Tag: editing

Week 6 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is week six: Feb. 8 – Feb. 15

Stats

  • Stories Finished: 1
  • Submissions Currently Out: 2
  • Submissions Total: 1
  • Rejections: 3
  • Acceptances: 0

Goals and Results

My goals from last week were:

  1. Finish revising Red Eyes.
  2. Start the first draft of a new story.

Although I’ve been generally keeping up with my self-imposed quotas for writing and editing, this week marks the first time where I’ve gotten ahead on both.

I started a new story with a working title of Out of Towner. I hate this title and it will change. I’m not sure how I feel about the story itself. I’ll give it another week to see how it shapes up.

I made a couple of breakthroughs with Red Eyes revisions this week. First, I found a motivation for my main character that connects several aspects of the story and helps to explain why he finds himself in his current predicament. This also gave me a reason to make a change to the ending—not really changing the outcome of the story, but replacing some dialogue between two characters that I always felt was not up to snuff.

In the past couple weeks, I’ve addressed about two pages of bullet point notes, with some content migrating across several scenes. I believe I’ve reached the point where I added and clarified everything I wanted to. Unfortunately, that process added 600-700 words to a fairly long story. I’m refusing to call it done until it gets another one or two editing passes, mainly to trim, trim, trim.

As I finally wrap up this story, it’s really apparent that I’m just not as good at editing as I’d like to be. It’s slow, painful work to slog through. The writing is breezy in comparison. I’ve been able to get away with it, to some extent, by writing shorter stories that don’t have as many complicated, moving parts.

This isn’t a point of shame, but it does reinforce my determination to do a lot of editing this year so I can get better at it.

Critiques

It will be a relief to have Red Eyes done, because I’ve got another story coming down the pipe. Taco Cat Employee Manual v.7.1 went out for critique this week. The Critters week runs Wednesday to Wednesday, so it still has a couple days to go. I’ve gotten seven responses, which is not bad, but I’m hoping to get a few more.

Taco Cat currently stands at 1150 words, and a couple people have noted that it’s probably worth trying to get that down to an even 1000, the common cutoff for flash fiction. I expect the editing pass to be much shorter and less intensive on this one. Soon, I should have two more stories ready to submit.

Goals for Next Week

  1. Finish Red Eyes.
  2. Finish Taco Cat.
  3. Continue writing Out of Towner.
  4. Get a new story in the Critters queue.

Week 5 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is week five: Jan. 31 – Feb. 6.

Stats

  • Stories Finished: 0
  • Submissions Currently Out: 2
  • Submissions Total: 1
  • Rejections: 3
  • Acceptances: 0

A New Kind of Rejection

I received one rejection this week. Sort of.

At first I thought it was going to be one of those rejections where the publication is so worried about offending anyone that they don’t even clearly say that the story is rejected. (For the record, these are my least favorite kind of rejection. Don’t treat writers as fragile little babies, even if we occasionally act that way.)

Around the fifth paragraph it became apparent what was actually going on. The publication was unable to keep up with the number of submissions, so they gave up, rejected everything, and changed their format to be flash fiction only.

My submission wasn’t flash, hence the non-rejection rejection.

Goals and Results

The goals I set out for this week were:

  1. Finish or get close to finishing Red Eyes revisions.
  2. Catch up on writing word count.

I have to admit I got distracted this week, but it was productive distraction. I ended up working on several blog posts, which should be a longer-term benefit when I have less work to do for the remainder of my February posting schedule.

I didn’t finish my revisions on Red Eyes, but I did make good progress. I’m now ahead on my self-imposed revision quota for the first time this year. I still have one more week to wrap up Red Eyes before critiques for another story, Taco Cat, start coming in from Critters.

I didn’t quite catch up to my word count quota this week, although I am within spitting distance. Those words were spent on finishing the first draft of the horror story I’ve been working on, currently titled Estate Sale. (I’ll be looking for a more interesting name when I come back to it for revisions.)

