Writer, Editor, Helper

Details from a Diary: Mining a Family Treasure for Fiction

 

(Guest-posting today for Cynthia Leitich Smith at her sensation Cynsations blog!)

I never meant to write historical fiction—mostly out of laziness (all that research!), but also because of the responsibility. Since it’s fiction, we expect to take liberties with the facts. But how much liberty is too much? At what point does stretching the facts become a disservice to history, and to young readers?

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Quoting Well, Part 3: Dot Dot Dot

 

Today, in the last of a series of posts about quoting, I tackle ellipsis—that is, the omission of words, phrases, or longer passages from quotations. The best scholarly writers take care when using ellipsis. First, they use it with restraint and honesty; second, they render it clearly by means of punctuation.

Quoting Well, Part 2: When It’s OK, and Not OK, to Meddle

Part 1 of my advice on quoting covered practices widely accepted in scholarly writing. Also well accepted, but perhaps not so well understood, is that it is permissible to make certain changes in quoted text.

The suggestion of tinkering with the original text may strike writers as confusing and dangerous, since the first rule of quoting is to quote verbatim. Altering the original, we are taught, is for the lazy, devious, or even criminal. All true.

Nonetheless, there are some alterations writers and editors routinely and safely make to quotations because they serve the reader without violating the original text.