Editing Archives - Page 3 of 9

Holiday Gift Ideas For Writers

I am stealing this post idea directly from Sierra Godfrey, who says other bloggers have written similar posts, so I guess I’m not the only one stealing post ideas.

BOOKS

Chicago Manual of Style, Sixteenth Edition

Although Sierra already mentioned this one, I’d be a bad editor if I didn’t suggest the […]

A Room Of One’s Own

If you studied English in college, you probably read Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room Of One’s Own in which she states: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” I won’t go into the figurative and feminist meanings of the text, and I’m opening this question […]

The Editing Hour: Save The Em-Dash!

I bet you had no idea the em-dash was endangered, did you? Well, when Julia Scheeres commented on my post about semicolons that she loves to use em-dashes as well, I remembered having read a tweet that said the em-dash had gone out of vogue with flared jeans and peasant shirts. I was shocked. So […]

The Editing Hour: The Semicolon revisited

A quick note about semicolons. I’ve blogged about them before: how to use them to connect two independent clauses and alternatives you can use instead: a period and a capital or a comma and a coordinating conjunction, or FANBOYS. But what I didn’t say was use them sparingly. It’s tempting when you learn a new […]

Five Ways to Murder Your Loved Ones

If you’ve been writing for a while, you’ve probably heard the expression, “Kill your darlings.” (The real expression is “Murder your darlings” and comes from Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch’s “On The Art of Writing”: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscripts […]

Self-Imposed Writer’s Retreat

I’m going on a writer’s retreat this weekend. Note that “writer” is singular because I’ll be the only writer on the retreat. We have a little house in the woods up north, and I’ve never been up there alone, but this weekend I’m going for four whole days to do nothing but write (and maybe […]

The Editing Hour: Creative vs Academic Writing

When editing and critiquing submissions, the academic in me wants to copyedit every sentence until it’s grammatically and typographically perfect. That means, if I’m following the Chicago Manual of Style, I may want to add a comma before “and” in a series: “I love ice cream, cake, and pies.” Or I may want to make […]

What is your writing process?

My last post got me thinking about different ways to begin a project. When I’m advising new writers on how to begin a memoir, I tell them to think of an event and just sit down and write it as a scene (or in essay form if they aren’t ready yet to write scenes). Then […]

Are you a slow writer or a fast writer?

I’m continually amazed by stories like Tawna Fenske’s who “In the last eight years [has] written nine full manuscripts and six partials.” Whoa! In the last eight years I have written exactly ONE memoir and revised the hell out of it and still haven’t finished it. Sure, I earned an MFA, got married, and had […]

Memoir Monday: Narrator, Character: The Two “Yous”

Today we have a guest post from Rachel Howard, author of the memoir The Lost Night: A Daughter’s Search for the Truth of Her Father’s Murder, described as “enthralling” by the New York Times. Her personal essays have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and O, the Oprah Magazine. Her advice is quoted extensively in […]

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