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Watch Your Dangly Bits

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Dangling participles. Sounds like an embarrassing medical condition; is actually an embarrassing editorial condition. Here I shall tell you how to identify and avoid them.

A quick refresher first of all (aka Stop! Grammar time!). This won’t take long, promise.

A participle is just a form of a verb. English uses present and past participles. Present ends in -ing; past can take various forms but -ed is the most common.

  • To go has the present participle going and the past participle gone.
  • To walk has the present participle walking, and the past participle walked. Confusingly, walked is the same for the perfect tense of the verb (I walked down the road). It’s a participle when it’s used with auxiliary verbs to form a different tense: I have walked, you might have walked, she should have walked).

You see participles all over the place but what we’re looking out for in this post is a very common construction when the subordinate clause comes before the main clause. Herewith a couple of examples of perfectly acceptable sentences. (Wrongness will be marked with an X.)

Talking animatedly, the two men walked down the street.

Having written one successful vampire book, she launched a series.

NB: a subordinate clause is one that has to be attached to a main verb because it doesn’t stand on its own. “The two men walked down the street” is a full sentence. “Talking animatedly” is not a sentence, and nor is “Having written one successful vampire book.” They don’t stand alone: they are there to tell us more about the main clause.

Let’s just flip those two examples around so we can see what’s going on here.

The two men walked down the street while talking animatedly.

She launched a vampire series, having written one successful book already.

You’ll notice I messed with the word order in the second sentence and have added words in order to make these proper-sounding sentences, but the participle is doing exactly the same work.

And what work is it doing? Well, it’s telling us about the subject of the sentence, and that applies whether the subordinate clause comes first or not.

The two men walked down the street talking animatedly.

Who is talking? The two men.

Having written one successful vampire book, she launched a series.

Who wrote the vampire book? She did.

Got that? Right. Now look at this.

X Today I am interviewing Mary Jones, author of the Fangs for the Memory series. Having written one successful vampire book, I asked her more about turning it into a series.

Who wrote the vampire book here?

Well, according to the structure of this sentence, the interviewer (the I of the sentence) did. Flip it around:

I, having written one successful vampire book, asked her more about turning it into a series.

And that is a dangling participle—one that has come adrift from the subject and verb it is meant to modify, and thus changes the meaning of the sentence.

A few more examples.

X Vikram had thirty seconds to catch his train. Running to the railway station, the keys fell unnoticed to the pavement.

Who was running? The keys, apparently.  Flipped: “The keys fell to the pavement while running to the railway station.” This obviously isn’t the intended meaning, but it is what the words say because the subordinate clause doesn’t have a “Vikram” or “he” to attach itself to. The only subject in the main clause is “keys”.

It’s very easy to see something’s wrong with this sentence if we flip it. Compare the following pairs:

Talking animatedly, the two men walked down the street.

The two men walked down the street while talking animatedly.

and

X Running to the railway station, the keys fell unnoticed to the pavement.

X The keys fell unnoticed to the pavement while running to the railway station.

This way round, it’s glaringly obvious that we’re missing Vikram was from the second sentence.

A few more examples:

X After writing the book, the editor will read it and send the author feedback.

Who’s written the book? The editor, apparently. (I wish.)

X Having abandoned his family for so long, the children no longer wished to meet their father.

Who’s the deadbeat? According to the grammar, it’s the children, even though they’re plural.

X Jogging down the canal, a swan attacked me.

I’m hoping it wore legwarmers, 80s style.

This isn’t trivial. The effect of dangling participles is awkward, confusing, often unintentionally comic. And that is bad writing.

The good news is, participles aren’t the only dangly bits! (I lied about that being good news, sorry.) Other modifiers can dangle as well.

Aged 5, Mozart wrote “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”.

X Aged 5, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” was Mozart’s first composition.

Or

Dark-eyed and curvy, she was still beautiful at 60.

X Dark-eyed and curvy, any man would find her beautiful,

These examples are just clunky. But this error can get really nasty in some circumstances. Take a look at this:

Now a consultant physician, he was astonished at how far his ex-wife had progressed in a short time.

This sentence is grammatically correct…if the man is the consultant physician. If however that’s his ex-wife’s new job, this sentence has just sent every reader down an entirely wrong path.

