This is such a simple thing, especially in comparison to many other editing skills. Weighing adjectives and adverbs, replacing weak verbs with stronger ones–all this takes real effort and a certain amount of experience. But this one is easy. Just…
Blog Archives
The Nod and Smile Editing Passes
A reasonably common piece of advice is to be careful not to overuse the words nod and smile. Beats are a lovely alternative to dialogue tags, but we can’t go to the obvious wells too often. I knew this. I’d…
The Magic of the Read-Aloud Pass–and the Following One
You’ve probably read this before, but let me chime in. Reading your work aloud is incredible. Writing that I would’ve sworn was as good as I could make it went through far more minor surgery than I would have ever…
One Line Wednesday Reflections
I joined in One Line Wednesday on Twitter for the first time in quite a while last week. But perhaps because of the break, I was really struck by the value of it. Not so much for the marketing value,…
Tagged with: 1lineWed, Cathleen Townsend, editing, One line Wednesday, social media, Twitter
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Interview with Gail Dore
Our guest this week is a pal of mine from Absolute Write. We hang out together at Grandma Susie’s (it’s a whole story by itself), and she’s a lot of fun to trade banter with. She’s also a trade-published author…
Trying to Pick and Choose
I’ve spent the past year trying to learn what to do to become a real, no-kidding professional writer. I started with learning about queries. They were like the gateway drug to this whole process. My first query took forever. Okay,…
Editor’s List of Common Mistakes
I found these tips here at AbsoluteWrite, an online writing group that was a great help to me in dealing with the horrible helpless feeling over having no idea how to edit my books. This list was the very first…
Cathleen Townsend 