Category: The Red Pen: Five-Minute Easy Edits
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The Red Pen: a Dash of Dashes
Dashes are sexy. Okay, maybe not sexy like Chris Hemsworth or a new pair of heels. But among punctuation marks, it’s the only one that leaves me a little breathless. Exclamation points are so obvious, semi-colons are pretentious, question marks too coy—oh, but the possibilities conveyed in that hot little horizontal pause! It’s enough to […]
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The Red Pen: Word crimes
You’re a writer, which means you’ve probably achieved a certain level of grammatical smugness—enough to muster a Dowager Countess of Grantham-worthy eyeroll at a misused their/there/they’re in a sign, or at a colleague saying supposably instead of supposedly, at any rate. But there are some words that have even the most precise of us googling. […]
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The Red Pen: Comma Chameleon
Perhaps no single keystroke has incited such violence of emotion as the Oxford comma. Also called the serial comma, it’s more or less grammatically optional in America—but don’t let our noncommittal adoption of the mark fool you. The Oxford comma has become something of a pop culture icon. It appears on t-shirts, drinking glasses, infant […]
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The Red Pen: Deep Thoughts Edition
Inner speech, interior monologue, musings—a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and there are plenty of names to describe the process of getting inside your character’s head. But what do you do once you’re there?—and how can you bring your reader with you? Read on for thoughts on…well, thoughts. First, let’s lay […]
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The Red Pen: Save Yourself from Seven Deadly Writing Sins
Okay, bear with me. Here’s a first draft: FIRST DRAFT: She was clearly dolefully miserable. “How . . . how . . . how could you?” she sputtered out in a voice that was icy with shock and rage. He sank down into the couch and rubbed his temple, framed by thick, salt and pepper […]
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The Red Pen: Meter Mishaps
Congrats! You passed Meter 101 in my last post and you’re ready to move into master class territory. Today we’ll look at two common metrical problems in drafting children’s books: forced emphasis and over-consistency (yes, there is such a thing). METER MISHAP #1: EMPHASIS I remember watching my then three-year-old daughter do a puzzle. The […]
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The Red Pen: Meter Matters!
Children’s books are deceptively easy. On the surface, the formula seems tried (or is it trite?) and true: a lovable character, a plot thinner than a fruit roll-up, a handful of sing-song nonsense words and a rhyming dictionary are all you need, right? If only! Let’s face it—if writing good kid lit really was that […]
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The Red Pen: December is for editing.
Ready, set . . . edit. It’s December, and NaNoWriMo 2018 is history. Forgoing Netflix binges and holiday preparations alike, your retinas are seared by long nights of blinking cursors and you have emerged triumphant (if exhausted) 50,000 words later. A newbie novelist might be ready to slap a cover on that mess and CreateSpace […]
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The Red Pen: NaNoWriMo & Editing? Blasphemy! (Or not. Keep reading.)
I know what you’re thinking. This is NaNoWriMo! There’s no editing in NaNoWriMo! And you’re right. The whole point of it is to produce a 50,000 word manuscript in a month. That’s about 1,600 words a day, and nobody said they had to be great words. Or punctuated words. Or even grammatically correct words. That […]
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A Matter of Perspective: POV, part II
“When I’m writing from a character’s viewpoint,” says Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, “in essence I become that character; I share their thoughts, I see the world through their eyes and try to feel everything they feel.” Determining which viewpoint to take in your story makes all the difference. Need to shake up […]
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