This month's "Ask an Editor" column answers a question about some of the distinctions between genre and literary tone and technique.
Go take a look. :)
Theresa
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Romance University Now Features Theresa in a Monthly Column! Click the Picture for Details
Got Editing Questions?
If you have an editing question you'd like us to address, feel free to send it to rasley at gmail dot com. We like reader questions because they save us from having to think up post topics on our own. ;)
Readers' Choice for Top Ten Blog Posts
- 1. Top Ten Reasons the Editor Doesn't Love What Your Critique Group Loves
- 2. How to Put It Together Into One Neat Tweet
- 3. Marks of the Amateur - Starting a List
- 4. When Unnamed Characters Speak
- 5. Character-Driven/Plot-Driven
- 6. The Words Not Spoken, the Steps Not Taken
- 7. This Was in the Comments, But It's a Great Question, So Let's Discuss--
- 8. Dialogue Tags
- 9. Enjambment in Fiction
- 10. Thoughts on Pacing - Nothing Brilliant
Readers' Choice for Best Series by Alicia
Readers' Choice for Best Series by Theresa
Readers' Choice for Best Series by Both Editors
Ask An Editor
Romance University Now Features Theresa in a Monthly Column! Click the Picture for Details
Our Promise to Authors
Every day we work with writers to shape their manuscripts for publication. We also evaluate submissions, read our friends’ pages, give second opinions to other editors -- in short, we confront a whole lot of manuscript pages for a whole lot of reasons. But here’s what we don’t do. We don’t -- and we never will -- pull examples directly from any of these manuscripts. The editor-author relationship depends on mutual trust and respect, and we won’t ever compromise that. We might get ideas for blog posts in the course of our interaction with writers and manuscripts, but all examples are ours, with the occasional exception of literary sources.
Theresa's Dubious Honor
Useful Sites for Writers
- AAR
- Alicia's Writer's Corner
- Brian's Common Errors Site
- Internet-Resources (Killer Collection of Links for Writers)
- Merriam Webster Online
- Poets & Writers Online
- Purdue's OWL Grammar Handouts
- Schoolhouse Rock Grammar Rock Lyrics
- The Chicago Manual of Style online
- Theresa Stevens, Editor
- U. of Chicago's Excellent Collection of Grammar References
- Vision Index: A Review Site for Books About Writing
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4 comments:
The article is great and timely as well. I and my family have talked about passive voice for weeks as I'm frantically writing. I can now explain it better to my son. We had used the definition from Office Word to help explain it to him. I have the passive voice monitor on to help me see it and I have very few passive voice sentences!
Thanks, Theresa! Very helpful and a great answer. I find the topic much clearer now. :)
JT
The post touches upon (but sadly, does not solve) my main dilemma.
I write, in the wider sense, coming-of-age novels. Books about people who face challenges and change. I also write mysteries in the wider sense: the protagonist stumbles across something they don't understand and put the pieces together and understand what's going on before being able to do something about it.
Both of these together mean that a lot of what is going on is in the character's heads. Which, in first draft, reads as follows:
The character began to walk down the street. She really had to work out why- [add five hundred words of going over clues and pondering past events]. Yes, she would face him. Tomorrow.
Any tips how to turn that kind of internal journey into a more active scene?
Green Knight, giver her meaningful action. If she's walking down the street, have her see two things simultaneously that remind her of two clues that she hadn't connected before. Let the environment act as a sort of stimulus for the internal journey.
It's not all that unusual for a narrator in a mystery, even a first person narrator, to withhold information and analysis from the reader. Keep in mind that you may be able to skip some of these passages.
Theresa
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