People like to pretend that you can write a book and make passive income from it. You can’t. If you write a book and stick it up on Amazon and never do anything to promote or market it, you’re not going to sell any copies. Okay, you might sell three or four from people who…
The querying process can be very hard mentally and emotionally. If you want to be traditionally published, though, it is one of the ways you’re most likely to land an agent. You can participate in Twitter pitch wars, attend a conference with pitch sessions, and so on but you don’t need to wait for a…
Plot, character, and setting are the trifecta of novel writing. They all have to work together or the story doesn’t work at all. You know the old freelancer saying, “You can have it fast, cheap, or good, pick two?” Same with plot, characterization, and setting. Authors who are terrific with plot and setting usually suck…
As developmental editors, our goal is to help authors figure out how to revise their stories to make them better. To do this, we are essentially comparing the work in front of us to some ideal in our heads. That ideal should not be “how I would have written this” but should be instead an…
Often people who want to write a story start with a character or a general situation in mind: “A female superhero with a lasso of truth!” “Terrorists take the president hostage!” And these are certainly perfectly good places to start. But it’s hard to create much narrative drive from situations and characters. Look at those…
I’m an editor who is also a writer, but I would caution you to be careful of hiring an editor whose main experience is their own writing and revising process. Being a writer has certainly helped me understand what the writing and revision process is like (at least for me) and how it feels to…
A long time ago I wrote a novel I loved. Loved. It was a flawed novel, as many beginning efforts are, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love it. I still love that novel, even though I’m perfectly well aware of its imperfections. I may in fact love it because of its imperfections. It is…
I’m often asked, “For beginning editors, do you recommend doing some edits for free to get a start?” To answer, I want to distinguish between a beginning editor who has no idea what they’re doing and needs to learn and a beginning editor who knows what they’re doing but doesn’t have a lot in the…
A common problem I often come across when editing fiction is a situation where characters are shoved around the story like chess pieces. Margie the protagonist winds up slapping her best friend not because Margie would ever slap her best friend but because the plot requires the best friend to be slapped. Authors often commiserate…