Continuing Education: Stellar Cartography

"If the map doesn't agree with the ground, the map is wrong."—Gordon Livingston

Kari Donald, A4A Member

Back again for some more Continuing Education. According to an old saying, “A picture says a thousand words,” which is likely the reason for the popularity of “the world map” in most fantasy or speculative fiction novels. Today, we’ll be looking at why your map is important and how it can create continuity issues in your book.  

How can a map cause continuity issues?

Your map, should you choose to draw it, gives the reader a window into your world and provides a sense of situational awareness. 

What types of physical features or landmarks make up the world? How close or far apart are the major cities? What are the relative sizes and locations of other kingdoms or countries? Where are the major obstacles your characters may face? These are only a few of the questions your map can help answer, and often much more easily than your narrative could. 

In other words, your map can also tell a story; so the story of your map needs to match the story in your book. Remember, we want to make sure your novel is free of anachronisms, errors, or anything else that could distract your reader. Some readers will reference your map while they are reading, so if descriptions in the prose don’t match the image, you may lose credibility points. Potential sources of discrepancy could include the scaling, layout, and geography of the map.

Do I seriously need to draw my map to an exact scale?

Absolutely NOT! There are many styles of maps with cities and other features represented by images that are larger on the map than the space they would actually occupy if they were drawn to scale. However, you do want to make sure that the space between features reflects a realistic distance as described in your story. 

For example, unless you are driving from downtown Los Angeles to Las Vegas (or something similar), it should not take two hours to travel the first quarter of the journey and then only three hours to travel the remaining distance. Anyone looking at a map of southern California can easily see how traffic congestion affects travel time. 

When considering the scale of your map, it should not take your characters a week to travel halfway across the open realm and then just two more days to travel the other half without an explanation. Likewise, it should take your characters longer to travel that two inches through the mountain range than it does to cover the same distance when crossing the plains. Rough terrain, inclement weather, mode of transportation, distressed dudes needing help, or your world’s equivalent of the dreaded orange barrel complete with detour sign could all be factors affecting travel time. So long as either a feature on your map or the narrative in your story justifies any oddity while tracking the progress of your characters, it doesn’t need to be exact, just close enough to avoid distractions.

In a similar way, placement and area of other regions in your world need to be fairly accurate. You don’t want to plan on sending reinforcements to your southern border to prevent an incursion of rogue elves if they hail from the Kingdom of the Great White North. Readers may scratch their heads if the (so described) tiny and insignificant country of Iota Minor takes up half the map. This is a case where size matters.

You mentioned geography can cause problems.

Thanks for the reminder! 

Geography is probably the most fundamental component of your map. It involves more than just physical features as it also dictates human elements such as culture, industry, and population centers. There are immutable elements of geography to account for when creating your world. 

For instance, unless your world is like the top of a hoverboard and can rotate or tip at different angles, water will only travel in one direction—down hill. A river that starts in your northern mountains and flows to your southern sea may be drawn perfectly, following the contour of the land and providing a means of transportation. However, your heros will not be able to “float downstream” on this river as they journey north. Both “float” and “downstream” would be problematic in this scenario. “Float” would mean your vessel is drifting along with the flow of the river. Downstream is with the direction the river is flowing. Traveling north on this river would be going against the current (upstream, not downstream) and would preclude being able to float. 

While magic can help you out of such situations, it should not be used as a crutch for poor planning or inadequate world building. There are lots of resources available to help with creating your map. Some even get incredibly detailed and look at things like prevailing winds and weather. For the important map basics, I suggest checking out the great blog post at Mythcreants. 

Another reason geography is so important is that it can literally dictate the direction of your story. Once your map is in place, the features and layout may limit how events unfold in your book. This could be significant if you’re beginning a new series. Plan ahead to avoid writing yourself into a corner, either figuratively or physically. 

Does that mean I can’t draw my map until I plan my entire series?

Not at all. There are a couple of things you can do to avoid continuity issues with your map. You could take a minimalist or “need to know” approach. Only include the part of your world where the story actually takes place. You can add arrows pointing toward the edge of your map with labels for the names of neighboring lands. Give the reader enough information for a sense of direction as they follow your narrative while still giving you flexibility for future installments. Your map can expand as your series grows.

