Be Your Own Editor

A few weeks ago, I posted a list of the most acclaimed novels of 2006. At the top of the list was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a post-apocalyptic tale of a father desperately trying to save his son’s faith, sense of humanity, and life in a world without much of any of that left. Think Mad Max meets To Kill a Mockingbird. Wait, scratch that. Bad idea. Just read The Road—carefully—and learn how deceptively simple writing can evoke bottomless depths of character and meaning.

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A question from Russell in Irvine, California:

Should an unpublished fiction writer pay thousands of dollars for extensive editing: plot, characters, style, POV, and so on?

The answer, Russell (as so often) is “it depends.” Ask yourself the following questions: When? Why? Who? What? Where? How much? My experiences in this field, both positive and negative, are what led me to create Be Your Own Editor—the suggestion to hire a freelance editor is thrown at more and more unpublished novelists and nonfiction writers these days, and too many blindly follow it because, after all, an agent said it.

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As I mentioned earlier this month, my desire to see how the other half (i.e., you writers) lives led me to seek out a fiction writing class. I signed up for a ten-week session of “Fiction I” at Gotham Writers’ Workshop, which runs numerous classes in numerous genres of writing, both in New York and online. I’m workshopping live, but the online version is exactly the same, so pay attention even if you’re not a New Yorker! Now, what was week one like?

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I’m not sure if I think this short story by author Shelley Jackson is fun and thought-provoking or gimmicky and just plain stupid, but I know it’s too bizarre not to share. And it’s a genius marketing idea. The title is “Skin,” and its 2,095 words are being written very, very slowly.

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Ah, technology. It has opened so many doors for creative people, writers included. One of the biggest changes in the book industry in recent years has been the ability for writers who can’t place their books with a commercial publisher to print and sell them anyway, through either self-publishing or print-on-demand services. But what’s the difference, if there is one, and which model should you choose?

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I came across a strange but simple online writing tool today called Cliche Finder, which will search your writing and highlight phrases it considers to be cliches. All you have to do is paste text into a box on a very minimalist web page. Its list of expressions to avoid could never be comprehensive, and the example on the site is culled from a political article, but most phrases listed are (too) common in both fiction and nonfiction. Some of the tool’s “cliches” are actually redundancies, such as “pragmatic realist” and “mutual cooperation.” But of course, you should avoid those like the plague, too (”avoid like the plague” being a cliche used here only for purposes of irony). In short, it’s a fast and easy way to highlight no-no phrases in any form of writing. And that’s not the only nifty writing tool I found.

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