Here’s a little taste of my post, “When Is My Manuscript Ready for a Freelance Editor? A Cost-Effective Look at Polishing Your Novel,” which is all about finding the right freelance editor on a budget, along with a link to read the rest on Girl Tell Me’s website.
Read MoreThe Top 5 Editorial Mistakes I’ve Seen… and How to Fix Them, Part 3.
Characters lacking in agency often don’t have many motivating factors to help them think, speak, or act. Instead, they passively accept the things happening around them.
This can make it difficult for the reader to empathize with your characters, often because it seems the characters are doing nothing to help themselves. As a result, you may risk losing your reader’s interest in your novel.
Read MoreThe Top 5 Editorial Mistakes I’ve Seen… and How to Fix Them, Part 2.
Remember Goldilocks and the Three Bears? We don’t want too much or too little background on a character in a manuscript. We want it to be just right.
Read MoreThe Top 5 Editorial Mistakes I’ve Seen… and How to Fix Them, Part 1 of 5.
If you’ve taken a creative writing workshop or even a high school composition course, you’ve likely heard the advice: “Show, don’t tell.”
When we’re writing fiction or creative non-fiction, we want to show instead of tell, which translates to telling our story through a series of interconnected scenes, instead of summarizing the events that happened.
If a character needs a raise to pay the rent, the writer shouldn’t explicitly state, “Bob needed a raise to pay his rent,” at least not without also providing supporting details. Instead, she may place an important conversation between Bob and his work best friend in a coffee shop, where Bob explains that he’s having his second triple latte of the day at 10:00 a.m. after pulling an all-nighter with the quarterly earnings report.
So, yes, “Show, don’t tell.” You know that intuitively. But I’m here to explain part of the “why” behind this age-old adage.
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What is Developmental Editing?
Even the most talented, thoughtful writer can miss critical mistakes when it comes to a passion project. Objective editorial feedback – whether from a professional editor, a beta reader, or even a software program – can help catch and correct embarrassing mistakes before they’re disseminated, along with the manuscript, to a wider audience.
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