a desert region earned the literary reference name “Mordor” would not have flown. (Yes, I thought about it. Then I decided I knew nothing about Amargosa’s deserts as they didn’t do anything for the story.)

A friend of mine, when he sold his first novel, quoted song lyrics all the way through, usually to start chapters like Stephen King occasionally does. He got a surprise from his publisher when he received marching orders to secure permission from each of the songwriters. Most of them agreed, some tickled an author remembered them. (Pro tip: NEVER assume this. ALWAYS ask. This is NOT fair use. Ever.) Then he got a call. “Why do you want to use the song?” “Huh? Who is this?” “Neil.” “Neil who?” “Young.” “Yeah, feck off, Martin. I don’t have time for your jokes. I got an early class tomorrow!” Neil called back. They actually had a good conversation.

On the other hand, that same writer edited an anthology he invited me to. I wanted a character to paraphrase the a line from U-2’s “Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me.” Would they care? “Not if you give them $200,000.” My house at the time was worth less than half that. (Mid-2000s, so… Cheap.) That was a hard no.

But paraphrasing is a way to get around quoting a song without stepping on the copyright holder’s toes. I’ve seen where AC/DC “thundered about a railroad track.” Most of you know what song that is. The rest can easily plug “AC/DC” and “railroad track” into Google and find out. Go ahead. You’ll be thunderstruck. 

A handful of bands and singers will allow snatches of lyrics to be quoted. You’ll need to get written permission, if only to cover your butt. And not every band will rush to your defense if they’ve sold off their catalog to an unscrupulous publisher. Yes, them that own the Beach Boys’ music managed to get Mike Love and Brian Wilson to team up, at least on Twitter, as they trolled them over a lawsuit against Katy Perry for her own “California Girls.” (If you sue over your own IP, and the creators flame you on social media, you can pretty much kiss your case goodbye.)

Now, what about character names? I get dragged by betas (who should know better by this point, having read the entire series) over a diminutive engineer named “Peter Lancaster,” with a rather familiar accent and libido. (Connor Duffy of Compact Universe fame constantly asks him how he hasn’t been court-martialed yet.) Again, this is suggestive of Tyrion Lannister and the brilliant actor who plays him, Peter Dinklage. However, it just made the character come together. But what if I named a character “James T. Kirk” or “Anakin Skywalker”?

Yeah, do that and you might start getting some rude letters from high-priced attorneys for Paramount or Disney. They get a bit worked up over that. (Lucas, however, still enforces the parodies-are-funny rule despite selling Star Wars to Disney. Suck it, Mickey.) You’ve probably met a James Kirk, so you might be able to shrug and say, “Well, I never watched Star Trek.” On the other hand, a world-weary detective named “Jim Bond” might get annoyed with all the Sean Connery imitations he has to put up with. (“Oh, wow. My girlfriend’s name is Moneypenny. I’ve never heard that before. Well, not counting the thousand times just last week.”) There, it’s a pop culture reference that likely will not ruffle the feathers of the Fleming or Broccoli families. (No one cares what Kevin McClory’s family thinks, since they sold Blofeld to Eon and, subsequently, Amazon.) But anything named Skywalker tramples on well-established trademarks. And we all know the Mouse is already displeased with Winnie the Pooh horror films now that their original copyright has expired. 

In the end, use common sense. You can get away with references to Twain, Shakespeare, or Dickens because they’re public domain. Your main concern should be how the reader will interpret it. On the other hand, Sherlock Holmes is also public domain as far as copyright is concerned, but the Doyle estate still owns the trademarks. That’s right.  They can still sue you if you still cross a line. You can bet they had a hand in the making of Robert Downey Jr’s turn as Holmes, Sherlock, Elementary, and most recently, Watson. 

And really, it’s someone else’s work. Orcs may not be original to Tolkien. Per Tolkien himself, it’s from Anglo-Saxon and appears in Beowulf.  Uruk Hai might earn you a nastygram from Christopher Tolkien’s solicitor. Similarly, Starfleet (Jimi Hendrix’s references notwithstanding), Jedi, and Brown Coats will get you in trouble. 

