Karen & the babes. Critical Charlize. 20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Makes. I’ve edited a monthly magazine for more than six years, and it’s a job that’s come with more frustration than reward. If there’s one thing I am grateful for — and it sure isn’t the pay — it’s that my work has allowed endless time to hone my craft to Louis Skolnick levels of grammar geekery. As someone who slings red ink for a living, let me tell you: grammar is an ultra-micro component in the larger picture; it lies somewhere in the final steps of the editing trail; and as such it’s an overrated quasi-irrelevancy in the creative process, perpetuated into importance primarily by bitter nerds who accumulate tweed jackets and crippling inferiority complexes. But experience has also taught me that readers, for better or worse, will approach your work with a jaundiced eye and an itch to judge.
While your grammar shouldn’t be a reflection of your creative powers or writing abilities, let’s face it — it usually is. Who and Whom This one opens a big can of worms. Which and That Lay and Lie Moot Nor. Writing 101: Revising a Novel. By Valerie Comer Copyright © 2009 by Valerie Comer, All Rights Reserved You wrote an entire first draft! Congratulations! Whether or not you ever sell this or any other novel, you are light years ahead of the millions of people who say they will write a book some day. It is a huge accomplishment to get to The End. You may be very disappointed in the execution of your novel.
There are two schools of thought on when you should start the revision process. Some say you should allow a cooling off process where you do something completely different, such as plan another novel or revise one that you've previously written. Others say it's a good idea to go back through right away and fix the things you already know need fixing, such as adding in mention of that character in chapters two and five so her arrival in chapter twelve doesn't come out of the blue. Purchase a spiral bound notebook (the 5.5x9 inch size is good) for making notes whether or not you have a print-out. Think about the scene. Revising Your Novel: Read What You’ve Written. Cliche Finder. Editing Recipe. Junkfoodmonkey's Editing Recipe "Take one raw first draft...
" You've written the first draft of a long story or novel, maybe as part of NaNoWriMo, or maybe as a year long slog. It doesn't matter, it's done. And it's a first draft, which means it's probably a bit crap and needs a lot of work. Don't worry! You gave it time to let it settle; long enough to get emotional distance from it and forget some of the details.
But now at last it's time to start the editing. Ingredients 1 first draft Writing materials Time Patience Caffeine (optional.) Method Print it out. Read the whole thing, as if you were a reader coming to it fresh. if possible, try to read the whole thing in a day, to get a view of the whole story. Make a big list of all the scenes in the story. This is like a skeleton of your story. Look at your Real Outline and think about the scenes. Some you might decide you want to cut. Eventually you'll have a new story skeleton. Finally you're going back to the text! Open the draft up. How to rewrite. I get a lot of beginning writers asking me how to rewrite. This post is aimed squarely at them: the ones who are unsure how to fix a story they have written from beginning to end. Which is my way of saying that any experienced writer is going to find what I am about to say obvious, boring, and un-useful. You folks should go read Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing or, you know, get back to work.
(It’s also a really LONG post. Hence the cut.) “How can I learn to rewrite?” The answer, of course, is practice. But how useful is that to the person who writes all the time but doesn’t seem to be getting any better? It’s almost impossible to improve your rewriting skills without doing lots of rewriting. How do you learn? Most people need to be taught. I didn’t learn to rewrite until I started to have my work critiqued regularly by people who knew what they were talking about.
I remember my first real critique. I was blind; other people had to teach me how to see. Very few people learn to rewrite alone.