Next Week

For the upcoming week, my goals are:

  1. Finish revising Red Eyes. Finally.
  2. Start the first draft of a new story.

Week 4 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is week four: Jan. 24 – Jan. 30

Stats

  • Stories Finished: 0
  • Submissions Currently Out: 2
  • Submissions Total: 1
  • Rejections: 2
  • Acceptances: 0

Goals and Results

The goals I set for this week were:

  1. Clean up another story (F-TIB) for Critters
  2. Revise a story (Red Eyes)
  3. Do just enough new writing to meet my self-imposed quota

My first goal went very smoothly. I usually don’t do a lot of heavy editing on a story initially, unless I get seriously negative feedback from my first readers or I feel like it has big structural problems. This particular story is fairly short—about 2300 words—and feels pretty good after some light cleanup.

My biggest concern isn’t a story structure thing, it’s the fact that one of the two main characters is trans, and their transition is an important plot point. I’m not trans, and I want to do right by the character and by that community. I haven’t worked with a sensitivity reader (formal or informal), but that’s something I might explore for this piece.

Goal number two is a work in progress. I won’t talk too much more about it. I’ve already mentioned that Red Eyes is a fairly long story (6600 words) that does need some structural adjustments, and that’s ongoing. I think this is an interesting example of the editorial process, so I may publish a longer post-mortem when I’m done.

Goal three was an abject failure. I barely wrote anything new this week. That doesn’t bother me, since I’m making progress on my revisions and that’s what I need to do to get more stories ready for submission. My word count goals are very reasonable, and I can still easily make up those words in a few hours of solid work.

Looking Back on the First Month

It’s hard to believe that January is over. One month down, eleven to go. I’m happy to report that I feel like I’ve struck a good equilibrium with my goals. I don’t feel overwhelmed, but I am getting things done.

So far, that isn’t reflected much in the stats at the top of these posts. I’ve been working on several stories, but haven’t yet pushed one over the line to be ready for submission. If we go by my goals for the year, I should be finishing one story per month. So I will necessarily have to ramp that up.

The number of submissions is also slightly low, if we go by the raw math of splitting 50 submissions over 12 months. This flows from completing stories, so it makes sense. Naturally, as I finish more stories I will be able to submit more, so I expect this to ramp up throughout the year.

My final goal for the year was orthogonal to writing short fiction: essentially keeping the blog active by posting 100 times. Conveniently, this works out to roughly two posts per week. So far I’ve remained comfortably on track.

I was struck by multiple ideas for the blog this week, which was a small distraction from writing fiction, but a welcome one. I was able to build up a small backlog of posts over my holiday vacation, and I’m happy to be able to maintain a healthy buffer for those inevitable times when the well of ideas runs dry. It’s a nice way to keep the writing muscles in shape while taking a break from fiction, and a good excuse to think about and discuss process.

Next Week

For the upcoming week, my goals are:

  1. Finish or get close to finishing Red Eyes revisions.
  2. Catch up on writing word count.

Taco Cat Employee Manual still has roughly two weeks in the Critters queue before I start to get feedback, and I now have F-TIB ready to submit for critique immediately after that. Red Eyes progress has been slow, so I’m mostly clearing my week to work on that. I’d really like to have it done by the time the critiques start rolling in so I can move on to addressing those.

Catching up on word count is a secondary goal, and one that will be fairly easy to achieve if I get in the right mood for it, but I’ll be happy to let it slide if I can make significant progress on revisions instead.

Week 3 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is week three: Jan. 17 – Jan. 23.

Stats

  • Stories Finished: 0
  • Submissions Currently Out: 2
  • Submissions Total: 1
  • Rejections: 2
  • Acceptances: 0

Keeping up the Pace

These first few weeks of the year have been about setting up a scaffold for the work yet to come. I’m now feeling like I’m in a comfortable place.

