Tag: editing

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Submit Early for Christmas

If you’ve never had work published before, it’s easy to imagine it’s a quick process. You send in your story, the editor gives it the thumbs-up, and then it appears in the next edition. On the contrary, the process can be tremendously slow, even in this fast-paced age.

For articles, a useful rule of thumb is to think six months in advance of publication. Magazines are full of Christmas features right now, but many of these would have been planned since July or August. Conversely, this is the time to submit pieces about relaxing sun-drenched locations, what to do during the school summer holiday, &c.

And the lengthier the work, the longer that timeline will be. For a novel, the wait could be up to two years, according to one source.

One way to shorten the time is by self-publishing. It’s entirely possible to finish writing a piece one day and then make it available online the next. But when you do this, there is the potential to cut out the steps that make a finished piece look polished. This includes tasks such as editing, proofreading, cover design and – in the case of non-fiction – fact-checking.

I know few people want to think about winter when it’s still the middle of summer, but from a publishing point of view, it’s the perfect time.

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Falling Foul of the Censors

Last week, I was reminded of a case involving the Obscene Publications Act 1959. Many people associate it with the 1960 trial of Penguin Books for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but there have been a few notable trials since.

The one I’ll focus on here dates from 2009. It involved a blogger called Darryn Walker, writing a sadistic fantasy story involving the members of Girls Aloud. This was notable because it was the first time the Act had been used for written material since 1991, and the first time it had been invoked in the Internet age.

If you want to read the story, which was written under a pen name, Girls (Scream) Aloud has been archived. You are warned it's not safe for work.

I read it myself at the time of the case. My personal view, then and now, is that the story might be in bad taste but hardly worthy of a criminal trial. In any case, Walker was ultimately cleared of the charges after evidence from an IT expert. In fact, I can’t find an example of a successful conviction for purely text material.

At present, it seems most writers published in the UK will never need to worry about falling foul of the Act. But in the years since the Walker case, much more material has gone online and it’s worth considering whether we might see more convictions in the future.

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Expelling the Exposition

Last week, I was inspired to write a short story, but it needed a lot of background information to be included before the action happened. As I was planning it out, though, I couldn’t figure out how to explain it without boring the reader.

In the years I’ve been writing, one technique I’ve found to work is simply to write the story, exposition and all. Afterwards, it’s usually a case of taking a step back and trying to carve out a structure from what’s on the page.

In this case, I had a character that should have arrived at a place by 6pm and was uncontactable by phone until 8pm before finally showing up at 9:30pm. I initially had the action take place at 8pm, with the characters holding a conversation between that time and 9:30pm.

Looking back over what I’d written, I realised I could dispense with the 8pm call and set the action nearer 9:30pm. That had the effect of both reducing the explanation and intensifying the surprise as the arrival was now completely unexpected. I also placed much of the exposition into dialogue instead of descriptive paragraphs.

That meant I could start the action earlier and it took off with gusto. I wrote so much that I was able to split the narrative, with a cliffhanger between the two parts.

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Preparing for November

For the last eight years, I’ve had the privilege of running the Dundee & Angus region of National Novel Writing Month. The name is usually shortened to NaNoWriMo.

My official title is Municipal Liaison (ML) and I’m just one of an army of volunteers around the world who run local regions of differing sizes. Dublin, for instance, is one region. By contrast, the entirety of Italy is also its own region for NaNoWriMo purposes, although that’s not uncommon outside the Anglosphere.

The poster child of NaNo is the challenge to draft a 50,000-word novel over the 30 days of November. Regions are not required to meet year-round, but ours does every Tuesday. November sees an increase in membership, so we’ve learnt to plan accordingly.

In addition to our Tuesday meetings, we have an additional one each Saturday in November. Traditionally, this is at a different location. I always like to have a co-ML as a backup, and she organised that alternative venue.

But why meet year-round in the first place?

It’s less well-known that the organisation also runs standalone challenges during April and July where you choose your own goal.

The idea came about after the 2015 November challenge, when there was an enthusiasm to keep meeting up into December. A previous co-ML and I decided to extend it on a trial basis each month, and we eventually met up every week until April 2016.

At that point, it was clear the weekly meetings were a winner. These allowed our members to come along during the off-season to work on other projects or prepare for the next challenge.

When the pubs were closed during the pandemic, we already used Discord as a meeting place, and this was stepped up. Our meetings now take a hybrid form, where members have the alternative to engage in our private server.