Let’s unpack this. The grammar gives us this meaning:

He was now a consultant physician, and was astonished at how far his ex-wife had progressed in a short time.

But the way it’s worded suggests that the more likely meaning is:

He was astonished at how far his ex-wife had progressed in a short time: she was now a consultant physician.

It is not always obvious to the reader which is correct when meaning conflicts with grammar. Try these:

X Having surrendered, the Germans occupied the Channel Islands.

Even worse is when we involve passives:

X Having invaded without serious opposition, the Channel Islands were occupied by German forces.

For the record, the Germans invaded, the Channel Islands surrendered, and the Germans occupied them. Is that what the above sentences say? (No.)

Watch out for danglers. They aren’t hard to spot: just keep an eye out when you have a subordinate clause before the main clause, and make sure that it’s attaching to the thing it’s supposed to attach to. Ask yourself who’s doing it. (Who wrote the vampire book? Who’s aged 5? Who’s the consultant physician?) Flip the sentence around if you need to check.

This construction is, frankly, avoidable. It’s very journalistic, and can often lead to top-heavy sentences which are hard to parse. Plus, present participles in subordinate clauses often lead to what editors call Simultaneous Action issues, which is another kettle of fish altogether. (“Walking into the room, he sat on the sofa.”) Isn’t writing fun?

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While there are quite a few dangly bits in my new book Band Sinister, none of them are modifiers.

“I have read some great romance books this year, but this rises to the top. Entertaining, intricately peopled, tightly plotted and simply … perfect.”–HEA USA Today on Band Sinister

All buy links here.

Cover of Unfit to Print

Stuck in the Middle: the story of a stalled project

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This is a post about the genesis, exodus, and resurrection of a book. It’s for anyone who’s ever got 20K words into a project and thought, “…oh shit”, aka most writers. Gather round.

Some time ago, I came up with an idea for a romance trilogy. It would be Victorian London and it would focus on the people who don’t normally get romance novels—not just in terms of sexuality, gender and race but also class and occupation. My working name was “The Other Victorians”, based on Steven Marcus’s landmark study of Victorian pornography. Here’s the publisher pitch.

Set in the 1870s, among the dubious, the déclassé, and the dishonest, The Other Victorians is a romance trilogy about high birth, low life, inheritance, family secrets, blackmail, betrayal, deception, murder, the love that dare not speak its name, and the love that speaks its name very clearly indeed from inside plain brown wrappers.

A pornographer ­­­­­and a left-wing lawyer join forces to investigate murder in London’s gay underworld…

A fraudulent psychic and a sceptical journalist get tangled up in the search for a deadly family secret…

And a music-hall trapeze artist becomes the unwilling heir to an earldom–if a private enquiry agent can keep him alive long enough to claim it…

The premise of book 1 was that one hero is an earl’s bastard, who works as a pornographic bookseller. The brother dies leaving a collection of dirty photos, a suspiciously large number of which depict rent boys who have been murdered. Our hero goes to a crusading lawyer he used to know, hoping to dump the problem on his lap. This sets off the romance whereby the self-righteous firebrand needs to loosen up while the self-centred bookseller has to rediscover his moral centre. Shenanigans ensue including two intertwined crime plots, and a lot of bonking. Sounds pretty good, yes?

No. Oh God no.

I hated every word I wrote including ‘and’ and ‘the’ (as Dorothy Parker nearly said). I gouged out twenty thousand miserable words by sheer bloody-mindedness, and by the point I stalled for good I was considering faking my own death.

As it happens we were at my parents’ house for half term, and my mum has a sideline as a careers coach. She sat me down for a session to talk through whatever the issue was. We made pros and cons lists for writing it. (Pro: I’ve signed a contract so I have to. Con: I hate the book, the story, the concept, and the characters.) It culminated in her telling me to visualise the book sitting on a chair opposite me and asking me to describe my relationship to it, and me saying, “I don’t have one.”

At which point, because she’s rather good at her job, my mum said, “Well, what do you want to write?” She listened patiently while I yattered about how I hated my characters because they were basically not nice people and I didn’t want to write three books about these harsh, unkind people at war, I just wanted to write someone kind, and interesting, and I’d been looking into Victorian taxidermy recently and I really fancied writing a taxidermist because, like, if you actually look into Victorian taxidermy it’s not all weirdos killing sacks of kittens to pose them like Sylvanian Families, it was a real applied art that could be done with incredible sensitivity almost as a branch of natural history. Then she looked at me in the way mums do until I said, “…so maybe I could talk to my editor about changing the synopsis?” and she said, yes, why don’t you do that. Dear.

