I decided to write up a quick post to warn about some problems I’ve seen recently regarding editors. X (formerly Twitter) recently had writers talking about their experiences with editors. Some writers obviously do have problematic experiences and are rightly wary about working with another editor. However, I wanted to flag up a few issues.
Editors who are offering to return a manuscript in an unreasonably short period of time may be using AI, while charging YOU for time they never spent on your manuscript. Furthermore, they should not be feeding your copyrighted material into an AI without your permission in the first place. Consequently if you see someone offering a one week turnaround for a developmental edit of a full-length novel, reject it. Developmental edits, done properly, take weeks.
Also beware of writers who fancy themselves as editors because they ‘edited’ their own work. It is very common for these people to have no editorial training and no feedback from professional editors on their editorial work. Some of these writers are simply looking for a side gig to help cover their own publication costs, or they’re unaware of the sheer amount of work involved. If you want another writer to edit your work, ask them about their training or membership of a professional association. Some writers have undertaken training.
I will probably add to this post when I have more time, and I will list some of the training you, as a writer, should be looking for in an editor. I will also include professional associations which have codes of conduct, including the Editorial Freelancers Association and The Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading. I’m personally a member of the EFA, one of the organisations I trained with. The Chartered Institute is more focused on copyediting and proofreading.
If someone is offering to edit your work, and they have no training, no membership of a professional organisation, and they are offering a fast turnaround of your manuscript, WRITER BEWARE.
As a fiction editor, I sometimes see manuscripts which have fairly basic problems like dialogue formatting and other issues which are relatively easy to fix. While you can buy a book on how to write and format dialogue, and how to use dialogue tags and action beats, the best way to learn is to copy. Because copywork can improve your writing in a short space of time.
And by copy, I don’t mean plagiarism.
I mean copywork, an old method of teaching writing skills, and one used by famous writers from Robert Louis Stevenson, Benjamin Franklin, Jack London, Joan Didion, and Hunter S. Thompson.
In the case of Thompson, he copied out The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms not to steal, but to learn how they were written and structured. It’s a good example of learning from the greats. You don’t have to write like them when it comes to your own writing, but you might learn from their techniques and narrative choices.
Using copywork to improve dialogue writing
For those who struggle with writing and laying out dialogue, you don’t need to copy out a whole story or novel to learn. You can simply choose dialogue scenes from novels you like, then write them out. Try doing it longhand. It forces you to think more about each word you’re writing down.
That way you learn where the speech tags go, how they are punctuated, and when you can drop them altogether. You learn how to use action beats. You also learn how to write dialogue that doesn’t run on forever.
Studying scenes in published books can teach you how to keep dialogue on track and succinct. You don’t need to show an entire conversation, for example. You can cut into the middle of a conversation and then exit before the meeting is over.
How copywork teaches other writing skills
Copywork can also teach you about basic formatting and indented paragraphs, the use of line breaks, use of punctuation, pacing, and more. You can examine how much an author describes the world of their novel or short story early on – whether they take time to feed in details, and whether they leave most things to the reader’s imagination.
If you write historical novels, you can look at the opening pages of well-regarded books in the genre, and copy them out to see how much detail, info dumping, and world building there is. You can see how the writer introduces the main character(s) to the readers – in terms of telling versus showing.
If you’re struggling to write a battle scene, you could find battle scenes in published novels and copy them out to see how the author choreographed the action, dialogue, point of view, internal dialogue, etc, to create a powerful and pacy scene.
Copywork can teach you how the greats tackled basic writing skills. While you can read ‘how to’ books (and the best will include examples), copywork using targeted passages to solve particular weaknesses in your writing can go a long way to improving your skills and techniques.
Again, this is not about stealing other people’s work. It’s about learning from the greats – learning technique, layout, rhythm, and more.
Copywork exercise
You can give yourself a regular copywork exercise by choosing a short passage – could be dialogue, opening scenes in a novel, more dramatic scenes – and copying them out longhand to study, word for word, how these passages work. If you struggle with writing tension or conflict, you could choose several relevant passages from published novels and copy them out to see what the author is doing that you’re missing.
Are they using shorter sentences to drive pacing?
What else might they be doing?
While you can simply read the relevant passages slowly, it won’t have the same impact as writing them out. Writing longhand takes more time and thought.
Need feedback on your novel?
I’m a developmental editor currently open to new clients. I work with adult fiction – SF/H/F, historical, literary, thriller, and romance. I’ve worked on both standalone novels and series. I particularly enjoy working with newer writers and my manuscript critique and developmental editing packages have tiered options for different budgets.
I offer a free sample edit. Check out my services page at the link below:
I post content on Substack once a week, sometimes less. The emails go out on a Monday or Tuesday. They include new posts on writing or editing, writing competitions I’ve heard about, and more. If you’re interested, you can sign up below.
I recently started a fiction Substack. I’d been meaning to do it before and just never got round to it. It was partly because I had a huge backlog of writing going back decades. I couldn’t make up my mind where to start with it. This also held me back in writing anything new. Developmental editing work also got in the way.
