Category: memoir

Can You Be Objective About Your Own Writing?

Can You Be Objective About Your Own WritingCongratulations! A fantastic story now resides on your hard drive. You put it aside for a while (as all the writing gurus suggest) and then you come back to it for your first round of edits. Days/weeks/months later, you complete that massive task, and wow! An even more fantastic story is ready for introduction to the world.

You share it with your family and friends—and they all rave about your storytelling talent. You share it with your critique group and beta readers, and they offer some useful constructive criticism that sends you back to your computer with a renewed vision for your WIP. You toil for many more hours, tweaking this, deleting that, rewriting entire scenes and characters, and finally—thankfully—you finish.

Sorry, you aren’t quite ready to publish that masterpiece yet. In the course of all that planning, writing, and revising, you’ve lost your objectivity about your work. But never fear, because I’m here to help you!

Don’t be your own worst enemy by losing your objectivity about your writing. #writetip #editing #selfpub Click To Tweet

Let’s examine two reasons you aren’t objective about your own writing and why you need to hire an editor if you are serious about publishing your work:

1.  You are too close to your own writing.

You’ve poured your heart and soul into your work. As a serious writer, you are invested in honing your craft. Even after you self-edit, there might be issues you haven’t addressed because you aren’t aware of them. Are there holes in your arguments? Are your introduction and conclusion as strong as they can be? Are your characters three-dimensional? Is your story slow to start, or does it move too quickly? An editor will help you by identifying issues that turn a flat story into one that everyone talks about.

Author Elizabeth Hein addresses this in “Questions”:

In the process of bringing a story to fruition, the author can lose sight of what the reader needs to know when. We are inside the story trying to push it forward. The reader experiences the story one page at a time. They need to understand what is happening at that point.”

Don’t be your own worst enemy by losing your objectivity about your writing—add a professional editor to your team. You wouldn’t dream of interviewing for a job without taking a shower, brushing your teeth, and making sure your socks match; why would you consider creating your legacy as a writing professional without hiring someone to edit your manuscript for errors, omissions, and weak writing?

2.  Your mind sees what it wants to see.

Your brain has trouble realizing that “weak” is wrong when you meant “week,” or that you’ve received a “compliment,” not a “complement.” Every writer has a personal pattern of error, such as using the same word too frequently or beginning sentences with dangling modifiers, and those are errors you won’t even notice—but an editor will.

Author Alison Neale puts it this way in “Professional Editing?”:

There are thousands of self-published books out there and you want to stand out from the crowd. Editing may be an expense you don’t feel you can justify – but when it makes the difference between a handful of sales and a best seller, it’s an expense you shouldn’t avoid.”

I won’t sugarcoat this: editing isn’t cheap. Or let me rephrase that: quality editing isn’t cheap. But how much will it cost you to publish a poorly constructed story full of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors? Ask other authors for references. Check out websites, interview prospective editors on the telephone, and ask for a sample edit.

So a professional writer (that would be YOU) needs a professional freelance editor (that would be ME) to navigate those too-close-for-objectivity minefields in writing. Your expertise is writing; let me show you how my editorial expertise can help you take your writing to the next level. Contact me at cyjohnson5580@gmail.com for a no-obligation quote and sample edit today.

Happy Writing!

—Candace

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Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Related articles:

I Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Editor. Or Do I? (changeitupediting.com)

A Little Editing Makes a BIG Difference (changeitupediting.com)

Join Me on the Air

ID-10033526Through the magic of the Internet, you can hear yours truly chatting about writing and editing on Monday, April 1.

I’ll be the guest of author, personal development speaker, and radio host Raeleen Mautner, PhD, who has invited me to be her guest on The Art of Living Well. I had the privilege of editing Raeleen’s latest book, Lemons into Limoncello, which will be out on May 7 and is available now for preorder here, here, and wherever books are sold.LemonsLimoncello

The Art of Living Well is a fantastic show, and Raeleen is a seasoned professional. I, on the other hand, am more comfortable behind the scenes, so the idea of an hour-long radio interview is making me a little nervous—but I’ll do my best not to let that show. At least I don’t have to give a speech in front of a crowd . . . where I’d have to imagine the audience in their underwear (remember that old trick to overcome stage fright?).

Come to think of it, those of you on the East Coast of the US might actually be in your underwear at that time!

Seriously, we’ll be discussing aspects of writing and the editing process, so I hope you’ll tune in and listen. You can listen to a live stream from anywhere in the world. If you’re in Australia, I’ll help you go to sleep, since that will be 11pm your time. In the UK? Join me on your noon lunch hour. And if you’re anywhere else in the world, here’s a link to a time conversion site: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html.

I hope you’ll join Raeleen and me for what promises to be an entertaining and enlightening hour. See you there!

—Candace

“On Air” image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Book Publishing Is the New Wild West

Book Publishing Is the New Wild West
Book Publishing Is the New Wild West

Crowd-sourcing, royalty-sharing, publishing your book in chapters . . . Here’s a little perspective from Brooke Warner, publisher of She Writes Press and founder of Warner Coaching Inc.