Each week I have some “standard” work: completing a Critters critique, meeting my first draft writing quota and my revision quota, and writing something for the blog. I like having some checklist items that I can work on without too much thought at the end of a long day. Beyond that, I can choose my own adventure.

I’m also getting back into the habit of scouring Duotrope’s upcoming themed submissions calendar. This is something I like to do pretty regularly when I’m writing short stories. Occasionally, a theme will inspire an idea for a new story, and if I already happen to have a story that fits a theme, those are great places to submit.

I didn’t find anything in the near future, but there were a couple themes opening in the next month or two that fit the stories I’m already shopping around.

Goals and Results

My goals from last week were to submit a story to Critters, revise another story, and keep up with my self-imposed quotas.

First, I spent some time cleaning up my newest and shortest story in progress, Taco Cat Employee Manual v7.1. As is typical, these are pretty light revisions based on feedback from my in-house beta readers (my wife and daughter) and anything that stands out to me after letting the story sit for a week or two. With that done, I sent it off to the Critters queue, and it should go out for feedback in early February. I’ll be curious to see how many responses it gets as a flash fiction piece that will only count for half credit.

In addition to those revisions, I dug into Red Eyes, a much longer story with a laundry list of improvements that need to be made. I made some progress, but there’s a long way to go.

The work I put into those two stories just about got me caught up on my revisions quota. Most of my writing quota was knocked out by working on a little horror story I’m calling Estate Sale, which I did partly while waiting at the DMV on a Friday afternoon. Once again, having a story in progress on my phone has paid off, even if I have to type with my thumbs. (Yeah, I probably could have brought the laptop. But I didn’t want to.)

Next Week

My first goal for next week is to work on Red Eyes revisions. I’m going to try to get the story done in the next two weeks. My second goal is to do some light cleanup on one of my stories that’s still in need of critique. That way, I will have Red Eyes ready to submit to publications by the time the Critters feedback for Taco Cat comes rolling in. I can immediately submit the next piece to Critters and work on the Taco Cat revisions while it works its way through the queue. Like a short story assembly line.

That’s all for week three. See you next Monday.

Week 2 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

This is week two: Jan. 10 – Jan. 16.

Stats

  • Stories Finished: 0
  • Submissions Currently Out: 2
  • Submissions Total: 0
  • Rejections: 2
  • Acceptances: 0

Finding a Groove

I’m still getting back into the rhythm of short story writing, but it’s less daunting than it was in 2024. I’ve done this before, and now it’s just a matter of doing it better.

I’m going to have a standard block of stats at the top of these posts. I haven’t decided exactly what those will be yet. I’ll finalize it when I feel more settled into a process.

Last week, I thought about splitting out the weekly stats from the yearly stats, but now I’m second-guessing that. The numbers just don’t change very much from week to week, and I don’t think it would be very interesting. Last week I also included a “stories in progress” count, but it’s hard to decide what that means. I have quite a few half-finished stories and first drafts in need of revision. Whether a story is “in progress” mostly comes down to whether I’m spending time thinking about it or actively rearranging the words.

What really matters is stories that are done done, and stories submitted to publishers. So I’m sticking to that for now.

This is also an appropriate time to note that for some people (like myself), there’s an allure to this kind of unnecessary bookkeeping. It can make you feel productive. It can also be an excuse to procrastinate by poking around the outskirts of writing-related activities without getting the core work done.

Goals and Results

Last week, I said that I had three goals.

#1 – The Rewrite

One of my stories had come back from the publisher with a rewrite request. The story centers on two characters who are friends, and it lightly hints at a bit more than that. The problem was that I submitted to a themed issue around relationships. The rewrite request, logically enough, suggested that I put the hinted relationship clearly on the page.

I have to admit, I had a hard time getting started on that rewrite. I’m not sure if it was because I had to dive back into a story that I’ve considered “done” for a while, or some other mental block. However, when I actually sat down to do it, the rewrite was fairly straightforward. It was easy to identify a handful of places that needed to change.

