Tag: editing

Have you noticed anything about many well-established authors?

Have you noticed anything about many well-established authors?

I have. And I often find it frustrating, but it’s not the author’s fault. Let’s take Kate Moreton as an example. If you’ve read her first, The House at Riverton where Grace worked as a servant for the Hartford family back in the 1920s when a suicide occurred in their mansion, I’m sure you were as riveted as I was to this mystery. Then came The Forgotten Garden that is one of my favourites of Moreton’s where a child arrives on the Australian docks unclaimed and doesn’t even know her name. A childless couple adopt her. Only some sixty years later does she try to unravel her past and work out how she ended up in Australia from England. My other favourite was Secret Keeper where Dorothy’s daughter Laurel witnesses her mother kill a man she’s never seen before, and she has no idea why.

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What to do after that first draft is done

What to do after that first draft is done

I recently completed the first draft of my fifth manuscript that’s set in India. I challenged myself to write at least a thousand words a day and planned to complete the work by Christmas. When I reached that goal, it was time to take a break—time to read more again and do some of the activities I’d set aside.

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Those favoured words

Those favoured words

Have you ever read a book where a word keeps popping up? I recently read a book that had a paragraph where three sentences began with and then. Another highly praised English author I read had me gritting my teeth at her use of began. It appeared over one hundred times in her otherwise great novel.

This kind of repetition can pull a reader out of a story, so I save lists of — words to use instead of — because it’s easy in a manuscript to repeat favoured vocabulary. I also have a short list of words I over use — that, looked, walked, relieved, for example. The list raises my awareness when I’m at the editing stage.

But opposing this suggestion is a tip I learned from author, Julie H. Ferguson about repeated words.

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