So, if you’re wondering if it’s fair use, if you’re describing something in someone else’s work or paraphrasing lyrics, yes. It is. If you’re lifting characters, prose, or lyrics wholesale from something where the creator hasn’t passed away in the last 75 years, you might want to rethink that.

Wadded paperPublishers, especially those in small press, are traumatized by how too many manuscripts come in. Goofy fonts. Weird margins. Author never read the guidelines. (Pro tip: If you’re asking someone to sell your work for you, they make the rules on formatting. End of discussion.) But it gets witchy for editors, too.  However, I get it. Writers have so much anxiety about query letters (Maybe agents need to quit talking so much about that. All they do is induce performance anxiety.), acceptance and rejection, and getting seen! And if it’s a first-time novelist, and you’re the lucky editor who gets to read them, you’re reading someone’s baby!

Do a couple of these things, meet with some success, and you, the writer, slowly learn that the final draft for the freelance editor, the agent, or the publisher is a reprieve from the Thing That Will Not Die. Because that shiny new story is a millstone around your neck a year or two later. And while a lot of writers enjoy working with their editors, opening that Word doc with all the track changes turned on usually results in the writer growling, “Oh, what fresh hell is this?” (Because the Thing won’t Die! You still have revisions. Especially if there’s a developmental edit step.)

But how should the manuscript look when it goes to the publisher, agent, or freelance editor?

Most publishers and agents want a specific format: Times New Roman, 12-point font, double-spaced. There’s a title page with the estimated word count and your contact info at the top and the title and your pen name (even if it’s you’re real name. If it’s a pseudonym, put the pen name in quotes.) halfway down the page. If you are subbing print–rare these days, and thank God for small miracles–pagination on every page following the title page is required. If submitting electronically, don’t paginate. Use “#” for scene breaks. Dedication is optional, as are acknowledgments and about the author, but copyright is not needed, even if you registered it. That will be added on publication.

For freelance editors, it’s even easier. Word, Google Docs, OpenOffice all track word counts, so we just need the title page and your prose. However, same rules apply. Times New Roman, 12 point, and double-spaced. 

“But why don’t you want page numbers?”

Well, unless I’m looking at a hard copy, which I assure you I will not until your tome is out in the wild, I can see the page numbers in the lower left-hand corner of Word. 

“What if the publisher wants something different from what you described?”

That brings me to the most important thing a writer can remember about submitting any kind of manuscript: Read the bloody guidelines! This means you. 

“But I want my book to look a certain way. Why can’t I format it?”

Because your book, even if all we do is move commas around and make snarky comments about something funny you wrote, your manuscript and all its carefully formatted pages are going to get altered. At this point, we, the editors, don’t care. Neither should you. One reason is all those funky things you do with formatting come when it’s time to send the book to press. The formatter does that. (I offer formatting services, by the way, just not while I’m editing the book. One step at a time, kiddo.) We are focused on the prose. How are the words strung together. Do you use the Oxford comma or are you wrong? (Another pro tip: Helpful if you tell me your stance on that before I begin reading your manuscript. The publisher will tell you whether you use the Oxford comma or not. An agent has no business having a position on that for anything but their own writing.) 

Formatting, if I may beat the dead horse, is how the book will look in print. And if you even partially format a manuscript that has, at best, only a beta read or two, you’re wasting your time. Words are going to move around. Besides, the bigger the publisher, the less control you have over how the book looks, what cover you have, etc. Just because you want that chapter to end on page 34 doesn’t mean that will survive even a proofread.

Instead, focus on sharpening your prose. Read the submission guidelines. If they’re not specific, the above–Time New Roman, 12-point, double-spaced–is sufficient, along with a title page (if subbing to an agent or publisher.) That’s all you need. The formatter will take it from their when your editor is finished.

My current project has em dashes in place of quotation mQuotation markarks, which is a challenge. Em dashes (or for the more pedantic, dialog dashes. Hate to burst your bubble, nitpickers, but the readers who pick up on this don’t care. Neither do I.) are generally used in Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, or French. I’m not sure why writers in English–any dialect of English–choose to do this, but then Cormac McCarthy dispensed with quotation punctuation altogether.