The story is better now. It makes sense: the characters have stronger feelings toward each other, and that only increases the tension when they find themselves at odds. Even if the publisher ends up rejecting the rewritten story, this is a good result. Their suggestion helped me improve it in a way that I wouldn’t have gotten to on my own.

#2 – Critiques

I knew going into the new year that I was going to be doing another year of short stories. While I continued doing some writing in 2025, I had not done any critiques on Critters. So I reset my count around the start of the year, but I had to complete three critiques to get caught up to the point where I could submit my own work to the queue.

I completed my three critiques across two weekly batches—Critters runs on a Wednesday to Wednesday schedule—and then discovered that I only got 2.5 credits. Now half-credits are normal for critiques of stories under 2000 words, as a way to encourage people to look at the longer stories. But the story was well over 2000. So I completed one more just to ensure I was fully caught up, and sent a message to Andrew Burt, who runs the site.

Burt responded very quickly and fixed the issue. So now I’ve got credit to spare. (That guy should be canonized a Saint of the Writing Internet for the time, energy, and money he has dedicated to that site over the years!)

Critters is a standard part of my process when I’m writing short stories. Now that I’m caught up, I’ll be doing roughly a critique per week for the rest of the year, and I always run my stories through Critters in the rewrite process.

#3 – More Revision

My final goal was to find more time for revisions. At the end of 2025 I found myself in the unusual (for me) position of having three short story first drafts written and waiting for edits. I want to start the year by polishing up those stories. If I’m going to hit my goal of 50 submissions this year, I need more stories to submit.

So far, I’m finding the writing spreadsheet helpful for this. My writing goal is an average of 100 words of new writing per day, and 10 minutes of revision time. The spreadsheet tracks that and tells me how ahead or behind I am for the year so far. As of Week 2, I’m about an hour and a half behind on my revisions, but seeing that number does actually work as a motivator, and I’m catching up.

Thanks to that rewrite request and Critters critiques, I found myself naturally in a revising state of mind. However, I didn’t revise one of those 2025 stories. I revised a completely new story. Which brings me to…

Taco Cat

I wrote yet another story. I exacerbated my too-many-first-drafts problem. But it’s okay. I’m pretty happy about it.

I mentioned in Week 1 that I was going to keep a story in progress stashed on my phone, so I could write in little bits of down time throughout the day. The result was that I wrote an 1100-word flash fiction piece over the course of the week. It’s currently titled Taco Cat Employee Manual 7.1, and it’s a strange little story in the form of a hacked fast food employee manual from a cyberpunk dystopian future.

So even though it still feels a little weird to write fiction on my phone, it feels like a resounding success two weeks in. It’s a great alternative to social media or mindless mobile games. I’ve already started a new phone story and put a few hundred words into that one.

Revising on the tiny screen, however, does not feel so good. My revision process involves copying and pasting, making notes and referring back to those notes repeatedly. I end up changing things that can thread throughout a story. None of this works very well on the small screen. I’m going to keep trying to figure out ways to make it work, even if that ends up being something like jotting ideas and notes during the day and doing the brunt of the editing work in front of the computer at night and on the weekends.

Goals for Next Week

  1. Submit a story to Critters
  2. Revise a story—Red Eyes
  3. Do just enough new writing

Critters limits the number of stories that go out to the group each week, to ensure that they all get a decent number of critiques. Usually, it takes a couple of weeks for a story to percolate up through the queue. So this week I want to do some cursory cleanup on one of my stories—probably Taco Cat—and submit it to Critters for additional feedback. It’ll likely go out in early February.

Next, I’m going to work on revisions for a story that went through Critters over a year ago: Red Eyes. Unfortunately, I think these edits are going to be significant and complicated, and it’s a long story.

Finally, I plan to do just enough new writing to keep up with the very modest quota I set for myself in my spreadsheet. The bottleneck in my process is clearly revision at this point, but hey, writing new things is fun.