If you already have a good idea of the major events in your series, then go ahead and map your entire world. Just keep a copy of your map in front of you while writing and reference it. Checking your map as you write helps maintain consistent descriptions and accounts of travel time, scenery, resources, and any other things that can influence your plot. The sooner you catch anything that could be problematic, the less work it will take later to fix it.

That’s all for this week. Check back next blog for the Space Time Continuum. Until then, happy drawing and writing.  

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Continuing Education: Location, Location, Location

Sense of Direction: Not just for your characters

Kari Donald, A4A Member

Time for more Continuing Education (our series on Continuity editing...get it?) As authors, whether writing speculative fiction, historical fiction, or something in between, you select locations to provide the best settings for your story. Today, we’re looking at why scrutinizing location as part of a continuity check is so important. 

What does location have to do with Continuity?

So why is location so important? It influences the setting and scene descriptions in your story, plus it impacts the plausibility of events. Remember, during our Continuity edit, we look for things that are out of place or could be distracting to the reader. There are many ways your location can cause a Continuity issue, either by itself or when it integrates into one of the other elements of Continuity. Today, we’ll dive deep into the ways that settings and descriptions (that innate sense of direction all writers have...or not) can make or break your story.

How can using an actual place cause a continuity problem?

Using an actual place puts an additional burden on your narrative since accuracy is a must. Some of your readers may be familiar with your chosen locale. For example, an account of someone that drives their car all the way to the Statue of Liberty will immediately surprise any reader who’s actually visited the landmark and knows the only way to get there is by taking a boat.

Not only can mistakes ruin your credibility, but there isn’t much that will distract a reader faster than the wrong name or detail of a known area. It can be as simple as using “Avenue” instead of “Street,” going the wrong way down a one way street, or having the sidewalk on the wrong side of the road. Add in things like transportation with stops, descriptions of buildings with their surroundings, and events with time of day or seasonal references, and the possibility for errors or misrepresentations becomes endless. Taking these details into account can be a daunting task and probably contributes to the misplaced advice “write what you know.”     

In the words of Roger from Rent, “Zoom in on my empty wallet.”

No problem! Can’t stop by the Live Cafe in person? Writers today have the advantage of a number of tools at their disposal. Google Maps is an invaluable resource for researching locations since you can quite literally immerse yourself in your desired setting. Photo spheres  and street view allow you to take a tour at ground level and see buildings, roads, landmarks, and shops, among many other things. Just be sure to check the date for when the picture was taken. If the photo is dated, some things may have changed, like businesses or the surrounding area. You’ll want to make sure Stuart’s Comic Shop is still open before using it into your story. 

Not only that, but the time of day or year may not match the timeline in your story, so elements like lighting, traffic, and foliage may not be the same. The bottom line here (which is a common theme throughout the Continuity edit) is don’t make assumptions about elements or topics outside your area of expertise. A few minutes of research is worth the investment and often saves lots of editing time later.   

I am using my own world, so I don’t have to worry about location.

If only it were that easy. 

One of the advantages of speculative fiction is that you can create your own world. One of the disadvantages of speculative fiction is that you can create your own world. 

If your location is loosely based on our world, then modeling it after a real place is helpful as all of the details have been worked out naturally. You won’t have to worry about accidentally setting up contradictory situations like a polar ice cap next to an arid desert or a citrus tree growing on top of an alpine mountain. It might work in your favorite video game, but those environments are created to keep a gamer engaged rather than a reader. For example, the fifteen square miles that Skyrim would occupy on our planet makes it easy for a gamer to be a world traveler but is hardly representative of a realistic location. 

It is just as important for world builders to take advantage of the internet to research elements that work for your chosen location. UCB has a pretty good introduction on biomes to get you started.

But my world is totally made up!

Awesome! Some of the most popular series are from made up worlds. You don’t have to be a flat earther to appreciate or accept the plausibility that a story can happen on a flat disc carried about the universe on the back of a turtle (thanks Terry Pratchet). 