The in-person element, however, will always remain central for as long as I’m in charge of the Dundee & Angus NaNoWriMo region.

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Quick on the Draw

If we must label it a party trick, one of mine is to write a short poem about a given subject in a short space of time, typically under five minutes.

This comes into its own at poetry shows with multiple performers, where I’ve been later in the bill. I’d pen a poem for each act while they’re still on stage and read mine at the end. I’ve occasionally been asked how it’s possible to write in such a short space of time, and the answer is simple: shortcuts.

The format I use is the four-line clerihew, and the first line is always the subject, so that’s 75% of it already written. The next line rhymes with the first, and then a different rhyme appears in the other two lines. Ridiculousness is encouraged with this style, making it ideal for a quick-and-dirty verse.

But much as people are impressed by my speedy poetry abilities, I’m similarly impressed by those who can churn out a drawing within the same time.

A few weeks ago, I found myself at a life-drawing class running by a pal. These sessions typically begin with a session of two- to five-minute poses to allow the artists to warm up, but I really struggle with these. By the time I’ve laid out the frame of the pose, there’s no time left to add in the details.

I’ve asked a couple of folk for advice about how to handle this, and there are some shortcuts, just as there are with clerihews: only draw part of the pose, construct the image in an abstract way, stick to the same colour of pen or pencil, &c.

The key to mastery, however, is to keep tackling these short poses. There was a time when I couldn’t write verse, never mind in such a short time, but I stuck at it and I’m sure I can stick at the life drawing.

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When to Break a Line of Poetry

During my last poetry group meeting, I was inspired to create a type of verse known as found poetry. This is created by taking phrases, passages or sometimes individual words from another work – often a prose piece – and reframing them, frequently by altering the line breaks.

My source material was taken from a comment that another member had written when distributing our poems. Here it is as prose:

Collation enfolded. Zoom link below for this evening. There have been recent times in recent weeks where the Wi-Fi at 2 Shore Terrace has been decidedly dodgy.

I then arranged this into a short piece that illustrates arguably the most obvious distinction between prose and poetry: the difference between sentences and lines.

Collation enfolded.
Zoom link below for this evening.
There have been recent times
in recent weeks where the Wi-Fi
at 2 Shore Terrace
has been decidedly dodgy.

The original material uses the sentence as a delimiter, whereas the reworked version uses a combination of sentences and lines.

I felt the first two sentences would work well as complete lines on account of their brevity. The third sentence, by contrast, runs over four lines to emphasise the repetition of recent times and recent weeks. It is also considered good practice to end a line with a strong noun or verb, as the reader is likely to linger there for a moment longer than the other words.

If you want to try this yourself, here’s a more in-depth discussion about the difference between a sentence and a line. It’s also worth reading a few examples, such as when a journalist used the technique on speeches by the politician Donald Rumsfeld.

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Nearly Nine Years of Staying on Topic

I have something I want to write about, but it needs to wait until at least next week. So in looking for inspiration to fill this week, I decided to go and look back at the entry I made around a year ago today.

Unfortunately, I was similarly uninspired back then, with topics I wanted to discuss, but my motivation was trampled by a couple of other factors.

Going back two years, I talked about the hurdles that beginner writers face, while 2019 took a look at how subtitlers caption TV programmes. In 2018, it was an entry about effective complaint letters, while five years ago, we discussed submitting Christmas stories during summer to meet publishing deadlines.

At this point, I was tempted to stop looking back, particularly as I didn’t have a point to make that would tie together these disparate threads. However, I was now curious.

In 2016, I was in the middle of an MLitt degree and running short of time, so I set readers a challenge. The year before that, it was all about saying goodbye to pieces of writing that weren’t working. Back in 2014, the topic was introverts and extroverts, and that’s as far back as I can go because the blog began in Oct 2013.

⭐⭐⭐

After leaving this entry overnight, I realised the connecting thread: in almost nine years, this blog has stayed relatively on-topic.

I think we’ve all had an experience where we subscribe to a newsletter or a content creator, only to find the topic either evolves or abruptly changes into something you didn’t sign up for. With this in mind, I’ve long been careful to make sure each entry harks back to writing in some way.

Just before I make a post on WordPress, the site tells me that it’ll be sent to more than 1,100 readers. That’s a pretty loyal fanbase to have built up over these nine years.