Week 1 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.

Jan. 1 – Jan. 9

Due to the new year, I had to incorporate a partial week here at the start. This “week” was nine days.

  • Stories in Progress – 2
  • Submissions This Week – 0
  • Submissions Currently Out – 3

Yearly Totals

  • Submissions: 0
  • Rejections: 1
  • Acceptances: 0

Starting the Year

It’s always hard to get back into the swing of things after a vacation. Tacking on some New Year’s resolutions doesn’t help. Just when I would prefer to slow-roll into the new year, I’ve got to do all that stuff 2025-me promised? What a drag.

Firstly, I set up a writing spreadsheet. It’s not as detailed as some I’ve tried in the past, which will hopefully make it easier to keep up to date. For now, I’m tracking my daily words and rough minutes of revision time, aiming to write a minimum of about 100 words per day on average. I know that’s not a lot, but it’s a minimum, and at this point I’m just getting in my reps.

To aid in this, I made a plan to always have a short story in progress on my phone. This gives me the opportunity to jot down a few words when I might otherwise waste time. I’d guess writing on a phone sounds awful to most authors, but I’ve found that e-books and audio-books on my phone have greatly increased my capacity for reading. Why not try the same thing with my writing? There are usually a few times during the day when I have a spare few minutes, and the phone is always in my pocket. Besides, it’s not too onerous when I’m only jotting down a hundred words at a time.

Secondly, I reset my critique ratio on Critters. For those who aren’t familiar, Critters has a system that requires submitting about three critiques a month to be allowed to submit your own stories for critique. I haven’t done any critiques for the better part of a year, so I requested a reset. This wipes out my deeply negative ratio, putting my count at only -1. I plan to submit a couple critiques this upcoming week so I can put a story written in 2025 into the queue for feedback.

Submissions and Responses

I have a few submissions still out from late 2025. One of those came back this week as the first form rejection of 2026. Nothing too exciting there.

I also got something of a soft rejection. I had submitted a story with admittedly very light romance elements to a themed contest, and they responded with the suggestion that I resubmit with the relationship angle more front-and-center. The wording was ambiguous as to whether that was just politeness or significant interest, but I’ll likely give it a shot and resend.

Goals for Next Week

My to-do list is already longer than I’d like, and I’m working on being realistic about the time I have and what I can get done. It’s a balancing act between self-honesty and pushing myself to be a little more productive.

Top of the list is that story rewrite, since that’s the most time-sensitive. Next is catching up on critiques, as that will facilitate revisions. Getting “finished” stories polished is my fastest track to having more to submit, and that’s key if I want to meet my goals for the year. Lastly, I’d like to work on ways to fit more revision time into my week. This might mean putting some new story writing time on the back-burner, so I’m not simply wracking up more and more stories that aren’t ready for submission.

The Short Fiction Posts

In 2026, I’m once again focusing on short stories, so this seems like a perfect time to revive a series of six posts I did in 2024, all focused on short stories.

In this series, I cover why short stories are important to read and write, how they’re generally categorized by publishers, and how to revise and submit for publication. Finally, I wrapped it all up with a comparison of the two most popular websites for tracking your submissions: Duotrope and Submission Grinder.

Some Short Story Submissions

After focusing intensely on submitting short stories in 2024, I have to admit, I fell off hard in 2025. However, I haven’t been completely dormant. I’ve been writing a little and submitting a little, so I figured it’s about time for an update.

The Joy of Simultaneous Submissions

I have two stories out on submission right now, and both have been rejected a few times, mostly by big pro markets.

I submit to these big markets first, simply because an acceptance will come with a bigger check and more prestige. It would be fun to have my name on a cover that has been graced with genre greats; the magazines that I read when I was young.

Am I confident that my stories are a high enough caliber for those markets? No, but judging the quality of fiction is such a personal, opinionated thing, and doubly so when you’re the one who wrote it. So why not? It’s worth a shot.

