Do Yourself a Favor: Tips and Quips on the Writing Life
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About this ebook
Like the Pirates' Code, many alleged "rules" of writing are more like guidelines…
But don't believe anyone who insists there are NO rules for writing. There are rules: the mechanics. The craft, as opposed to the art. The tools for sculpting clay or stone, or spinning and dyeing thread for weaving, or learning to play scales and read music and keep your instrument in tune, when creating music. The rest -- the "art" portion -- is flexible and adapts to what works best for YOU the writer. The technique for playing the instrument, the point of view and voice for the story, the genre you write in, the images you create from stone and clay, the pattern of the cloth you weave, and the colors you choose to use.
When you understand the why of the rules, then you can bend or break them.
So Do Yourself A Favor and learn what's hard-and-fast, and what is flexible. It'll save you pain and effort and wasted time in the long run.
This collection of advice started as blog postings (read: semi-rants) while editing people who had something to say … but didn't take the time to figure out how to say it. Basically, whenever I ran into something noteworthy in my own writing journey, or things I encountered too often in editing, I blogged about it, hoping the things that frustrated or fascinated me would be helpful to others. Along with those blog posts, revised because of timeliness or to cover a broader subject, or to fit in new discoveries along the way, or because I repeated myself … I offer bits of advice about topics that other authors have found worthy of discussion. Or argument. Or mockery. Or complaint. Or wailing. Or amusement of the I'm-losing-my-mind variety.
Snark warning!
Michelle L. Levigne
On the road to publication, Michelle fell into fandom in college, and has 40+ stories in various SF and fantasy universes. She has a BA in theater/English from Northwestern College and a MA focused on film and writing from Regent University. She has published 100+ books and novellas with multiple small presses, in science fiction and fantasy, YA, and sub-genres of romance. Her official launch into publishing came with winning first place in the Writers of the Future contest in 1990. She has been a finalist in the EPIC Awards competition multiple times, winning with Lorien in 2006 and The Meruk Episodes, I-V, in 2010. Her most recent claim to fame is being named a finalist in the SF category of the 2018 Realm Award competition, in conjunction with the Realm Makers convention. Her training includes the Institute for Children’s Literature; proofreading at an advertising agency; and working at a community newspaper. She is a tea snob and freelance edits for a living (MichelleLevigne@gmail.com for info/rates), but only enough to give her time to write. Her newest crime against the literary world is to be co-managing editor at Mt. Zion Ridge Press. Be afraid … be very afraid. www.Mlevigne.com www.michellelevigne.blogspot.com @MichelleLevigne
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Do Yourself a Favor - Michelle L. Levigne
PUBLISHING IS WAR
When you join the military , do they send you onto the battlefield with spitballs instead of guns?
So why do people who decide to be writers slap words onto the page and never take the time to polish, proofread, fix grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, formatting, etc., before they send those words to a publisher?
Yes, I know what you're about to say: Fixing those piddling little details are what editors are for.
Umm... No! A traditional publisher will read the first paragraph of such a sloppy masterpiece
(monsterpiece!) and reject it immediately. No publisher has the time and budget to make your book readable.
That is your job.
Before you submit.
If it's going to take hours of drudgery just fixing the things you should have caught with the spell check in your word processing software, no publisher worth her salt is going to buy the book. Time is money, after all.
As a side note: I'm a regular judge for a writing contest where the prize is a publishing package. One of the criteria for picking entries worth a second read is how much editing has to be done to make those entries publishable. I'm not going to inflict mental anguish and frustration that I wouldn't want to endure on another editor. That's just plain inconsiderate and cruel.
The only publishers who accept manuscripts full of grammar, spelling, punctuation and formatting mistakes charge you to fix them. Remember, I make my living as a freelance editor for people who self-publish, or publishers who contract to publish people's books for them. Books that traditional publishers won't touch because they're aimed at audiences too small to be profitable, or they are incoherent messes. Spitballs instead of rifles.
Remember that editing job I mentioned that someone dictated into the computer? It had me close to tearing my hair out. (Bald patches in a woman my age are very unbecoming. Thank goodness for cold weather and stocking caps.)
Why was this book so hard to edit? Total lack of punctuation. No periods to indicate the stop of a sentence, no commas to indicate phrasing. Do you know how hard it is to figure out what someone is trying to say, without punctuation to indicate phrasing and where thoughts