I worked out a new story, in which our heroes were a quiet, reserved taxidermist and a gentle, kind lodging-house keeper, and I went back to the publisher and said, “You know that erotic enemies-to-lovers full of sex and violence? You’re getting a sweet story about taxidermy instead,” and to their credit the publisher blinked a bit and said, “Fine.”

I learned a bunch of stuff from this. Most importantly, I realised when I started writing version 2 that actually the trilogy wasn’t about dodgy geezers as the pitch had said, it just featured them. What it was actually about was kindness to others: that was the deep theme of all three romantic conflicts and the overarching plot, and ended up becoming the series title. (It’s now called Sins of the Cities, which refers to the sin of Sodom: “She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.”) That was an important realisation for me on a lot of levels. I have tended not to know what my books are about until they’re published, but it turns out that it’s pretty helpful if you work out what your subconscious is trying to write during rather than after the part where you type words.

So. There I was, finished the series, wrote some other stuff, left 20K of abandoned book throbbing in a file called USELESS. 20K is a lot of work and this 20k had been more than most. A year or so later, I opened it, wondering if I’d still hate it as much, and…

It was almost embarrassingly obvious. The characters weren’t bad: the problem was that I’d told them wrong. I’d focused on the angry clashing swords and shields, not the vulnerable bits they protected. But—and possibly because?—the actual big block was the whole ‘murdered rent boys’ plot. That was not a story I wanted to tell. There’s already infinitely too many stories about queer people being murdered for their sexuality or identity, and it’s not my job to add to piles of pain. I couldn’t write that story because I had no goddamn business writing that story, on a number of levels, and my subconscious knew it even if I didn’t. Thank you, lizard brain.

However. If that wasn’t the story…if I removed the macho posturing from the characters and the stuff I didn’t want to write from the plot…if I focused in on love, not hate or fear, and let the story flow from there…

Ding ding ding. I rewrote the existing 20K in two days, had the second half down in a week flat, and it’s coming out tomorrow (10 July) as Unfit to Print. There’s still the Holywell Street setting, the illegitimate earl’s son turned bookseller, the crusading lawyer, even a murder to solve–but the entire feel of the book is so different from the first draft it’s startling to me. It’s now a story about love lost and found, about rebuilding trust and letting yourself be vulnerable, about opening up rather than closing down. Turns out I work better if I’m lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness. Who knew.

What can you learn from this? Don’t ask me; do I sound like I know what I’m doing? But here are my takeaways for getting stuck on a book:

  • Take a step back and ask yourself if something’s making you uncomfortable. When I find I really don’t want to write something, there’s usually a reason.
  • Take a longer step back and ask yourself what your story is about. Not the elevator pitch (“It’s about Victorian jewel thieves”) but the deep heart (“It’s about being true to yourself and when that clashes with love”). If you can’t dig out what the deep heart of the story is, that may be your problem.
  • Play with what would happen if you flipped something. If your hero’s strength was kindness instead of kicking arse, if you gave your vulnerable heroine power…
  • Remember where it started to go wrong? You may be able to cut it back to there and take it off in another direction. If it sucked to write from the start, learn from that.
  • Sometimes you need a year to see why it’s not working. Give yourself time and space.
  • If you’re really buggered, call my mum.

This is not to say that every project that isn’t working should be dropped, or that every dropped project can be salvaged. But if you look at the twin questions of “what am I actually writing here?” and “do I actually want to be writing it?” you may find a lot becomes clear.

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Unfit to Print is a 40k novella, out 10th July.

Cover of Unfit to PrintWhen crusading lawyer Vikram Pandey sets out in search of a missing youth, his investigations take him to Holywell Street, London’s most notorious address. He expects to find a disgraceful array of sordid bookshops. He doesn’t expect one of them to be run by the long-lost friend whose disappearance and presumed death he’s been mourning for thirteen years.

Gil Lawless became a Holywell Street bookseller for his own reasons, and he’s damned if he’s going to apologise or listen to moralising from anyone. Not even Vikram; not even if the once-beloved boy has grown into a man who makes his mouth water.

