Be Your Own Editor

In a surprise move, positivity queen Oprah Winfrey has chosen my favorite book of last year, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, as her newest book club pick. (It’s a surprise because the post-apocalyptic tale isn’t exactly bursting with positive messages.) I’ll definitely be recording her show on the day the notoriously reclusive McCarthy sits down with the big O. You can read some of my thoughts on the book here.

Note: This article, courtesy of Bernadette Sukley, refers mostly to nonfiction writing. But, as she mentions at the end, it applies equally to novelists, who might be even more in need of a fact-checker if they aren’t experts in the milieus in which their stories are set.

Every “t” was crossed and every “i” dotted. But you were caught winging it when you described Vermont in spring with the fireflies lighting up the night. Oops: fireflies, carnivorous beetles, don’t appear in Vermont evening skies until June. A quick check of the facts probably would have saved your writing career. Now you’ve been told to look into fiction as a better outlet for your talents. Here are five reasons why you need a fact checker to save your, uh, face.

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Eddy from the Bronx has a dilemma:

I am a screenplay writer. I have a few things in the works. In the meantime I am turning one of my screenplays into a novel, which is an interesting process. The big problem that I am having is changing my description, in other words in my screenplay I use the word “we” a lot. In my research I have not found a book that uses this POV style and I am for whatever reason STUCK on how to change the word “we” in my description as it also bumps up against 1st person, or is it OK and acceptable to leave this style in the novel.

Eddy sent me the first two pages from his novel, which I share just a bit of below, and in it he employs first, second, and third person. (The first sentence addresses an anonymous “you”; after that an anonymous “we” is narrating the story.) Eddy, you need a crash course in what point of view really means and how it affects the reader.

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Finally, a state legislature that cares about proper punctuation:

See what I mean in this New York Times article.

Time for an information technology break. My company’s IT department recently sent out a dire-looking announcement regarding some features of Microsoft Word’s “Track Changes” feature, and it got me thinking… Many writers probably use Track Changes to, you know, track their changes. Many writers may also be e-mailing documents—manuscripts, query letters, etc.—to agents or editors or friends or teachers. If you don’t want those agents or editors or even your friends to see every step you took on the road to the finished product, read on for a few simple tips.

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I’m nearing the end of my 10-week session at Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and it’s been an invaluable experience to learn the importance of feedback, to be prompted to consider such matters as pacing, voice, and description, and to simply be forced to write something every week. At the same time, it has—to be blunt—separated the wheat from the chaff, and the potential from the lack thereof. But that, too, is part of the workshop process. And it’s helped me realize that the lack thereof are pretty cool people, too.

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