Betsy Morais wrote a piece for The New Yorker called “A Book Is a Start-Up,” in which she writes about some of the new publishing business models coming out of the Tools of Change conference, three days focused on new publishing technologies and business models.

Morais writes about Tim Sanders, C.E.O. of NetMinds, a company that’s attempting to crowd-source book production. It’s an interesting model, to be sure, but one that will probably end with authors, editors, and designers feeling like they are getting screwed somewhere in the process. The reason I say this is because most books . . . read more.

 

Related articles

 

I Am So Honored!

Cindy PasqueleneImagine my surprise this morning when I found my name mentioned in a new blog post!

Cindy Pasquelene, who writes at The Writer Backblogger, was one of the winners of last week’s drawing for free editing. Cindy sent the first 1,500 words of her NaNoWriMo novel for my feedback, and . . .

See what Cindy had to say about the experience at The Writer Backblogger.

I spend some time every morning searching Twitter, blogs, and the Internet for interesting things to post on my Facebook page. If you aren’t already a fan, I hope you’ll check it out here.

My Red-Letter Day: Meeting Singer, Speaker, and Author LaDonna Gatlin

LaDonna Gatlin
Invitation to LaDonna Gatlin’s appearance

I had the most fun experience this week: I met LaDonna Gatlin, an author with whom I’ve been working since I first read her book proposal for The Song in You: Finding Your Voice, Redefining Your Life in the summer of 2011. If you had spent as much time on the telephone as LaDonna and I spent over the past eighteen months, you get to be pretty good friends . . . Continue reading “My Red-Letter Day: Meeting Singer, Speaker, and Author LaDonna Gatlin”

Beware of Snake-Oil Salesmen in the Editing Biz

In the past week I came across two websites that offer unusual editing services. Unusual isn’t bad, but in these particular cases, unusual is definitely NOT good for authors.editing

One of these companies is a membership site that proposes to save authors money on professional editing by trading editing with other members; in other words, you and another writer edit each other’s books, thereby eliminating the cost of having your manuscript professionally edited.

What’s wrong with that? Nothing, as long as you understand that the chances of having a professional edit your work are slim to none. In reality, this service is a beta-reader service, which is very useful in its own right—but let’s call it what it is. And it is no substitute for professional editing or proofreading.

How to NOT save money on professional editing costs. #writers #editing #amediting Click To Tweet

“Oh, come ON, Candace,” I can hear you say, “I’ll still get editing, plus I can save hundreds of dollars on editing costs.” Continue reading “Beware of Snake-Oil Salesmen in the Editing Biz”

Media Alert: Angela Rose and PAVE

I absolutely LOVE to share good news, especially when it concerns friends and authors—and especially friends who are authors. One of the best parts of my job as a freelance editor is meeting people through my work who then become friends, which tends to happen a lot (lucky me)! So without further ado: Continue reading “Media Alert: Angela Rose and PAVE”

Present Tense: Breathlessly Waiting to Read About What’s Already Happened

Present TenseAs an editor, I’ve made no bones about my preference for past tense in both fiction and memoir writing. And I know I’m not alone. Yet there seems to be a movement toward writing in present tense, and there have been some passionate blogs written about the past versus present debate. In a blog titled “Does (or Did) Tense Matter?” D. Thomas Minton wrote:

“Stories in the present tense feel more urgent and immediate to me—I feel like I’m there with the characters, instead of listening to the story after-the-fact, while sitting in the cozy comfort of a coffee shop.  In contrast, the temporal distance that comes with past tense removes this immediacy, but past tense is more conducive to reflection, as if the narrator has had a chance to digest what has happened to him or her prior to telling me.”

Do you find present tense engaging or off-putting? #writers #authors #writing Click To Tweet

So maybe I prefer the reflective aspect of writing? Or perhaps I’m just an old dog who doesn’t want to learn new tricks—the author of The Singularity Sucks blog suggests it’s an age thing:

Continue reading “Present Tense: Breathlessly Waiting to Read About What’s Already Happened”

The Procrastination Station

I recently had to write some copy for the back cover of a client’s book, and I avoided this writing for days. Sound familiar?

As writers we often find ourselves at the mercy of the ideas that one day flow faster than we can type, yet the next day apparently have a strong desire to hide like dust bunnies under the bed—they scatter as soon as we get close to them.

writing procrastination
Image courtesy of digitalart at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

When the latter happens, we find a million and one things to do other than write (I see you nodding!). I’ve noticed many bloggers writing recently about NOT writing—and I totally get it. Whether you dabble at writing as a hobby or you make your living this way, you’ll always have days when you reach The Procrastination Station* and just can’t get going.

(*Thanks to my good friend, Angela Rose, founder of PAVE: Promoting Awareness/Victim Empowerment for the use of this phrase. Learn more about Angela and PAVE here.)

The Procrastination Station Click To Tweet

Continue reading “The Procrastination Station”