The reason I finally decided to open the second Substack was that I hoped that in starting to get stories off my computer, done and dusted as it were, I might free up mental space for where my writing focus really needed to be.
Funnily enough, within posting two stories, my brain started to come up with story titles (without plots attached to them yet). Then after a few more postings, the creative engine in my brain was running and I had completely new ideas. The whole point was to break both the backlog and the deadlock with new writing. It might be too soon to say for sure if this will work, but posting does seem to help.
One of my stories also ended up on the Top in Fiction list for Issue 15.
Otherwise, I think having a little quiet corner of the internet helps. Especially given the constant distractions of social media.
Some of the stories I’ve posted there appeared elsewhere a long time ago. But far more have not. Ultimately, I have big novels I could serialise in due course, but I’m starting out with short stories for the time being.
Influx of fiction writers to Substack
That brings me to the influx of many new writers into Substack from other platforms. I’m seeing a lot of new fiction and non-fiction writers announcing their arrival in the notes section of the Substack app. Some people bemoan the newbies with large followings they’ve brought from elsewhere.
I’m also seeing complaints about “writing gurus” and editors posting articles – basically calling them grifters. Since the writers posting want to advertise their own writing, then I feel there’s an element of hypocrisy here. Especially since some of those so-called gurus and editors have been there longer.
But there are writing advice posts that seem to me unhelpful for those who write more intuitively. Not all writers are completely conscious of the decisions they make when writing, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You need a certain objectivity later for polishing and editing, but some advice to me looks too much like micromanaging. Too much of this on different writing topics and it becomes overwhelming for newer writers.
Serialisation as a publishing option
Otherwise, I recently completed an outline critique for a client – 11,000 words of a novel outline including character profiles. I wrote a 4,000 word report and left loads of margin comments. The client was delighted.
Since she mentioned self-publishing as her goal, I added an option in the report I hadn’t included before – on serialisation on Substack or other platforms. If more fiction writers flock over here, it will obviously become a more viable option for those looking for readers. The normal self-publication route is the more obvious one, and many will see it as the best route. But it’s worth mentioning the alternatives if there are any.
Non-fiction writers and journalists have done well on Substack. It’s a site that caters to freelance journalism, supported by subscribers. Whether fiction will work so well on the same model remains to be seen. For the time being, mainstream and indie writing will continue to be the two main routes to readers. But with Substack and Ream (another serial fiction site), there is definitely a third option that could work for some people. It all depends on your goals.
I’ve done little to promote my fiction or non-fiction Substacks since my main blog is here on my site. But if you’re interested in checking out my fiction Substack, you will find it at the link below. And if you decide to join the site, feel free to follow or subscribe. My posts are free to read.
The art at the top is by Aleksandra at Fusion Dreams.
Looking for feedback on your novel or memoir?
If you need someone to take a look over your opening chapters, the whole novel, or your outline, feel free to email me at karen@indiecateditorial.com. I offer free 2000 word samples if you want to test drive my services. This does not apply to outlines or short stories since are much shorter to start with.
One of the mainstream published novels I read recently had far too much internal dialogue. Internal dialogue is the stream of thoughts, which can be in monologue or dialogue, that many people have in real life. Though, interestingly, not everyone experiences internal dialogue.
In fiction, showing a viewpoint character’s thoughts is an excellent way to strengthen characterisation. We can see the character’s changing emotions and thoughts, the questions they ask themself, their hopes and doubts.
Internal dialogue shows us the interior life of a character, adding an extra dimension to a story.
However, too much will interrupt scenes, cause lengthy breaks in external dialogue or action which can lead to readers struggling to pick up the story again. Too much will also slow down pacing.
Imagine a scene where a conversation is taking place, and the conversation is constantly interrupted by an extended section of internal dialogue. The character might ruminate over what’s being said, and that’s fine and good, but if it goes on too long the external scene becomes fragmented and hard to follow.
In the case of the gothic thriller I was reading, the internal dialogue also added far too much unnecessary word count.
I think part of the issue was that the author was often using internal dialogue to emphasise the stakes, as if they didn’t trust readers to work it out for themselves. But it would run on too long and become counterproductive.
Stakes should add to tension and pacing in more dramatic scenes, but stringing out the internal dialogue actually blows the pace. The author’s editor could have suggested cutting it back. I could see loads of places where cutting it back would boost not just pacing but the stakes by keeping things more focused.
I’ve read two books by this author and felt both were failed by the lack of proper developmental editing. There were also other issues including weak characterisation in relation to other characters. It was hard sometimes to tell the other characters apart. Less bloated sections of internal dialogue could have made room for better characters.
After I finished both novels, I checked the Amazon reviews and many other readers had the same issues.
Do you want feedback on your novel?
I’m currently open to new clients. And I’m adding a new version of my Opening Chapters Edit service. Previously this was always a developmental edit, featuring a report and comments in the margins of your manuscript. However, I’m also offering a manuscript critique version. This is basically just a report with no margin comments.
If you’re interested in either of these services, or a full developmental edit or manuscript critique, you can check out my services page here.
