The Editor’s Corner

"Beautiful Entertainments" italicized in three different fonts.
CC 4.0 2015 Blythwood

There’s one issue our modern computer-based writing and editing has raised. Italics.

When Word Perfect and the dedicated word processing devices surfaced in the mid-1990s, it solved the underlining problem typewriters could not consistently address. Some of the newer ones had underlining options, including the venerable IBM Selectric. A few die-hards will not give up their magic qwerty boxes until  you pry them from their cold, dead, and lifeless hands. But those of us who learned to type just as Steve and Bill were putting a PC on every desk hated typewriters. And I owned three of them over the years. I moved in with a girl who owned a Canon word processor, and I haven’t looked back since. And one of the things it let me do was italicize.

For the last 30 years, italics have been easy. Ctrl + I or Cmd + I makes all your letters slant. Simple. Maybe too simple. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Most people know the basic rules: Book titles, album titles, movies, TV series, magazines and newspapers, and works of art. Yes, I’ve been getting The Mona Lisa wrong longer than some countries have existed. Titles of short stories, chapters, TV episodes, songs, poems, and articles go inside quotation marks. (Double quotes in North America, single in UK and elsewhere in the English speaking world. Be consistent.)

That last line brings up another use. Italics can also emphasize a word or a phrase. I generally shy away from that as a writer, but that’s because I also shy away from stage direction. On the other hand, it can reduce use of that annoying punctuation mark, the exclamation point!

The list above comes from Actually, the Comma Goes Here by Lucy Cripps, a quick and dirty style guide for when you dropped your Chicago Manual of Style on your foot and can’t pick it up until the doctor removes the boot. One thing it left off is ship names. That’s right. Star Trek (for some reason, we don’t seem to italicize franchises, just the individual series and movies) is about the starships Enterprise. But that’s led to some bad editing.

I used to italicize class names for ships. Like the last aircraft carrier Enterprise was of the Nimitz class, named for the USS Nimitz. I stopped probably when I also noticed that Star Wars stopped showing up in italics, which was right around when the original movie was renamed A New Hope*. 

But as a writer, I’ve had to smack a couple of editors’ hands. (I’ve had my hand smacked, too. Occupational hazard.) People start italicizing things which they had no business slanting the letters. Specifically, building names, business names, restaurants, theaters. That’s actually a big no-no. And this is not like the argument between people who require the Oxford comma and people who are wrong. You do not italicize restaurant names, theater names, and buildings and businesses!!! Now and forever, world without end. Amen. Shakespeare debuted Hamlet at the Globe Theater, but the Globe Theater does not exist. No. Don’t do that. Ever.

Italics are not as badly handled as apostrophes, commas, or capitals. But they do get abused. Overusing for emphasis is just as distracting as too many exclamation points or bad dialog tagging (“Get out,” she shrieked shriekily.) As with anything, stick to the basics and use in moderation.

*The proper way to watch A New Hope is to watch Rogue One, then immediate jump into A New Hope, and finishing on YouTube with Robot Chicken‘s “Go for Papa Palpatine” bit. Then, you shall know what the hell an Aluminum Falcon is.

An apostropheThanks to clickbait and social media, use of the apostrophe (or “sky comma”) is a lost art. The most common (and often ridiculed) error is, of course, your/you’re. When you’re typing at a million miles an hour and want the words down, it’s easy to “hear” a word and pick the wrong spelling. For all the jokes about your/you’re, it’s something a ninth grader doing a proofread of your manuscript can spot. Assuming that ninth grader doesn’t believe texting should be the basis of grammar. Spoiler alert: It shouldn’t. k thx bye!

For the most part, people get contractions right. “He’s,” “they’re,” and “can’t” are all common examples. Frequently, I do see the apostrophe left out of “can’t.” In a manuscript, I’ll flag it. That’s what I get paid to do, among other things. Reading it, it’s not the most egregious apostrophe error out there.

Where do we get it wrong? Possessives. People can’t seem to wrap their head around when an apostrophe should or should not use it to denote possession. After all, we use his/her/their for third person possession. Where’s the apostrophe? Pronouns, aside from being the most monumentally stupid thing for politicians to whine about, are their own thing with their own rules. No formal name or specific noun denotes the possessor. Except…

There’s that pesky pronoun “It.” “It’s” is not possessive but rather a contraction for “It is.” When, as a pronoun, “It” possesses something, then you write “its,” no apostrophe. The easiest way to remember it is pronouns don’t use apostrophes for possession: Mine, our, your, his, her, their, and its. 

Now, let’s talk about where people really grind my gears: Slapping an apostrophe in to indicate plural or omitting it to indicate possession. STOP DOING THAT!!!  You know I’m worked up about that if I use three exclamation points after a sentence. That, in and of itself, is extremely bad grammar. So hopefully, I made my point.