The authenticity of characters or situations may be more important, as the focus on them allows readers to lose themselves in your story despite any unrealistic worldbuilding. You just need to put some thought into your location and work out a few details for viability and sustainability. You don’t even need to reveal these details in your narrative, just make sure there is nothing about your location that has contradicting elements or prevents readers from using their imaginations to fill in the blanks. You might have a hard sell that your barren wasteland location can support an abundance of livestock or lush vegetation. 

I am trying to avoid a cliché from a superhero movie about power and responsibility, but you get the idea. Just take into account how the location of the story will fit into your world while you are busy creating. 

Check back next time for some more Continuity tips. Up next: Stellar Cartography.  

 

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Continuing Education: A look at Continuity Editing

Not just another blog about editing!

Kari Donald, A4A Member

There’s a reason “edit” is a four-letter word. For some authors, it’s the least exciting part of the writing process, but one of the most important steps for improving your manuscript. Editing is so essential there are numerous blogs providing helpful hints about the different types, such as structural, developmental, line, copy, and of course, proofreading. For this, however, let’s look at one very specific part of editing: the continuity edit. 

What is continuity editing?

Continuity is often grouped in with copy-editing. However, I personally think every work can benefit from an editing pass dedicated to looking only for continuity issues. This edit is one where you’re looking at the details in your story and making sure they make sense in the real world. Filmmakers do something similar where they pay people to sit on set and do nothing but observe scene set-ups, watching for things like putting a glass of wine in a different place during a retake, seating characters in the same chairs after a break, and other similar details. Continuity edits on your manuscript are very similar: you’re checking for misplaced, out of order, or other anachronisms and inconsistencies. 

Why is continuity editing so important?

As with any edit, a continuity edit helps to remove potential sources of distraction and make the story the best it can be. It goes beyond basic writing mechanics and structure. We want the reader to stay immersed in your narrative and not wonder why someone that sat down next to the fireplace is suddenly giving an answer from their position standing next to the window. A continuity check also helps maintain the credibility of your story. Try to tell me your character recently visited Philadelphia to see the Liberty Bell in Independence Hall and I will cry “Shenanigans!” The Liberty Bell hasn’t been in Independence Hall since 2003. (Or 1976 if you count the time spent in a pavilion next to Independence Hall; I’m all about accuracy; just ask any author whose book I have edited.) The last thing we want to have happen is your book ending up on the literary equivalent of Cinema Sins.

But I carefully planned my book; there shouldn’t be continuity issues

It doesn’t matter if you are a plotter or a pantser. I have done continuity reads on manuscripts from both styles of writing (and those in between), and there is no difference when it comes to the number or types of errors that I find. In my experience, the biggest influencer on continuity issues is previous edits. The developmental edit can be brutal to even the best-laid plans. Adding, deleting, or changing scenes and events in your story can cause problems like eating supper before breakfast, having Monday follow Wednesday, or watching the sun set twice at the end of the day (and no, your world is not Tatooine). You might think it was just a small change, but it can cause a ripple effect throughout the rest of your book. The bottom line: you need to check your book for continuity issues at least once after you’re done with major edits.

I’ve gone through my book several times and I don’t see any continuity problems.

That’s great! But as the author, you’re very close to your story and you know it inside and out. I’m certain that if you were to rewrite one of Gordon Ramsay’s recipes so that it was missing some ingredients or steps, give it to Gordon, and then tell him to execute the recipe you gave him, he would still make the dish the same way he always has (and not just because he would “bloody well do it the right way”). He’s so familiar with the recipe that his brain just doesn’t notice the missing or different parts of the written recipe. When checking your book for continuity, your brain will do the same thing. Since you know what’s supposed to happen, you can miss holes, incorrect details or conflicting events. Because of this, try to find fresh eyes, someone that hasn’t read your manuscript yet, to do your continuity edit. Your person of choice should be someone that is very logical and detail-oriented. However, that doesn’t mean that you are off the hook for trying to look for them yourself, especially during revisions and edits.