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How to Write a Letter of Resignation

If you were following UK political news last week, you’ll have heard about the high number of resignations from Members of Parliament and from aides. So this week, let’s look at what should go into a letter of resignation.

Many of those leaving have chosen to make the letters public. Two typical examples are from Mims Davies and Lord Greenhalgh. Both of these are an A4 page in length and express gratitude, despite their reasons for submitting the letter.

But the job of a politician is not the same as being an employee and is often not subject to normal employment rules. As such, the examples given above are not good templates to follow.

When writing a letter of resignation for most jobs, there are many sources of help, including Glass Door, Indeed, and Reed. The exact advice varies between them, but they all recommend keeping the wording positive yet formal – and above all, brief. Politicians might like to showcase their reasons to the voters, but most of us don’t need to impress anyone.

I’ve only written one such letter, when transferring from a job in the UK government to the Scottish government. I kept it on my computer for weeks while waiting for official confirmation of the new position. However, HR advised me they considered this to be a transfer rather than an entirely new post, and all my work wasn’t needed in the end.

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The Importance of Structure and Conflict

This entry gives away the storyline of the novel The Bricks That Built the Houses by Kae Tempest. If you don’t want to know, it’s a good idea to skip this entry.

Every six months or so, one of my writing group members runs a 12-hour read-a-thon, where members can encourage each other to engage with a book they want to start or finish. We had the last one on Sunday just past, and I finished reading the aforementioned novel.

As a long-time fan of Kae Tempest’s other work, including poetry readings and music-backed albums, I really wanted to enjoy this, but what a letdown.

We’re led into the slightly seedy, slightly grimy world of the characters. But when the characters’ backgrounds are spelt out one after the other, it quickly becomes directionless.

Around two-thirds of the way in, there’s a scene where some chancer is beaten up after trying to charge a drug dealer double the previous price. This would have made a fantastic opener, from which we could have seen the tensions rise. Instead, any conflict is almost immediately resolved in the following chapters.

The book also suffers from some hallmarks of the first-time novelist. Firstly, Harry is a thinly-veiled version of Tempest. Secondly, the other characters all talk in a similar manner to each other, and not much conflict is built up between them for most of the time.

All the elements of a great story are there, but the final product feels like a collection of notes than a cohesive whole. The only element that made me push on through is the poetic prose throughout.

Having reached the abrupt ending, I recalled hearing about the first edit of Star Wars. It didn’t impress test audiences very much.

There is a standard story structure underpinning almost every major film, so an editor carefully went through the footage and shuffled it into an order closely resembling that structure. Here is the video of how it was done:

Had someone done the same with this novel, I might have been giving it a far better review.

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Proofreading at Speed

One of the best ways to proofread a new piece is to leave it aside for a while, and then revisit it in the future. Writing and reading are two distinct processes, much like cooking and eating,

My preferred formula is to leave one minute per word, or 24 hours, whichever is longer. To find this, divide the number of words in a piece by 60. So a 600-word short story would be set aside for 24 hours, while an 80,000-word novella would be left for over 1,333 hours or around 56 days.

But what if you have a deadline that won’t allow the piece to be set aside for long? Here are three ways I’ve learned over the years to speed up the process.

Change the typeface

Microsoft Word is usually set up to type in Arial or Times New Roman, with equivalent typefaces available for Mac. However, there are countless others pre-installed on both operating systems. Save your work, then convert the text to something completely different.

I suggest picking wider letters than usual and increasing the font size, because the eye tends to focus on different parts of the same words, and any errors will seem more obvious.

Read it aloud

For the avoidance of doubt, there’s no need to read it to anyone, just as long as it’s out loud to yourself. This method is good for picking up poor grammar and clumsy sentence construction that reading alone often misses.

Make your computer read it out

I used to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking a lot, and that has a feature to read text from the page, although Word and other word processors also have this built in. I have a particular problem with typing form when I mean from, and vice-versa, and this method is particularly good at finding these.

Older speech synthesis is a little grating for longer pieces, but the inflections have become much more realistic over the last decade. Just ask the actor Val Kilmer, who was given a cutting-edge system after he lost his voice.

… and a disclaimer

Murphy’s Law dictates that a blog entry about proofreading will contain some errors that can’t be attributed to stylistic choices. I haven’t found any, but I’m sure my many readers will be all over it.