Two years ago I quit blogging and launched an email newsletter, Writer, Editor, Helper. Now that I'm fully immersed in writing and publishing novels for children, I'm winding down the newsletter. December 2024 will be my last email, and I am no longer accepting subscribers. However, to read past newsletters, please visit the selected archive of Writer, Editor, Helper.
After 12 years of blogging and social media, I’m retiring!
But I still have things to say about writing and publishing. If you don’t want to lose touch, please join my free “Writer, Editor, Helper” email newsletter list for creative writers, beginning in early 2023. Unsubscribing will be easy, if the newsletter doesn't interest you.
“Writer, Editor, Helper” is aimed at general readers. If you’ve thought about writing a book, if you’re in the middle of writing a book, if you’re interested in how publishing and self-publishing work, you’re my reader.
I’m just now wading into indie publishing myself. It can be overwhelming at times. I’ll share what I learn—for better or for worse—and I want to hear from you, too.
My emails will be occasional, lighthearted, and informative. And they’re free! Every email will have an unsubscribe button and contact information.
I know many readers of this blog are also writers, so I hope you’ll stay on board. My newsletters will include
Helpful, hopeful news for creative writers
Self-editing tips
Opportunities to announce your new books
Answers to your questions about writing and publishing
Fun, random stuff
Things I learn the hard way as I begin self-publishing (gaah)
I realize this is a bit of a bait-and-switch. If you’re a longtime reader of the blog who decides to bail, please accept my sincere thanks—and feel free to hop back in at any time.
In the writers’ groups where I hang out online, these queries are evergreen:
How do I know if I need a copyeditor before I submit my work to an agent or editor?
How do I find a good copyeditor?
How much does copyediting cost?
The replies and comments are typically so head-spinning in their range and variety that no one could blame writers for being confused. And who can blame a writer for resisting an expense they aren’t convinced is necessary?
Earlier this year, Fiction+ considered whether a novel should have a table of contents. Although it might seem to be a matter of personal preference, there are strong practical reasons for including or not including a TOC, depending on a book’s genre and format.
Is the same thing true when deciding whether chapters should be numbered or titled? A survey of my social media turned up a number of reasons to go one way or the other, along with some strong opinions:
Careless quoting is a writing crime. Fiction or nonfiction, a writer must be scrupulous in quoting words precisely and crediting their source. Most publishing contracts hold the author liable for misrepresentations and plagiarism, but even without that legal pressure, a writer, of all people, should naturally respect the intellectual property of others.
Writers of historical fiction, memoir, creative nonfiction, and books for children often handle source materials that provide background and authenticity to their stories. Sometimes they quote from published or unpublished writings; sometimes they quote from speeches or interviews or online videos. But the way they credit their sources ranges from providing pages of detailed citations to providing—nothing.
Let’s take a closer look at the writer’s challenges and responsibilities.
Not all fictional characters are meant to be smooth-tongued and lyrical in their speech. Rather, just like us, they sometimes mumble or stumble. Giving a character flawed speech is a way to make dialogue more realistic. And this very human kind of talking often involves the use of interjections.
First-time novelists often struggle with dividing their work into chapters. A sample from my Facebook feed:
“How long should a chapter be?” “Is it okay to have this one randomly short chapter?” “Is there a standard for how long a chapter should be?” “What is considered a reasonable maximum length of a chapter?” “Is it okay to throw a long chapter in between two shorter chapters?” “Is 3,000 to 4,750 words per chapter too long for a young adult urban fantasy?”
Almost every writer I know has a love-hate relationship with their writing program, whether it’s Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, or a yellow legal pad. It’s clear there’s no single perfect choice for drafting, editing, and formatting your work for publication.
Scrivener is great for drafting but has limited formatting capabilities. Docs is great for collaborations, and it can handle basic formatting, but it lacks compatibility with professional formatting and editing tools like PerfectIt and the add-ins from the Editorium. MS Word is the publishing workhorse, more or less required for submitting to agents and editors and publishers, but it’s pricey and not always friendly.
Getting to know your word processor better will help you love it more. Here are some moves you can use in Word and Docs and sometimes Scrivener.
Exclamation points are controversial. Writers can’t be blamed if they’re confused!
Exclamation has always announced straightforward shouting, alarm, surprise, excitement, amazement, disbelief, exasperation, or even just helpless flustering. In the eighteenth century, readers could expect melodrama:
And those were some of her last words! O how my eyes overflow! Don’t wonder to see the paper so blotted! (Samuel Richardson, Pamela, 43)
Exclamation points still serve in all those ways. But somewhere in the last century, the shouty little mark fell out of fashion in literary prose. Editors today frown on excessive exclaiming even in mainstream fiction, outside of books for young children and comic books. Plenty of passages worthy of alarm make do with commas, periods, or nothing:
Although some believe that the subjunctive mood in English is dying, many of us use it all the time, whether we know it or not. And that means the subjunctive is right for fiction, even in the mouth of a character who wouldn’t know a subjunctive from a subplot.