Now the upright lawyer and the illicit bookseller need to work together to track down the missing boy. And on the way, they may even learn if there’s more than just memory and old affection binding them together…

All buy links here!

More on the Sins of the Cities series (aka the one with the taxidermist).

The Still Small Voice of Doom: feeling flaky about your MS

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I finished my MS the other day. I tend to edit as I go, so it was fairly clean. Everything had gone as per the synopsis. And I’d finished early. Yay! (I have four deadlines this year, I need to get on).

I told Mr KJC I’d reached The End. He said, “So have you sent it to the editor?” I said, No, I’ll send it to beta readers first. He said, “Well, have you sent it to them?” I said, Not yet. I’ll do that now.

I sent it to my beta readers. I twitched. I fretted.

Mr KJC said, “Why are you fretting?” I said, I’m not fretting.

Mr KJC said, “Why don’t just you send it to the editor, whose job it is to read your MS?” I said, I want to do some pre flight checks. Make sure the timeline’s okay. See if the readers spot anything.

Mr KJC said, “I’m pretty sure editors do that. I’ve been married to an editor for a decade, I know this.” I said, Yes, well, it’s my first book with a new publisher. I’m just being tidy.

Mr KJC said, “Are you wanting to make sure Teacher doesn’t tell you off?” I suggested he might shut up.

Then one of my beta readers texted me and said she liked it but wasn’t sure how the ending fitted the story. And I nodded and went about my business doing other things, and three days after that, I sat at my desk and said aloud, “Of course it doesn’t bloody work.”

It didn’t work. It didn’t work (since you ask) because it was making a big dramatic number out of an insufficiently significant plot strand, because it didn’t weave in the other main plot strands, because it ignored the Big Massive Existing Threat that touches on the entire cast of the whole trilogy in favour of a small localised threat that actually the heroes had already confronted successfully. It was, structurally, crap.

And I knew it.

That’s why I was finding all kinds of reasons not to do what you do with a finished MS, i.e. send it to the editor. Because it wasn’t finished, and I knew it wasn’t finished, but I had typed The End and I wanted it to be finished, and so I was ignoring the Voice.

You know the Voice. The one in your head quietly going, um, not really sure that’s…hey, aren’t you just jamming that in…what about that abandoned strand…are you sure that fits there? The one that niggles at that one little line every time you pass over it: are you just going to let this sit here? The one that is soft and mild and persistent and will not go away.

I’m not talking about the grating voice that says You can’t write books, who do you think you are? and Why aren’t you doing something better and more important, you loser? I mean the persistent little niggling wobbly-loose-tooth Voice that you don’t even really notice, except that you keep telling yourself, Sure the ending’s fine and Yeah, I can retcon it, build it up in editing and Well, it’s just a different sort of plot structure, that’s all, and That’s just a detail, tidy it up later.

The Voice talked to me a lot during the doomed first version of Magpie 3 where I ended up dumping 30K words. Hello, old friend, we meet again.

Thing is, though, the Voice knows its business. The ending was wrong, sure. But when I went over the MS and picked up the other little tiny points that the Voice had been niggling and nibbling and chewing at all along, they slotted together like jigsaw pieces to form a picture of a better ending. One that ties in the key themes to become proportionate and relevant, and which will do a hell of a lot more towards the two linked books. It’s pretty obvious this should have been the ending all along (duh), and the Voice was itching at me to see that, but I had an apparently perfectly good synopsis and a deadline, so I ignored it. More fool me.

One day I will listen to the Voice while I’m writing, rather than before I reach the end of the draft. One day. Meanwhile, the following:

  • If you’re feeling niggled at while you write, find a trusty beta reader to read the incomplete MS. That will help keep you on track and it’s always useful to have people’s thoughts on where the story is going.
  • Small pointless details that niggle at you are probably not small and pointless after all. Listen to your subconscious.
  • We all feel that this is the worst MS ever at some point. Ignore that feeling. But if you keep on thinking about/circling round/justifying something to yourself, especially if it’s specific rather than general self-doubt, you might as well face up to it now.
  • If you’re actively finding reasons not to send a finished MS off, it’s time to go hunting for the bits that made the voice say, Ummm…
  • Editors can fix this stuff. If you have an in-house editor, ask for help. If not, and you can stump up for a development editor, that’s what we do. Even if we’re not, apparently, fantastic at doing it for ourselves.

