writing

  • Writing Advice

    How copywork can improve your writing

    How copywork can improve your writing

    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:

    IndieCat Editing Services

    Sign up for emails on writing and editing!

    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.

  • Short Stories, Writing

    A Writing Room of One’s Own

    Fiction and essays on Substack from K.M. McKellar. A Writing Room of One's Own.

    A Writing Room of One’s Own.

    A Writing Room of One’s Own

    Have you ever wanted a writing room of your own?

    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.

    My Fiction Substack.

    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.

    Check out my services section below:

    IndieCat Editorial Services

  • Inspiration, Research, Writing

    Historical fiction as a time machine

    Fifth Avenue, Vanderbilt mansion and Plaza Hotel, 1910

    Historical fiction as a time machine

    What is the appeal of historical fiction – does it function as a time machine?

    If you’ve ever pored over an old photograph like the one above, it might be the mystery and appeal of a lost world.

    There’s something romantic about vanished buildings like the Vanderbilt mansion – the largest private residence ever built in New York City.

    No one will ever walk up those steps to the entrance ever again. No one will ever walk the hallways. No one will ever pull aside the curtains and look out onto Fifth Avenue.

    It is a ghost house that recently drew my attention when a coloured version was posted on a Twitter account.

    The family who lived there are all dead. The maids who dusted and cleaned are long gone. The street looks very different today.

    The only way to visit this world is to study photographs. Or to read accounts of the area and the vanished house itself.

    Of course, with fiction, we can not only visit the past but use it as inspiration for new stories.

    What if there was a similar mansion belonging to a fictional family? Who might this family be? How did they build their fortune?

    And what dramatic events might take place in the house? What mysteries and secrets? Not just among the family, but also among those who worked there.

    Lost houses and mysterious houses are a common theme in fiction.

    Cornelius II Vanderbilt Mansion

    The real house was built in 1883, along the west side of Fifth Avenue to West 58th Street. It was a product of the Gilded Age and possessed 130 rooms.

    The owner, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, was the eldest grandchild of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, founder of the family fortune.

    It wasn’t the only house Cornelius II owned, and 13 years after moving in, he suffered a stroke. His last three years were spent in a wheelchair.

    The house was six stories tall, not including the basement. On the first floor, there was a two-story ballroom and a two-story dining room, plus a salon, a smoking room, a den, an office, a library, a breakfast room, and much more.

    His wife’s bedroom, boudoir, bath, closet and dressing room were on the second floor. Cornelius’s bedroom was also there, along with his bathroom, dressing room, closet, and private study.

    In addition to the 130 rooms, there was a stable and private garden next door.

    After Cornelius’s death, his wife Alice lived on at the mansion with the 37 servants required to run the house. But she no longer entertained guests. Eventually she sold the house in 1926. Since the developers were only interested in the land, and not the house itself, it was demolished and replaced by the Bergdorf Goodman department store.

    Vanderbilt mansion, 1908

    The Gilded Era

    In The Age of Innocence (1920), which is set in the 1870s, Edith Wharton describes a house of this type early on. I’ve bolded anything relating to the description of the Beaufort house:

    The Beauforts’ house was one of the few in New York that possessed a ball-room (it antedated even Mrs. Manson Mingott’s and the Headly Chiverses’); and at a time when it was beginning to be thought “provincial” to put a “crash” over the drawing-room floor and move the furniture upstairs, the possession of a ball-room that was used for no other purpose, and left for three-hundred-and-sixty-four days of the year to shuttered darkness, with its gilt chairs stacked in a corner and its chandelier in a bag; this undoubted superiority was felt to compensate for whatever was regrettable in the Beaufort past.

    To be able to shut up a ballroom for 364 days of the year is a sign of pure luxury… and pure waste. Further down the page, Wharton says:

    … and two years after young Mrs. Beaufort’s marriage it was admitted that she had the most distinguished house in New York. No one knew exactly how the miracle was accomplished. She was indolent, passive, the caustic even called her dull; but dressed like an idol, hung with pearls, growing younger and blonder and more beautiful each year, she throned in Mr. Beaufort’s heavy brown-stone palace, and drew all the world there without lifting her jewelled little finger. The knowing people said it was Beaufort himself who trained the servants, taught the chef new dishes, told the gardeners what hot-house flowers to grow for the dinner-table and the drawing-rooms, selected the guests, brewed the after-dinner punch and dictated the little notes his wife wrote to her friends. If he did, these domestic activities were privately performed, and he presented to the world the appearance of a careless and hospitable millionaire strolling into his own drawing-room with the detachment of an invited guest, and saying: “My wife’s gloxinias are a marvel, aren’t they? I believe she gets them out from Kew.”