I don’t like to dither over style choices. At the beginning of a sentence, it’s routine to start the next word with a capital letter. But when I type a colon within a sentence, I often have to stop and think about how to write the next word: whether to cap it isn’t always obvious.
The Chicago Way
As I not-so-sneakily demonstrated above, Chicago style lowercases the first word after a colon within a sentence, even if the words after the colon are themselves a grammatically complete sentence (see CMOS 6.63):
They even relied on a chronological analogy: just as the Year II had overshadowed 1789, so the October Revolution had eclipsed that of February. [full sentence after the colon]
The watch came with a choice of three bands: stainless steel, plastic, or leather. [sentence fragment after the colon]
From our own reading, most of us know that some paperback and hardcover novels have a table of contents page in the front and some don’t. Lurking online, I perceive a widespread notion that tables of contents are old-fashioned and pointless for fiction. There’s also fear that a contents page wastes valuable marketing space in online “see inside” previews, preventing readers from getting to the good stuff that will tempt them to buy.
Why then do some best-selling, award-winning novels have a table of contents, sometimes several pages long? As you’ll see, sometimes it makes sense.
One of my favorite MS Word tricks allows a novelist (or any book writer) to view and organize their chapters in the Navigation pane (an option under the View tab). Using this feature, I can see all my chapter titles at a glance, and I can go instantly to the one I want by clicking on its title. Moving a chapter to a different location is as easy as clicking and dragging it down the pane. Numbered chapters renumber themselves like magic any time I change their order.
If you ever need to add, delete, or move a chapter while you’re drafting, you can make good use of this trick.
Narrators and characters in novels and other creative writing can talk about whatever they want. A character might read the Chicago Sun-Times; they might say they like to sing “Drivers License” while brushing their teeth. A narrator might mention a famous poem or novel or TV show: “The host didn’t mention that he’d heard the same joke on The Simpsons.”*
Writers often ask how to style such titles. With italics? Quotation marks? Title caps?
Creative writers sometimes mangle grammar on purpose or get creative with punctuation. At the drafting stage, we keep a dictionary and style manual at hand. When slips are unintended, we count on our copyeditors to catch them.
But at some point, most of us get advice on punctuation or grammar from a friend, relative, or strangers on social media. Sometimes friends or beta readers read our draft and point out what they believe to be errors.
Long before a book is printed, while the text is still in manuscript form, editors at publishing houses speak in terms of word count, not page count. An appropriate word count for a project depends on the kind of book. A picture book editor might think in terms of 0–750 words. An editor acquiring young-adult fantasy novels will consider anything from about 80,000 words and up. Thrillers, graphic novels, romances—their editors all have target ranges for the length of book readers expect. There are always exceptions, of course.
Page counts, on the other hand, are for printed books. Designers and production editors use a manuscript’s word count to estimate how many pages the published book will be, taking into account how they want it to look: how large the pages will be, how much white space is wanted, whether illustrations will add to the page count, etc.
Why then, at the querying stage, are writers almost always asked to submit a set number of pages instead of a set number of words?
A piece of bossy advice often given to creative writers is to sweep through your manuscripts before you submit them and delete certain words. “Just,” “so,” “very,” and “really” vie for the top target, but the most popular prohibition of all might be of the word “that.”
What’s wrong with “that”?
Nothing is wrong with the word “that.” It’s frequently essential to the grammar or clarity of a sentence (see below). Yet we’re often told [that] it’s “unneeded.” I sense the ghosts of Strunk and White here. “Omit needless words,” they tell us, declaring (for instance) that the sentence “His story is strange” is “more vigorous” than “His story is a strange one” and therefore better.
But is vigorous always better? Do readers demand vigor at all times, from every sentence? Creative writers especially must ask, Is this character or narration meant to be vigorous?
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the great time I had brainstorming about blogging with Louise Harnby and Denise Cowle at their joyful Editing Podcast. Parts 2 and 3 are now available.
Yesterday I had a wonderful time brainstorming about blogging with Louise Harnby and Denise Cowle at their joyful Editing Podcast. In fact, we dug into so many aspects of blogging, they decided to break the chat into 3 parts.
The Editing Podcast has lots of other great posts for writers and editors. You’ll love their expertise and enthusiasm. Listen here (Blogging Tips for Editors and Authors) or through your favorite podcast app. I’ll let you know when parts 2 and 3 appear!
Recently, a question that went something like this appeared in a Facebook group for writers seeking help from book editors:
Help with this sentence please! “Some advice, for whoever/whomever is interested.” A friend said it should be “whoever” and my editor said “whomever.” How do you vote?
In the rollicking spirit of Facebook, grammar is routinely decided by ballot. The votes were all over the place. Some were based on the “feeling” of the voter. Some repeated what others had already said. There was at least one claim that the choice depends on whether you’re American or British or Australian. (It doesn’t.) And there was the requisite insult, causing an admin to throw down a caution.
Mainly, there was confusion. Not even the professional copyeditors knew for sure, although it didn’t stop them from holding forth. Two or three cited a source, evidently unaware of social-media etiquette.
