A Shot in the Arm for Your Writing

Here’s a quick way to give your writing a shot in the arm (thanks to megisi for the post idea!): scan for “to be” verb forms such as “is,” “was,” “were,” etc. and replace them with active verbs (“wrote,” “ran,” “eats,” etc.). Passive constructions are like water, slipping into every crack in your writing until it’s sunk–and you never saw the leak!

How much of a difference does this make? I’ll give you an example. Here is a sample of my own writing, first with “to be” verbs, then with active verbs plugged into those cracks:

Arielle found herself holding Periwinkle so tightly she was nearly squeezed in half. She loosened her grip and looked at the doll. Her fingers were stiff. She threw the bed covers off and scooted to the edge of her bed. It was dark out, and quiet. The open bedroom window let in the sounds of the neighbor’s dog barking and distant traffic, and a dim light came into the room from the street lamp outside her window and from the night light in the hall outside her open bedroom door. Normally Arielle loved the soft puddle of golden light the night light cast on her floor, but tonight it was too dark. She slipped her feet into her fuzzy white slippers and walked carefully downstairs, staring anxiously at every shadow.

Okay, so here’s what I did. I went back to this paragraph and
1) replaced all the “to be” verbs
2) That cleared up the text enough for me to notice that I had repeated several words in the text, namely “she,”
“her,” and “the”–all boring words.
3) I cleaned up these redundancies, and this is what I got:

Arielle found herself nearly squeezing Periwinkle in half. She loosened her stiff grip around the doll, threw the bed covers off, and scooted to the edge of her bed. The neighbor’s dog barked, and Arielle could hear the sounds of distant traffic through her open window. The street lamp outside and the night light in the hall both cast their dim light into the room. Normally Arielle loved the soft puddle of golden light the night light cast on her floor, but tonight felt too dark. She slipped her feet into her fuzzy white slippers and walked carefully downstairs, staring anxiously at every shadow.

I’ll probably rewrite this 10 more times, but it’s a little tighter, don’t you think?

Two Simple Ways To Become a Freelance Editor

A few people have weighed in on my little poll, indicating you would like to hear more about freelancing. No problem! I’m regularly asked how to do what I do: freelance editing. Well, there are many ways to go freelance (the easiest involves the insertion of your full-time gig into a bodily orifice of your boss), but here are a few tips I hope will give you a solid start. Please note that I am still only freelancing part-time while I stay home with my daughter, so I can’t be your shining example of how to “make it” as a freelancer–not yet, anyway. These are just tips to get your foot in the door of the publishing world, which really is the hardest part.

Route #1: Create your own internship.

I schmucked around trying to find paid gigs even while I was still IN college, because back then we all still thought we could find paid work in our field of interest, with minimal experience. Not so much. My first paid gig dried up after college, and by the time I started looking for internships (because publishers wouldn’t even call me back about paid jobs), the window of opportunity had closed. That = several years wasted time. If I had known then that it would take me so long to find a paid job without internship experience, I would have viewed 6 months or a year of indentured servitude as an investment rather than an insult.

Problem is, LOTS of folks know better than I did and are clamoring for just a few internships, so what you should do is find a small publisher you like and offer to work for them for free so you can gain experience. You just found an internship with zero competition, and you made the overworked editor an irresistible offer: free help. Just set a time limit on your internship and be ready to say goodbye (and thank you!) if they can’t offer you paid work after that time.

Route #2: Start small.

This is what I ended up doing: I tried my damnedest to get jobs in publishing or as close to publishing as possible in order to pay bills and keep myself occupied. On the side I was working for one or two small book publishers at a time, doing occasional work. Yup. I had to cold-call a lot of people to get those gigs, too. S’just the way i’tis. There are oodles of online lists of publishers. Start there and research each one until you find one you like. It would help your case if you knew something about the genres they publish, too.

Over time my part-time experience looked better and better on a resume, until I was able to land an in-house, full-time, pull-your-hair-out-stressful, gloriously satisfying copyediting job, which in turn bolstered my credibility when I went back to freelance.

All these ideas take some guts, because you have to pick up the phone and call people (gah! anything but cold-calling!). If you want to freelance, though, you’re probably the ballsy sort anyway, right? Anyway, I hope these tips give you some new ideas. Good luck!

How To Write a Good Plot

This technique comes from James Scott Bell’s Plot & Structure, part of the Write Great Fiction series of books. I bought this book several years ago, but picked it up last night because the plot of the book I’m writing was lacking some momentum, and I needed some pointers to get it moving. I hope this helps you as much as it helped me.

The author breaks down a great plot into the acronym LOCK:

Lead–The lead character needs to be interesting, whether they are sympathetic or not. My lead has an unusual and unsettling gift for seeing the future, which surely makes her interesting, but I realized I hadn’t sufficiently fleshed out my lead so the reader could see how uncommonly brave and sweet she was, or how she was a loner that didn’t explain herself well to others. These characteristics drive the plot, so I need to draw her with a finer brush.

Objective–Great plots require the lead to have a clear objective. My lead’s objective reverses halfway through the book as she starts to run away from what she thought she wanted, then switches back. Will that work? We’ll see.

Confrontation–I needed to up the stakes for the lead’s parents, who are the primary supporting characters in the story. Now instead of just being motivated to protect the lead because she is their daughter and being motivated because they are threatened with loss of reputation and friends, they stand to lose economic stability as well as a direct result of the conflict. This one was easy because the father is a CPA, and his reputation was already under attack because the conflict involved his role as church treasurer. All I had to do was make some parishioners his business clients and I had a big fat mess on my hands.

Knockout–Bell says readers want the author to send the opposition to the mat. But my story would seem a bit vindictive and unrealistic if I were to flatten the perps, so I’m achieving this knockout by allowing them to ruin themselves spiritually as a result of their decisions. The lead is vindicated by her own ability to move forward, while the opposition is left to wander in confusion and desperation. It’s not exactly a knockout, but I think it will work. I hope so.

Does this give you any new ideas for your stories? Do you have any tips to share for writing a great plot? I’d love to hear them.