But having to adapt to a different style of quoting dialog underscores another issue: You still have to follow the rules of dialog. And to follow said rules, the reader has to know who’s talking and when. Even the great Lawrence Block, whose books taught me to write novels long before Stephen King graced us with On Writing, munged dialog once. If the greats do it, you need to watch out, too.

So, let’s review, shall we?

  • “Said” is an invisible word. It takes less than second for the reader to blow by a “said” phrase to pick up on whose talking.
  • That said, the old chestnut of not using any word but “said” (except maybe “asked”) needs to be put down like Old Yeller. (Um… Spoiler alert?) In an age of audio books, it is absolutely nerve-grating to hear “said” twenty-six times in a thirty-second passage. Yes, you can use mild alternatives like “shouted,” “mumbled,” even “intoned.” Just don’t get fancy with it. There’s a reason more old-school editors insist on “said/asked.” “‘Well,’ he queried” is still bad writing no matter how much you’re bored with “said.” </rant>
  • Action beats are your friend. You don’t have to tag every line of dialog. In fact, don’t. Dialog-heavy scenes have the disadvantage of encouraging “white rooms.” Two characters are talking. Where are they talking? What’s going on? Half the time, it’s just exposition, and exposition is death in our era of short attention spans. Sorry, but that’s the reality we’re working in today. Have your characters eat a salad or lift weights or knit a sweater. Anything to convey where the conversation takes place.
  • When exposition is unavoidable, put the Pope in a pool. This is one of my favorite storytelling tools from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat. He talks about a movie where a bunch of cardinals have to set up the movie and can only do it through rambling dialog. So the screenwriter put an old man in a swimming pool listening to the cardinals. It takes the viewers a minute or two to figure out the guy swimming is the Pope. They get an infodump, but their attention is held because they’re forced to figure out who’s in the pool. (I loved that so much, I put a character named “Mr. Pope” in a swimming pool in one story. Then I killed him in that same pool in another story. Yes. As an author, I’m mean to my characters.)
  • Untagged dialog: No more than five lines before you insert a “said/asked/pontificated” (Don’t use that last one. The reader will throw your book in the trash, and for good reason) or an action beat. The reader needs to keep track of who’s talking. And so do you.
  • Tagging or adding beats: If two people are in the conversation, unless they are the same gender, get their names out quickly and stick with he/she/they*. Once you’ve established who and what they are, the reader can pretty much follow along. More than one person? Or two of the same gender? You’re going to need to drop names a little more often. 

*The common use of singular they today is not political. It’s the means by which I get to spike the football on a pedantic English teacher’s grave. My favorite English teacher, who just turned 90, would heartily approve.

Wadded paperI’ve had people ask if I’m harder on the books small presses send me than I am ones where the author pays me. The answer: I’m harder on the author as a client.

Now, why is that, since the client usually pays more and is paying me directly? Simple. As an author, you expect certain things of the publisher from all but the smallest presses. This book should already be vetted. The publisher will likely flag any major issues. In one case, I had a tale with supernatural elements that probably should have had a developmental edit, but I was able to meet with the author in person. Going back and reading that book just as a reader, I now have a better understanding of what to ask and what to flag. (Plus, that guy sent me notes for the next one.)

So why be harder on the writer as a client? Simple. I write indie. So I know the writer chasing an agent or a publisher or even going indie is flying without a net. So my edits are going to be deeper. I’m going to cut (and add) more if I don’t think you’re getting your point across, and a bit less lenient on tangents. (I know. As an author, I love my tangents, too. Hurts to kill your darlings, but we can’t all be Stephen King. And even Steve and his editors cut a lot of stuff.) Why? There’s no one, except maybe beta readers, who will tell you when that pronoun should have been a name because you have more than two people in the same conversation. “He said…” Okay, if there are two hes in the conversation, which “he”? If it’s a man and a woman, and they’re the only two people in the conversation, then we’re fine. 

It’s the writer clients who get the long-winded explanations about drive-ups. I’m harder on run-ons with them. Most clients I get for copy editing are newer writers, so I need to help them put their best foot forward with an agent or an acquisitions editor. Yes, experienced writers break the rules, but we’ve been following them for years. So we know when coloring outside the lines looks artistic (We hope!) vs. looking like your two-year-old niece or nephew savaging a coloring book with whatever Crayola they grabbed first.