Every so often, I’ll see a sign as I’m driving along or even online where someone wrote something along the lines of “Drink’s and Sandwich’s.” One had it as “Johnnys Bar.”

If you needed more proof civilization is in decline, there it is. It’s “Johnny’s Bar” and “Drinks and Sandwiches.”

Worse, some people labor under the delusion that the apostrophe goes before every “s” at the end of a word, especially if it’s a plural. STOP DOING THAT!!!

Now, the question on everyone’s mind once they realize how easy apostrophes are: What if a name or noun ends in an “s”?

Well, as we say in SQL Server work, “It depends.” This is one where the style guides vary wildly. Are we going to Charles’ house or Charles’s house? The Chicago Manual of Style says “Charles’s house” while the AP and various British guides suggest “Charles’ house.” Even Jess Zafarris and Rob Watts of the Words Unraveled YouTube channel can’t agree. Rob himself, a former BBC reporter now living in Germany, says he’s been forced to change with every style guide his work requires. And if it’s “Charles’s,” do you pronounce that second “s”?

Here is TS’s guide to the sky comma when it comes to nouns ending in “s.” It’s possessive, so use “‘s” at the end. However, it’s an S, followed by an S. You don’t have to say it out loud. This is what I learned in school, what a potential agent told me to use (I laid down the law on the Oxford comma, but she was in agreement it’s mandatory. Get over it.), and ultimately, what the Chicago Manual uses.

 

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.

The bulk of what I edit comes from a publisher. So it stands to reason each writer, regardless of flaws, knows how to write. Now, how well they write is up for some debate, and that includes your humble narrator. Self editing, of course, is a tricky skill to master. It’s why I’m a fan of Stephen King’s process, where in the rough draft gets shoved into a drawer or dark corner of the cloud for two or three or six months. That masterpiece you wrote in the heat of the moment suddenly looks like the literary equivalent of a Very Special Episode of Hoarders. 

 

But you should know how to write, even in that messy, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink first version of the story you’re writing. I mentioned on my author Substack that I just started a short story I knew was already bloated because it takes too long to wade in. Of course, I’m GenX. Typewriters and dedicated word processing machines were still a thing when I began to work on my craft. I know one Gen Z writer who says he doesn’t do drafts. He just revises the existing original. He’s about fifteen years younger than me and started writing probably on Word Perfect or even the early Microsoft Word. Which means we’re both old enough to have owned cassettes for music and don’t cotton to these fancy, newfangled apps like Scrivener. (Scrivener has been around long enough to cultivate quite a few “Get off my lawn!” types among its fan base. Welcome to the geezers club, Scrivenites. The guys still using IBM Selectrics will be tending bar this evening.)

“Well, gee, Hottle. Are you going to get to your point?”

Now that the bush has been thoroughly beat around, yes.

This column, and dozens of others just like it, are about beating a manuscript into submission. (For submission, though no pun was intended.) Some time back in the 2010s, all the writing advice became about flogging books on Kindle, how to crank out 10,000 words while walking your dog, taking a shower, or getting a root canal. (Pro tip: Dragon Anywhere does not understand WTF you’re saying when a dentist is ripping bone out of your mouth.) None of it was about the joy of writing, why we do it, what drives us to sit at the keyboard and make stuff up.

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray BradburyRay Bradbury wrote a book about it. He came up in the age of pulps. His best known science fiction novel, The Martian Chronicles, was welded together in outline form almost on a dare from his editor (who wrote him a check the next morning.) Bradbury knew he wanted to write from earliest childhood. I’ve heard tell of writers whose parents discouraged them. One gent I used to know took beatings over it. (He’s old enough to be my father, so put that into generational context. My dad transitioned from spanking to the time-out because the latter really pissed off my brother. I digress. Again.) No, Bradbury collected memories. He wrote down lists of nouns that triggered those memories. And he talks to his characters. He actually will chat with them, listen to them. It’s how he adapted Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes for stage and screen. And I’ve noticed movies based on Bradbury’s work tend to hew more closely to the original source than that of other writers. Stephen King comes close, even when a director “has their own vision” (Shut up, Stuart Baird!), though the director of The Outsider needs to apologize for trying to excise Holly Gibney from that story. 

Bradbury approaches life as one long journal entry. Something happens to him or around him, and he knows an idea from it won’t emerge for years, sometimes decades. It’s obvious to anyone who’s read Something Wicked This Way Comes. And if you read between the lines, you can see an homage to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio in The Martian Chronicles. And, I suspect, shades of Stephen King’s Castle Rock, too.

