Wording Around With Editing: Getting Your First Draft Ready to Publish: Wording Around, #2

By Kathy Mac

Wording Around with Editing gives readers everything they need to get their first draft of any writing project ready to publish.   

 

The first three chapters detail steps of the editing process and introduce the types of editing: Substantive, Stylistic and Copy. The next four chapters get into the nitty gritty of each of those, with an additional chapter on Proofreading. The final three chapters explain the importance of writing communities in helping writers bring their book to its very best form. Every chapter of Wording Around with Editing ends with a resource to help readers dive more deeply into that chapters' topic, as well as prompts that help authors take their first steps on each stage of the editing process.  

 

"Kathy Mac is a 'writer's writer.' In this tight and mighty work, she cuts to the heart of what she's learned about process, craft, and loving yourself through the hard parts of writing." 

 – AJ Ripley 

 

During the COVID-19 lockdown in the spring of 2020, poet and creative writing professor Kathy Mac (St. Thomas University, Fredericton, Canada) taught a free online course, the notes for which became Wording Around with Prose, the first in the Wording Around series. Wording Around with Editing: Getting your First Draft Ready to Publish  is the second one in the series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wording Around Press
• Release date: Mar 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781777373924

Kathy Mac

Kathy Mac loves dogs; helps run the Odd Sundays Reading Series in Fredericton NB, Canada; published her first ebook  “Wording Around with Prose” in 2020, her third poetry book in 2017, and a book of essays (under the name Dr. Kathleen McConnell) in 2012; is starting to envy retired friends though she still enjoys teaching creative writing at St. Thomas University; has won a couple of writing awards and been nominated for more; has brown eyes; used to have brown hair; is somewhat allergic to social media (sorry!); and has a website at kathymacpoet.com.

Book preview

Wording Around Press

2022

Copyright © 2022 by Kathy Mac.

Cover image and design by Delaney Crawford. Cover model Mike Arsenault.

Final Copy Editing & Proofreading by Grant Bagnall, Renelle Dion, Jacob Moore and Danya Sullivan

Hard Copy preparation by Renelle Dion, Jacob Moore, and Danya Sullivan

Digital Book preparation by Grant Bagnall, Cassidy Coughlin, Alexander D’Alessandro, and Caleb Murray

Audiobook preparation by Malkia Andrews, Alexander D’Alessandro, Rachel LaForge, and Elizabeth Pellerin

Freytag’s Pyramid diagram by Caleb Murray.

Glossary compiled by Elizabeth Pellerin

Student course evaluation comments in Preface used with permission.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

Wording Around Press

345 Oxford Street

Fredericton, NB, Canada

E3B 2W6

Wording Around with Editing: Getting your first draft ready to publish. / Kathy Mac, March 2022.

book: isbn 978-1-7773739-3-1

ebook: isbn 978-1-7773739-2-4

audiobook: isbn: 978-1-7773739-6-2

Land Acknowledgement

Wording Around with Editing was written in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Fredericton is in the traditional territory of the Wolastoqiyik, (Maliseet) whose ancestors, along with the Mi'kmaw and Passamaquoddy Nations signed Peace and Friendship Treaties with the British Crown in the 1700s.

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Thanks

This book wouldn’t be in front of you now if it weren’t for St. Thomas University Fredericton’s ENGL 3153: Literary Publishing class in the winter 2022 term, doughty literary warriors who persevered at university through all the waves of COVID-19:

Malkia Andrews, Grant Bagnall, Cassidy Coughlan, Alexander D’Alessandro, Renelle Dion, Rachel LaForge, Jacob Moore, Caleb Murray, Elizabeth Pellerin, and Danya Sullivan.

Thanks also to the STU Department of English, for their support of this book production project, and to Mark Leslie Lefebvre (of the Stark Reflections on Writing and Publishing podcast), Fazeela Jiwa (Acquisitions and Developmental Editor at Fernwood Books), and Anumeha Gokhale (Marketing and Publicity Manager, also at Fernwood Books) for sharing their expertise with the class.

Finally thank you again to AJ Ripley who came up with the name Wording Around, those many years ago, when they were my creative writing course assistant, and we needed a blog title, and who supplied a back cover blurb that made me blush.

Preface

It ain’t over until it’s over.

- Yogi Berra

The first draft of anything is shit.

-Ernest Hemmingway

The jury is out about what percentage of the writing is done now that you’ve finished your first draft. Are you halfway through? One third of the way? It depends on your process.

Some writers simply dismiss that idea. They say to themselves What is she going on about? I’m done! All I have to do now is check for typos, chuck that sucker up on Kindle, then watch the cash come rolling in.

Don’t get me started on those people. There’s a name for them: bad writers. That’s judgmental, I know, but they earn the moniker in two distinct ways:

their writing tends to be unedited, and so pretty rough (to put it kindly); and

as writers, they don’t have the chops to recognize their own shortcomings.

I already know readers of Wording Around with Editing don’t fall into that category, by virtue of the fact that you’re reading this; clearly, you want to get better at writing. Good!

In 2020 I listened to a podcast interview with the prolific Grand Old Man of science fiction and fantasy Kevin J Anderson. He waxed prosaic about how much he prefers writing first drafts over the editorial process of rewrites. On the other hand, during a creative writing class visit at Saint Thomas University, author and journalist Jan Wong confessed that, for her, getting the first draft down is like pulling teeth... but, she pointed out, you have to go through it to get to the fun of rewriting.

When you’ve typed that magical phrase the end on your first draft, you’ve done only about one third to half of the work of getting the book ready to publish. Wording Around with Editing organizes the process of editing into neat, bite-sized topics, but you’ll find they overlap a lot while you’re doing them. Part I: The Big Picture (the first three chapters of this book) is introductory and general:

1. Finished First Draft: What Next?

2. The Three Types of Editing (and Proofreading)

3. An Overview of the Editing Process.

Then in Part II: The Nitty Gritty, each of the editing