That’s not to say I don’t get some challenges from Down & Out or other publishers. My very first client I like to say has been doing this longer than I’ve been alive. And I’m just barely old enough to remember when Abbey Road was new. (I also was a toddler. Make of that what you will.) His original editor was Ruth Cavin at St. Martin’s Press, who is still considered a giant in the crime fiction field. My initial client’s manuscripts are not as clean as, say, Jim Fusilli’s, who writes for The Wall Street Journal. Editing Jim is basically moving commas around, half of which I’m pretty sure Jim stetted. The other client is used to pushing it to the deadline, so there’s an expectation (as expressed in feedback) that I’m going to have suggestions how to clean it up. So far, it works, and he’s put out some pretty good books since I started working with him.

And then we have the anthologies. Usually, they’re as much fun to edit as they are to write for. (Okay, I actually prefer writing for them. Less time, except less money.) But even that’s a challenge. Half of mine have Michael Bracken as the main editor, and Michael has sent me several “Go with God” emails after learning I got the copy edit assignment. Why? Short story author A will submit a story with almost no corrections. Yes, that actually happens. Author B can’t consistently capitalize or lower-case a proper noun. Author C is a lawyer. They capitalize EVERYTHING! (Sidenote: My last author was actually a district court judge. He did NOT capitalize everything.)

In the end, it’s what serves the reader best. Sometimes, I’ll leave an entire passage as nothing but sentence fragments because that’s how the author writes, and the reader will just get confused if I try to fix it. Plus, you try to fix every damn sentence in a book. Usually, by page 2, you have the writer’s rhythm and cadence. As an editor, don’t mess with it unless it’s unreadable. Because isn’t that why you hand off to an editor?

Man runningApologies to Steve Perry

As a writer, I have a problem. And it’s one of my pet peeves as a writer.

Ever read a sentence that seems to go on forever? To the point where you forgot what the author was saying in the beginning? You’ve seen them, especially in first-person novels. The author starts out with one thought, then, through the magic of “and” or “but,” adds a related thought. Okay, all good so far. Then there’s another and/but or even just a comma. In most European languages, we are hard-wired to look for a period. The brain wants to move this out of short-term memory and into the neurological databanks. The longer it has to wait, the harder that gets.

Especially with today’s short attention spans. 

As writers, particularly newer writers, people tend to throw in as much detail as they can. In a rough draft, this is good. I know a few writers who’ve abandoned the idea of “drafts,” since 99% of everything is now electronic. The principle still holds. When you make revisions, you tend to cut more than add. Most of the early cutting comes from too much detail. Sometimes, this results in a run-on sentence. If anything prompts me, as a reader, to put down the book, it’s run-on sentences. As an editor?

Well, I’m gonna chop up that lengthy epic within a paragraph brutally. A lot of times, you’re trying to put in everything you think the reader needs. Or you go off on tangents, particularly if you’re pantsing. Or it’s all one big sentence in your head. A lot of run-ons could be broken up into paragraphs unto themselves. On occasion, I’ve been known to simply toss out a long one. That, of course, requires a comment explaining why I just tossed the author’s hard work into the recycle bin. It’s drifting into rewriting, and I will not do rewriting if I can avoid it. It’s seldom been done to me as a writer, and I think I owe my clients the same courtesy. Hence my rant a while back about editors bragging about cutting. It ain’t about you, Seamus.* 

Short stories provide the biggest challenge. You have a limited amount of space to convey information. Short stories are generally 1000-5000 words, with some longer but not by much. The temptation is to cram in as much information as you can, hoping the reader gets everything. It’s also where the most cutting occurs. In a short story, the fewer POVs, the less backstory, the fewer characters, the better. In a novel, you can wade in, take side trips, be as detailed as you want (within reason). The average novel these days in 90,000 words. Scifi novels regularly check in between 100K and 120K.  But a 5000 word short? There’s not only not much room for world building but none for run-ons.

But I’ve run on enough about that.

*Not an actual editor. The only Seamus I’ve ever known was my brother’s dog, who loved Pink Floyd for some reason.