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KJ Charles is rewriting. Jackdaw is out on 17 February.

If you stop running, you fall.jackdaw small

Jonah Pastern is a magician, a liar, a windwalker, a professional thief…and for six months, he was the love of police constable Ben Spenser’s life. Until his betrayal left Ben jailed, ruined, alone, and looking for revenge.

Ben is determined to make Jonah pay. But he can’t seem to forget what they once shared, and Jonah refuses to let him. Soon Ben is entangled in Jonah’s chaotic existence all over again, and they’re running together—from the police, the justiciary, and some dangerous people with a lethal grudge against them.

Threatened on all sides by betrayals, secrets, and the laws of the land, can they find a way to live and love before the past catches up with them?

This story is set in the world of the Charm of Magpies series.

Self Editing Tips: Line edits

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As I said last week, self editing is no substitute for real editing. If you are self publishing and intend to charge for your work, you should hire a professional editor. I am well aware this can run to significant money, which most of us don’t have to spare. But a lot of the readers stumping up $5 a copy don’t have it to spare either, will resent spending it on a poorly edited or unsatisfactory read, and will be likely to review/make future buying decisions accordingly.

So it makes sense to reduce editorial costs by getting your MS into better shape before you send. I blogged previously on how to have a crack at your own development edits; now we move on to line edits. (Some of this stuff should probably have gone in the development edits blog post, but whatever, it’s here.)

Before we begin: An excellent general tip is to read your MS aloud. You will be amazed how much you’ll spot if you read it out loud–echoes, infelicities, typos, unclear sentences. It takes a while, and may require a solitary room/waiting till the kids’ bedtime, but it’s really worth it. Or, less good but still valuable, read it in a different format. Print it out, or send it to your ereader instead of reading on computer screen. That will defamiliarise the text and allow you to see things that your eyes are used to skimming over.

I have blogged on a lot of these issues before so rather than repeat myself I’ll just link where appropriate.

Speech tags

Small things, big problem. Blog post here. To summarise:

  • Don’t use thesaurus words (opined, declared, asseverated, proclaimed) when you mean ‘said’.
  • Don’t use dramatic speech verbs (snarled, snapped) if you haven’t written a snarly or snappy line. If you have, check you need the verb.
  • Don’t use non-speech verbs (nodded, hesitated, smiled) as speech verbs. I will hurt you. (Exception, as always: funny writing, eg ‘he oiled’ or ‘she oozed’. But do it consciously.)
  • Don’t overload with unnecessary speech verbs of any kind. You don’t need to tag every line and you can use action to vary the style.

‘Said’ is often called an invisible verb but it can still make its presence felt too strongly, and it is certainly worth taking out when it isn’t doing anything useful. Compare:

“Well, I hope it’s not as boring as the last luncheon,” Stephen said, snuggling down into the bed.

“Well, I hope it’s not as boring as the last luncheon.” Stephen snuggled down into the bed.

‘Said’ is useless there. However, that does not mean you should mark all dialogue with action. That’s agonising.

“I mean, look at this.” The purple-haired editor reached for her pen.

The aspiring writer drummed her fingers on the table.“What do you want me to do, use ‘she nodded’?”

“So help me God, if I see ‘nod’ as a speech verb again…” The editor’s face betrayed her rage and pain.

The writer’s foot was going to sleep. “Is it me or is this conversation taking forever?”

While I’m at it: Please make sure you know how to punctuate speech. I am appalled how many writers get this consistently wrong. It’s time-consuming for an editor to tidy up, and that’s a pure waste of your money.

“My name is Jim.” The man picked up his cup.
=>   Two sentences. First sentence ends inside the quote marks.

“My name is Jim,” the man said.
=>  One sentence. Speech ends inside quotes, sentence goes on.

And, by analogy:

“What’s your name?” The man picked up his cup.
=>   Two sentences. First sentence ends inside the quote marks.

“What’s your name?” the man asked.
=>  One sentence. Speech ends inside quotes, sentence goes on.

Pretty straightforward, but if I had a quid for every

“What’s your name?” the man picked up his cup.

“My name is Jim.” The man said.

that I’ve had to fix, I’d be writing this from a beach. Quite seriously, there are more valuable things you can pay a skilled editor to do than insert and remove capital letters.