Okay, so what should I look for during a continuity edit?

Glad you asked! There are a plethora of factors to look for when checking a manuscript for continuity. Since it would be impossible to cover them all in a single blog (I tried), we’re going to present a series of blogs dedicated to continuity. Each one will do a deep dive on a particular topic as well as provide hints, tips, and resources to help find and resolve continuity issues. So check back for these in-depth continuity topics, and happy writing!

Join us next week for an interview with A4A author Karen Heenan, and in two weeks for our next continuity blog on location.

 

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Editing: Keeping Track of Characters

Wait, didn’t she have blue eyes?

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

I wanted to keep this for the last post because this is a little bit different—it’s more preemptive. Keeping track of your characters will help you edit when it comes down to it, yes, but it will also help you from making the mistakes in the first place. 

The characters in general

Thanks to our illustrious founder Brandi Spencer, I have an information tracker for all of my characters. There is so much information in there that it can sometimes be a little overwhelming, but it’s been invaluable for making sure that I don’t forget names of minor characters or physical features of some of the more frequent characters. 

So what should you keep track of in this section?

Your columns

A lot of times this is information that you as the author will feel very obvious and unnecessary to write down, but let me tell you, you’ll be happy you did if you ever take a sabbatical from your WIP to start another one, or because life gets hectic. And right now, life is very easy to become hectic thanks to the pandemic. So, your very basics should at least be:

• Names—first, last, and nickname

• Birthplace—either their country of origin or city of origin, or both

• Description—this will be their relation to the protagonist(s)

For me, I added a few extra bits of information because I’m keeping track of characters across a series of six books and otherwise, I might forget when the characters appear. These are the extras that I need a little help remembering sometimes:

• Titles—this is both for the military titles and noble titles, and when they change in the series

• Books in which they first appear

Physical appearance

My absolute favorite example to give of why it’s important to keep track of physical features both for yourself—and to hopefully share with your editors or publishers to ensure a cohesive picture—and your readers is from Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series with Dell Publishing. Her main character Claire (Beauchamp Randall) Fraser is very well reported to have whiskey-colored eyes (light brown), but in one of the books her eye color was definitely not the correct one. With this information readily at your fingertips, it will be easier to avoid small mistakes like that. 

I will note, very strongly, that everyone makes mistakes, whether you're self published, published with a small press, or a large publishing company, and these mistakes should not be villainized. Authors and editors alike are human, and there’s only so much you can catch. 

Your columns

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m bad at writing character descriptions and leave them as scant as I can get away with. Unfortunately, you need to know the basics of what your characters look like aside from, “She’s pretty and has brown hair.” So what do you need to look for? Here is what I’ve got to help me keep track of my characters physical appearance:

• Skin

• Hair color, texture, and style

• Eye color

• Mouth

• Nose

• Height

• Build

• Distinguishing features

• Corresponding actor—for those of you who are like me, you might need some visual aids to help you fill out your information or visualize facial expressions on a similar face

Personality Traits

This, I find, is one of the hardest to nail down as an author because a lot of times I want to keep track of characters in “good” and “bad” columns, but that’s just not how the world works in real life, and it’s now how your world should work in your books. Every person has positive and negative traits, and sometimes the positive traits that your characters have are actually negative because of their motivations. These are all the things that make well-rounded characters to make a richer world for your readers. 

Positive

The positive traits are almost always the easiest to come up with because we like to see the good in people. We’re breaking this down into a couple of categories. For your positive traits, you want to look at four things: moral, achievement, interactive, and identity. You might be looking at that list and say, “What in the heck does that mean?” Don’t worry, I’ll give a brief description of each. 

Moral is what influences the mortality of the character, like their loyalty and honesty. Achievement is the characteristic(s) that helps the characters reach their goals, like their adventurous nature, boldness, or curiosity. Interactive is how your characters interact with the other characters in the book, like being flirtatious or courteous. And finally, identity is how the characters truly identify with themselves, like being passionate about things or imaginative.