    And further down still:

    The Beaufort house was one that New Yorkers were proud to show to foreigners, especially on the night of the annual ball. The Beauforts had been among the first people in New York to own their own red velvet carpet and have it rolled down the steps by their own footmen, under their own awning, instead of hiring it with the supper and the ball-room chairs. They had also inaugurated the custom of letting the ladies take their cloaks off in the hall, instead of shuffling up to the hostess’s bedroom and recurling their hair with the aid of the gas-burner; Beaufort was understood to have said that he supposed all his wife’s friends had maids who saw to it that they were properly coiffees when they left home.

    Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses’) one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d’or), seeing from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo.

    Newland Archer, as became a young man of his position, strolled in somewhat late. He had left his overcoat with the silk-stockinged footmen (the stockings were one of Beaufort’s few fatuities), had dawdled a while in the library hung with Spanish leather and furnished with Buhl and malachite, where a few men were chatting and putting on their dancing-gloves, and had finally joined the line of guests whom Mrs. Beaufort was receiving on the threshold of the crimson drawing-room.

    Edith Wharton’s book was written long after the 1870s, but it still acts as a time machine. Wharton herself described it as “a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America… it was growing more and more evident that the world I had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914.”

    In an article in 2020, Hillary Kelly wrote that Wharton’s “status made her story more than believable—it made the story real … Novelists before Wharton understood that storytelling was an act of exposure, but she built it into the architecture of The Age of Innocence and weaponized it.”

    The Age of Innocence is available on Project Gutenberg for anyone who wants to read it. The excerpts above are from Chapter three.

    Wikipedia article on the house.

  • Writing, Writing Advice

    #NaNoWriMo Burnout

    #NaNoWriMo burnout
    #NaNoWriMo burnout

    Are you currently engaged in National Novel Writing Month? Have you been furiously writing away and watching your word count build as the days go on? With the middle of the month approaching, maybe you’re already suffering from #NaNoWriMo Burnout?

    Maybe you’ve even fallen behind or dropped out. Due to that one or two days when you couldn’t get any writing done… You felt like you’d failed and you dropped out.

    Or maybe you picked up your thread again, but those missing days still bug the hell out of you.

    Don’t heap unnecessary pressure on yourself

    The truth is, with everything else that’s going on – Covid, lockdowns, restrictions, job worries – you don’t need the added stress of writing obligations.

    Or a feeling that you’ve somehow failed.

    #NaNoWriMo is great for getting people engaged in an activity for a fixed period of time, where you can also talk to other participants.

    But if you find it’s all getting too much, it’s perfectly okay to drop out.

    Your health is more important than a word count

    First of all, your health and wellbeing come first. Secondly, your writing won’t necessarily benefit from you feeling stressed out and under some kind of obligation to produce.

    If you feel that NaNoWriMo is the boot up the backside you need to get you motivated, there are others ways to get the same results. And they don’t involve the same short-term pressures.

    If you can find a writing group – including an online writing group – that would certainly help motivate you.

    You could also try and find some accountability partners. It can be one or two and then check in with them periodically. Set reasonable goals for the next check-in.

    Never set unreasonable goals. You’re just setting yourself up to fail and feel bad about it.

    And that can keep you trapped in a negative downward cycle of ‘what’s the point’ and ‘I can’t do this’.

    One technique I found helpful in the past

    One thing I’ve found helpful in the past is writing down a word count for each day. Even if it was just 30 words. Tiny word counts were fine because there were other days when the count would be in the thousands.

    Momentum was the key.

    I could count up the words at the end of each month, each quarter, each half-year, and each year.

    Over the years, the overall word count went up dramatically.

    At first, there was novelty and enthusiasm. Then there was the sense of obligation and the grind of having to do it. This is why even allowing small word counts can help. After a while, I had to write and if I didn’t there was a feeling of dissatisfaction. I didn’t associate it with a sense of failure or duty either. It had more to do with the feeling that writing was such a part of my daily life that I missed it and didn’t feel right when it wasn’t there.

    Nevertheless, we’re all allowed breaks.

    If you feel that a month of writing isn’t for you, it’s fine to take a step back. Never mind what other people are doing. Writing is not a competition – though it might feel like it is sometimes when you’re on social media.

    Still intent on finishing #NaNoWriMo?

    If you’re feeling a bit burned out, but you still want to continue, remember to take breaks. Go for a walk. Listen to music.

    If you need help concentrating, you can use a social media blocker like Cold Turkey.

    You can also use a Pomodoro timer to pace yourself.

    Whatever you write this month is just a jumping-off point, not the end goal. You can rework it later. Or even run off with a side character and live happily ever after in a new plot/novel!

    More posts from the blog

    You need author photos but you’re camera shy

    Social media blockers

    Is dialogue ruining your scenes?

    Boost your writing with the Pomodoro technique