Names and pronouns

This one is a bugbear of queer romance in particular: the Big Old Mess Of Pronouns.

pronouns

Don’t ask me for answers. Just look out for it. Remember that the reader will probably link any pronoun back to the previous noun, so if your viewpoint character is Jonah, but the last referent was Ben, Ben’s likely who the pronoun will be stuck to.

It’s tempting to use metonyms like ‘the smaller man’, ‘the blond’ etc in place of names, but this can become obvious and jarring. If doing this, make them earn their place. ‘The smaller man’ is pointless words, but if you frame it as ‘the evasive little bastard’ that gives us a flavour of the POV character’s thoughts. (Again: can easily be overdone.)

Sex scenes

People quite often seem to write these at white heat with a bottle at the elbow, resulting in heavy edits, and nobody likes getting them back full of red pen. Edit them yourself, in sobriety, or you’ll be cringing till your backbone snaps.

This is probably one for its own blog post since every scene has its own demands and every writer her own stylistic issues. Play it out in your head, though, remembering your characters’ relative height, weight and position, to double check that all the bits line up. If you’re using metaphors or euphemisms, keep them under control, and consider that if people actually want to read sex at all, they can probably cope with something a bit more plain-spoken than ‘her intimate dewy petals’.

(While I’m here, can I make a plea for physical plausibility? Limitless priaprism and receptivity in standard-issue humans is just silly, and unintentional silliness kills sexiness dead. As does the reader thinking words like ‘stinging’ and ‘tearing’ and ‘yeast infection’. Do you want your editor to leave comment boxes about this? No, I didn’t think so.)

Metaphors

Look at what your metaphors are doing and don’t pile up inconsistent ones. Thus: if you talk about a character moving with feline or snakelike grace, don’t give him ‘barked’ or ‘growled’ as a speech verb in the same paragraph. If a character has cutting wit in one line, don’t have him asking rapid-fire questions or hammering his point home in the next.

Point of view

If you are directly telling me what a character is feeling/seeing etc, you are in his POV. If you switch to another POV in the same paragraph/scene, you are head hopping, which is jarring for the reader and will cost you a lot of editorial time to fix.

pov

Never, ever, ever switch mid-para like the first example. Never.

Control switching, think about it, and preferably wait for a scene break before switching heads. This isn’t just style guide prescriptiveness. In a good scene of any kind, the reader should be immersed in the story via the POV character. When you switch POV, you jolt the reader out of the immersion, like a train switching tracks, and if you do it badly (so that the reader doesn’t realise you’ve switched heads for a few lines and the action makes no sense), that makes the transition even more distracting. It draws the reader’s attention to the fact that she’s reading a book–which is what you want her to forget.

So if you absolutely must switch POV mid-scene (think carefully about why you need to), at the very least put in a clear line break and do the switch at a significant mid-scene cliffhanger. Multiple switches in a single scene are a really bad idea. And I would be incredibly cautious about switching at all in any intense scene (sex, violence, deep dramatic emotion), when you need the reader totally immersed in the story.

More on POV here.

Repetition

A chronic problem and surprisingly hard to see until the book is published, at which point it might as well be in highlighter. Blog post here to avoid, uh, repeating myself.

Continuity

It is a very good idea to keep a list of your characters’ names, physical appearance and quirks, names of businesses/imaginary places, and all those other things. You can waste a lot of everyone’s time randoming whether your heroine’s cutesy business is the Donut Palace, the Doughnut Palace or The Doughnut Palace, or if her sister is Lucy or Lucie, and it’s always embarrassing to discover that you called two other minor characters Lucille and Lucian in the same book.

Pacing

Another one that I can’t summarise here. I will say this: if you find yourself skimming through a stretch of description or a conversation, I expect the reader will too. If your characters are wailing, “Do we have to go over this again?”, ditto. Take your own responses as a guide and see if you can trim or tighten.

Good habits

If you need to cut down editorial costs, sweat the small stuff. Get into the habit of doing things properly. Take, for example, the dash.

  • Train yourself to type an em dash/double hyphen instead of using a hyphen or spaced hyphen or whatever.
  • If you’re not sure about how to use em dashes, find a style guide, print out a list, and keep checking it till it’s second nature. Thus, part of yours might read:

Em dash for hesitation, no space “I think–regrettably–you’re right.”