The big magazines and websites can afford to be picky and demanding. They often have months-long slush pile backlogs, and don’t allow multiple or simultaneous submissions. Once you’ve submitted, your story could be in limbo for a quarter, six months, sometimes even longer. All for that <1% chance at a big acceptance.

The stories I have out right now are past all that. They had their shot. Now I’m submitting to lower-paying and less well-known markets. There are three reasons why this is nice.

  1. There are a lot of them! Even in the face of limited reading windows, narrow topics/genres, and themed issues, most stories have at least a couple reasonable places to submit in a given month.
  2. They have smaller slush piles, and that often equates to higher acceptance rates and faster responses.
  3. Many of them accept simultaneous submissions, which means you can send a story to several places at once.

So even though I only have two stories I’m currently submitting, I’ve been able to make 11 submissions, which isn’t too bad.

Timing the Market

Another thing I’ve noticed is that there seem to be a lot of markets that open for submissions in the summer, and close at the end of July or August. There are reading windows all year round, but there are also these larger trends. December and January seem to be the worst times to submit, with so many people out on holiday in the US and Europe.

I still check the Duotrope themed submissions calendar and publishing news pages fairly frequently. Their “Fiction publishers that have recently opened to submissions” list is a great way to track reading windows without trying to keep tabs on all the markets in your genres. The theme deadlines list is easy to glance through to see if anything matches any of the stories that I’m currently shopping around.

Drafts and Critiques

I’m still very behind on my rough drafts and critiques. I wrote a couple stories this year, and I’m now sitting on four that are somewhere between “technically complete” and “needs a final polish.”

The downside of using Critters for critique is that I’m not very good at keeping up my three(ish) critiques per month, so when I have stories I want to submit, I tend to have to do a couple months of critiques to get caught back up. However, with my finished stories out on submission, I really have no excuse. Aside from revision being the toughest part of the job.

The rest of August is going to be busy. I have a family vacation planned for the end of the month, and the kids are back in school the week after.

I’ve set myself a lofty goal of trying to get all four stories edited before the end of the year. That works out to almost one story per month. Doesn’t sound too implausible…until you compare it to my track record for the year so far.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print. How is your summer writing going? Let me know in the comments.

A Revision Checklist

After my recent re-read of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, I decided to create a revision checklist. For this list, I started with items from the book, then added some of my own based on my weaknesses and what I typically look for. I’ve split these into several categories to help focus. If you want to make your own checklist, you can split items up into whatever categories make sense to you.

There is a lot to keep track of when revising a story. Too much, in fact, to keep track of all at once. This is why it pays to make multiple revision passes, working from big to small, and working on  only a few things at a time. The checklist is a convenient tool for keeping track of it all.

One checklist like this can’t cover everything. It’s just a starting point. There will be changes that are specific to each story. The “general purpose” checklist can also change with your writing style. As you rid yourself of bad habits, you may find that you don’t need to check for those things anymore. If you want to focus on something new (maybe something that comes up repeatedly in reader feedback), you can add it to the checklist.

Story

☐ Introduce important characters early
☐ Describe character physically when first introduced.
☐ Can any characters be merged?
☐ Avoid using multiple channels to show the same characterization or plot point (dialogue, action, narration, etc.)

Chapter/Scene

☐ New scene or chapter when location/timeframe/POV changes
☐ Pacing - should this feel faster or slower?
    ○ Adjust scene or chapter length
☐ Focus on important aspects for scene
    ○ Characters/characterization
    ○ Physical action
    ○ Dialogue
    ○ Background info
    ○ Tone

Dialogue

Mechanics

☐ Avoid swifties (alternatives to "said," adverbs on "said")
☐ Single attribution per character per POV/scene
☐ Avoid tagging with redundant explanations 
☐ Beats (action in dialogue)
    ○ Do two things at once — illuminate character, reveal something
    ○ Punctuate an emotional shift

Character

☐ Each line fits character/shows character
☐ Dialect - word choice, cadence, grammar. No phonetics.