There is actually no Zen in Zen in the Art of Writing. Well, not until the end, with the essay that gives the book the title. This is Ray Bradbury telling you he’s not a science fiction or literary god but just a kid from Waukegan, Illinois, who got to make stuff up for a living. One suspects he’d have done it whether he got published or not. Writing is, after all, an unstoppable madness for many. Including Bradbury.

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?

I’ve talked about the software tools I use to edit. ProWritingAid and PerfectIt are my go-to suites for copy editing. Story analysis and developmental editing, despite what OpenAI would have you believe, is very much a human art and has to be learned. By humans. Sorry, Sam. Good luck buying Twitter. (Like Sam Altman, I’m not holding my breath on that one.)

But software is not the only tool in the box. As I edit primarily books, it may surprise you to know some of my tools are… Well… Books. And the odd website, usually Wikipedia. More on that in a moment.

So what books do I recommend?

Chicago Manual of StyleThe Chicago Manual of Style – For US writers, this is the mack daddy. A fellow editor, newly minted, assumed I read the thing like you’d read any textbook. But we don’t read the dictionary or even peruse Wikipedia to absorb it. (The latter is constantly in flux, so that’s a fool’s errand.) No, CMOS, as it’s sometimes called, is a reference book. This is the baseline for writing in American English. There are UK and Canadian equivalents, so look for those. But you have the manual to look things up, it’s indispensable.

The Elements of StyleThe Elements of Style -Strunk & White’s treatise on the English language. Most of it is universal. It’s less a grammar book than a style book. Chicago is an encyclopedia. Elements is the quick-and-dirty. It’ll even tell you if you should hyphenate “quick-and-dirty” and when.

 

Actually, the Comma Goes HereActually, the Comma Goes Here by Lucy Cripps – This is a new addition. Like Elements, it’s a short, sweet guide to grammar I’ve started keeping handy as I work.

 

 

Self-Editing for Fiction WritersSelf Editing for Fiction Writers by Rennie Brown and Dave King – Out of print now, but you can find used copies pretty much anywhere online. (My plug for bookshop.org, the indie bookstore’s friend.) I got a copy years ago, and most of the writers I started out with still have their copy.

 

 

Websites

Wikipedia – When it first debuted, it was largely a copy of the 1911 version of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Wiki vandalism,” which I gleefully admit to provoking (Yes, I’m one of those who added “Born in Babylonia, moved to Arizona” to the Tutankhamun article. Wasn’t the first and definitely not the last), was a huge issue in the beginning. However, this non-profit operation has evolved. It’s well-policed and has become much more nuanced in its restrictions on how information is sourced. It’s great for fact checking and spellchecking brand names. And like you’re not supposed to city Britannica as a source, Wikipedia provides you the actual source for much of its information.

Duck Duck Go – Until recently, I swore by Google. And why not? For years, it was the gold standard of search. But like anything else, great brands and great products decline. Duck Duck Go is not only a secure, privacy focused search engine, it’s a great web browser to boot. Duck Duck Go’s search engine is as robust as Google’s and Microsoft’s Bing. I keep Chrome and Edge in case Duck Duck Go blocks or can’t reach something that’s needed, but that’s seldom a problem. 

Writing:

Writing the Novel (Updated version)Writing the Novel  by Lawrence Block – This is the book that taught me how to write a novel. A reread years later convinced me to switch from pantsing to plotting, but that’s a personal preference. Block even mentions the difference while describing a historical novel whose author basically shuffled his research cards into a certain order to make them a novel. That sounded to me, as it did to the great Block, a bit clumsy. His point was it worked for that writer. The book was a best seller. (It sounds like Michener. He was a researching fool, eventually employing teams of researchers to build his stories.) Block gives it to you straight, and from an age when word processors were not yet a thing.

 

On Writing by Stephen KingOn Writing by Stephen King – Not so much a how-to as  a how-I-do-it. King is an unrepentant pantser, but you can see that in how he structures stories. It’s also a memoir and, in the final section an editing guide. Like every writer and every editor, he has his pet peeve. His is adverbs, and he cheerfully admits he’s the worst offender. So noted. But not only should every writer read this, but it’s like spending time with a favorite uncle recounting his past.

 

 

Save the Cat – Blake Snyder – Take the Hero’s Journey and boil it down for screenwriters. Also useful for novelists. Save the cat is one of the goals of any story. How do you get to saving the cat in the end? Snyder, who sadly is no longer with us, also gave me one of my favorite tools for handling expository scenes that cannot be avoided: The Pope in the Pool. If you have a scene where people are talking about the story, but not much is happening, through something interesting into the scene. In one movie, an old man is swimming as a bunch of cardinals outline what’s happening. Gradually, you realize the guy in the pool is the Pope himself. I loved that passage of the book so much that, in one story, I named a character Pope, who forces business visitors to talk to him while he swims in his company-supplied pool. (He also dies there in another story, but that’s for the TS Substack.) 

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.