Em dash with space if new sentence “I think– What’s that over there?”

Em dash outside quotes, no cap or full stop, if interrupting “I think”–he handed her a bun–“it’s teatime.”

I know this is tiresome–I’m currently training myself to use double quotes instead of my habitual single, and I resent it bitterly–but if you follow a style sheet and type things like em dashes correctly in the first place, rather than scattering inconsistently spaced hyphens around the text and needing all your broken speech tidied up, you will save editorial time, which is to say, your money.

***

This post just scratches the surface, and doesn’t go anywhere near what an edit should pick up about blocking, pace, length, unconscious prejudice (it happens), character consistency in speech and behaviour, etc etc. But if you want a professional product without breaking the bank, sorting out what you can yourself should cut down considerably on your editorial costs.

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KJ Charles is a freelance editor and Rainbow Award-winning romance writer who has made most of the above mistakes, so I know how you feel.

Self Editing Tips: Development edits

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Self editing is no substitute for real editing. End of. It is not the case that you can do it yourself (I’m an editor and I can’t do my books myself), and your friend who reads a lot isn’t qualified to do it either. If you are self publishing and want to build a reputation or charge for your work, get an editor.

That said, I’m sure you don’t have hundreds of dollars stuffed down the back of the chair, and sums like $45/hour for line edits look pretty scary with no guarantee anyone will buy your book. So it’s a good idea to cover what you can yourself before it goes to the editor, instead of paying someone to do grunt work. And if you’re planning to submit to a publisher, it’s an excellent idea to make sure your MS isn’t full of obvious holes.

So here are some ways you can start to whip your MS into shape. (Again: this is not a substitute for a professional edit.) This is a pretty big topic so I’m going to do two blog posts covering the basics. Today, development edits; look out for line edits next week. Some of this is stuff I’ve blogged on already, so I’ve given links.

Beta readers and crit partners

A strong beta reader/crit partner is invaluable. Strong means someone who likes the genre, or is happy to read in it, but who will be honest with you about the book’s flaws. This is incredibly hard to do. This person may be your friend or relative, they may be about to send you their MS, they probably don’t want to hurt your feelings. It may be easier to find a partner from across the internet, to avoid the face to face difficulty.

You must make it clear that they should be honest. That requires the following from you:

  • Actively ask for what they didn’t like, not what they did. People want to give you positives. Ask for the negatives.
  • Take criticism on the chin. Don’t argue. Don’t say ‘You didn’t get it.’ Don’t say ‘You’re wrong.’ Don’t show your inevitable hurt feelings.
  • Even if they’re wrong in specifics or have blatantly misread, they’ve probably identified a problem. Don’t just reject without thinking.
  • Thank them for their honesty, and mean it. You should.

Again: No tantrums. If you can’t handle criticism from a beta reader, you’re going to die when the reviews kick in. You might as well cut out the middleman and have a huge social media meltdown right now.

Here are some of the questions to ask your reader:

  • Were you bored/did it drag? Where?
  • Does the plot make sense? Any holes?
  • Are the characters consistent?
  • Was anyone too stupid to live, or obviously serving the needs of the plot?
  • What didn’t you get?

I gave my ‘troubled’ first version of Flight of Magpies to two readers. They both – politely, lovingly, reluctantly – said, ‘It’s boring, there’s not enough plot.’ It hurt. It hurt so much I junked 30K words and started again. It would have hurt a lot more if I’d released a substandard book and heard ‘It’s boring, there’s not enough plot,’ on every review blog, and spoiled my beloved series with a crappy instalment that I could never get rid of.

Warning: There are people who take joy in slagging off other people’s work and relish finding clever ways to explain just how bad you were. That’s what Goodreads is for, not beta reads. If the response is all hilarious similes to convey how stupid/boring/confusing that bit was, close the email right there, thank them nicely for their time, and don’t ever ask them again. And when you’re taking your turn at beta reading, don’t be that person.

Structure

It’s hard to look at your own book’s structure but here are some tips.

Write a synopsis from scratch. If you have a glaring plot hole, you may well find it here. If you’re writing all about the adventure plot and nothing about the progress of the relationship, that’s a red flag for a romance. If it’s all ‘And then…’ rather than ‘But then’, if it’s a sequence of events rather than reversals and changes, that may suggest a too-simple narrative line.