Misc

☐ Read aloud!
    ○ Read each character’s dialogue consecutively, out loud, to hear inconsistencies in voice.
☐ Avoid big soliloquies - back and forth flow
☐ Complexity - misunderstandings, indirect questions, leaving things unspoken

Details

☐ Avoid weak words - seemed, mostly, some, a little, a bit, slightly, somewhat, sort of, kind of, like, as though
☐ Avoid cliches and idioms
☐ Avoid italics and ”emphasis” quotes
☐ Avoid phrasing that draws attention to itself
☐ Avoid description in a dependent clause (accidentally simultaneous actions)
☐ Avoid repetition
☐ Use exclamation points very judiciously
☐ Use brand names judiciously
☐ Use expletives judiciously
☐ Use adjectives judiciously
☐ Replace adverbs with better verbs

Narration

☐ Bad/excessive summary or exposition.
    ○ Work in exposition along the way
    ○ Provide information at the point it becomes relevant
☐ Narration follows POV character's focus

Characters

☐ Avoid summarizing character feelings
    ○ Show through action/dialogue
    ○ Have a character react to or describe another
☐ Time spent/level of detail on character should reflect importance

Point of View

☐ Establish POV as quick as possible in a scene.
☐ Evaluate POVs
    ○ What info is necessary? Is an omniscient  perspective necessary
    ○ What perspective is most interesting?
    ○ More distance makes perspective changes less jarring
☐ Limit interior monologue

Pacing

☐ Should this feel faster or slower?
    ○ More or less description
    ○ Sentence and paragraph lengths

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers — Reference Desk #22

Bookshop.org affiliate link

Renni Browne and Dave King aren’t household names. They aren’t famous authors like Chuck Palahniuk, or Chuck Wendig, or any of your classic famous authorial Chucks. They’re editors. Their advice isn’t wild or shocking, and it doesn’t claim to make writing easy or save you the hard work. It’s just twelve fairly straightforward ideas that can be used to edit fiction and make it better. The result is one of my favorite books on writing.

This book has been on my shelf for years. I have the second edition from 2004, and the original was published a good decade before that. It’s not exactly timeless, but it’s about as close as you can get while including references to a broad swath of literature. I take it out every few years when I’m planning to do a lot of editing, which is why I recently re-read it.

Each chapter focuses on one thing: Show and Tell, Dialogue Mechanics, Interior Monologue, etc. The authors explain a few problems they look for when editing, then provide short examples from published books, workshops, and manuscripts. Each chapter finishes with a bulleted checklist that can be used for your own work. Finally, they provide a couple of exercises that you can try, if you want to use the book as a sort of self-guided class.

After the last chapter, there are two brief appendixes. The first contains the editors’ answers to the exercises. The second is a list of recommended books for writers, split out into craft, inspiration, and reference. Lastly, there is a solid index, so you can easily find that half-remembered advice without needless skimming.

This structure is something worth noting. So many books on writing are meandering or mix anecdotes, ideas, and advice in ways that make them difficult to use as tools. This book has a few anecdotes and asides, but it’s organized so that you don’t have to wade through any of that when you’re busy trying to find some specific thing that resonated. It’s worth reading the book from cover to cover, but it’s also designed in a way that allows it to be useful as a reference.

If there is a weakness in this book, it’s a focus on a modern, mainstream, “popular” writing style. The authors don’t talk much about the exceptions to the rules, or how to make strange and unusual fiction. This is not a guide that will help much if you’re writing House of Leaves, or Poison for Breakfast, or This is How You Lose the Time War.

I don’t think that’s a major failing. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers advocates for clean, concise, clear fiction. That’s a pretty good starting point for any writer. I suspect the authors would suggest that this is table stakes for fiction. If you want to do something more, something wild and crazy that breaks the rules, you will do it more effectively if you have a good grounding in the basics first. This book provides that.