Look at your romance arc. (If you’re not writing romance, there will be a similar list of questions for any genre fiction, eg your mystery or adventure arc.)

  • Is the book about internal conflict (problems between the two MCs) or external conflict (homophobic boss/evil ex/zombie incursion) or both?
  • If internal, is there enough of a plot arc and character development to show change and the overcoming of obstacles and the growth of the characters?
  • If external, are you relying entirely on those factors to create the obstacles? Are we still seeing romantic growth and tension?
  • If you use instalove, how are you maintaining satisfactory tension between the characters throughout the book?
  • Have you got a black moment? Even in a sweet relationship comedy, the relationship should rise and fall and rise. No obstacles=no plot.
  • Ensure it’s a shifting conflict – not the same point gone over and over again till one of them gives way.

Check things are going badly. It may be kind to the characters to let them off the hook, have them discuss all their issues sensibly or make everyone around them lovingly understanding, but it makes for a pretty boring book.

Are your hero/ines agents? Are they always reactive/helpless, or do they take agency? That doesn’t mean they should always be in charge: the story should flow from the characters’ flaws and weaknesses as well as their strengths, and obstacles easily overcome aren’t interesting. But we need to see how the MCs’ actions and responses change their situation, for good or ill.

Is enough stuff happening? Pages of banter that don’t advance the plot are a great deal more entertaining for the writer than the reader. Are we moving forward along some arc in every scene, whether action or emotion?

Have you woven in your backstory rather than infodumping?

Time lines

Keep track of ‘that morning’ and ‘three days later’. If you’re doing anything remotely complicated, or if this is a bugbear, I strongly recommend you invest in Aeon Timeline ($40, which is less than the editorial fee for unbuggering your dog’s breakfast of a timeline) or similar software. This allows you to track your timeline, check that it really is a Wednesday, and get character ages and ‘two months ago’ right every time.

Make sure that days have 24 hours and come one after another in chronological progression. Some real examples I have seen/perpetrated:

  • A dramatic ghost hunting scene taking place in the morning includes references to the dark and the moon because, you know, scary things happen at night.
  • All the action is happening on successive nights. The days somehow evaporate.
  • The heroine leaves work on a Saturday night and flees through a busy crowd of commuters heading to work the next morning which is, er, Sunday.
  • Our heroes cover 25 miles on foot between 7am and 10am.
  • Book set in England. Hero is jailed in February. He is released six months later and weeps at the daffodils in bloom, as well he might. (I can’t tell you how often this happens. CHECK. YOUR. FLOWERS.)

Read scenes for action

This is almost impossible to do yourself, because you know what ought to be happening. Try to play the scene as a film in your head.

  • See the hero get out of bed naked, have a screaming row with the heroine, and storm off to ride away on his motorbike without actually dressing!
  • Gasp as the heroine gets up three times without sitting down once!
  • Marvel as the villain stubs out a cigarette she never lit, then lights another one which she never smokes or stubs out before lighting the third!

Sex

Are the sex scenes serving the plot? Does each advance character development, our or their understanding, the emotional progress, or the plot action? If the sex scene doesn’t take us somewhere new, it’s porn, and it’s skippable. Yes, this applies even if you’re writing erotica. In a good book, each one should count.

Don’t place heat over character consistency. There is no point writing a shy, repressed virgin with a touch phobia and then having him bottom like a porn star first time.

Run the mental film to ensure limbs/orifices are in the right places. If his tongue is there, he’s going to require a spine made of Silly Putty to get his genitalia there. And how many hands is that?

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This is only really scratching the surface of what a good development edit can do. You will almost certainly not be able to identify the bits where, eg, the story comes to a dead stop because of the brilliantly witty but pointless conversation between two beloved secondary characters, or you totally missed an obvious course of action that destroys your carefully worked out plot, or your carefully laid clues turn out to be undetectably obscure/glaringly obvious, or two scenes are simply in the wrong order for the emotional arc. This is why you need an editor. But she’ll have a chance to see the wood for the trees, and more cheaply, if you clear the undergrowth first.

Next week: some hints on clearing up for line edits.

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KJ Charles is a writer and, no kidding, freelance editor. Will beat hell out of your MS for $$.