Negative

For the negative, there’s a little bit less to examine. You want to look at the character’s core flaws and their lesser flaws. There’s also the motivation behind the character’s actions, and you can tie that into both the positive and the negative traits, but I want to tie it mostly into the negative traits because often times we have more motivation for our negative traits than our positive ones, and sometimes our positive traits have negative motivations...which in turn makes them more negative than positive. So what would your core flaw and lesser flaws look like?

Your core flaw is the heart of the matter that will help influence your lesser flaws, like being manipulative and greedy. With these flaws, your lesser flaws would slide into being controlling and inflexible. Things are going to be the way that character wants, no matter what they have to do to get it. 

Now, this is where I think tying the motivations in the negative trait is a lot more useful to understanding the character compared to the positive traits. Let’s take the negative traits listed above and explore some internal and external motivations for why your character is the way they are. Greedy and manipulative could stem from growing up in poverty and wanting to better themselves by any means necessary, such as manipulating others and hoarding wealth so as not to lose it.

If all this sounds great, you can download a blank copy here.

Join us in two weeks when we start a series on another branch of editing: Continuity. 

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Editing: Cutting the Fat

Snip, snip, snip.

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

Ironically, I already cut the fat from this blog series. Originally instead of the three posts, there were going to be four, one of which covered unnecessary words and phrases. You’ll notice that it’s one of the sections in this blog post. Cutting the fat doesn’t necessarily mean you have to get rid of everything, but that you must trim it down to be more purposeful.

Kill Your Darlings

In our Misused Writing Advice series last year, we had a post about this you can read here. As you’ll read in the post, killing your darlings isn’t about killing off your characters. (Though you might need to do that too.) These are the scenes or large sections that don’t add to the plot or character development, no matter how much fun you had writing them. They will weigh down your novel and make it more difficult for your reader to get through your work. 

One really good example of this is getting attached to a chapter in another character’s POV that could be easily summarized in a paragraph. Let’s call these Character A and Character B. Character A has the main POV through the book, but Character B has a chapter where they witness some important information happening. It’s great that we have the information, but because the reader and Character A only need that bit of info to move the plot forward, we don’t need to have a 3,000 to 4,000 word chapter to give a paragraph’s worth of retelling.

Like in the dialogue post, each scene and bit of information must have a point. It absolutely must push the plot forward toward the conclusion of the book or the series. There might be some bits that you can recycle that would be better in smaller chunks or even in another book, and please, by all means, do it. 

Just don’t be afraid to take out the knife and slice away because you’re too attached to a scene. 

Get Rid of the Clone Army

No one likes killing characters, except maybe George R. R. Martin because he subsists on his readers’ tears. In this section, however, I’m not talking about killing off characters that drive the plot forward or give your protagonist a driving point, motivation, or affects their character arc. I’m talking about the characters, or the Clone Army, that just in general don’t need to be there because they’re redundant, don’t drive the plot forward, or really make any difference whatsoever to your protagonist, or even antagonist. 

Your first thought might be going to the “sexy lamp test” that was proposed by comic book writer and editor Kelly Sue DeConnick, but those characters are better served by developing their characters rather than taking them out. If you haven’t heard of this test, Sexy Lamps are usually female characters who do nothing to affect the story by their actions and could be replaced by an inanimate object with changing the plot.

A great example of this is right in one of our founder’s own works. In book two, Kiss of Destiny by Brandi Spencer, she combined the roles of the captain of the guard and the prison warden into a single character because one was redundant and didn’t need to be there when the second character could do the job of both without feeling the loss of either one. 

Another example is when you’ve got a character that shows up only for a scene or two that doesn’t play a role in later books in your series disseminating information but there’s a way for an established character that does affect the plot to give this information instead, get rid of the dead weight.

Unnecessary words

Remember that recycling I talked about in the first section? Well, here’s a great example. I’m recycling an entire blog post into here. 

Let’s talk a little bit about unnecessary words: they shouldn't be there unless they’re in dialogue and it’s the way your character speaks. There are plenty of us out there that don’t speak with the eloquence most of us strive for.

There are two categories that I think all authors need to look at in their edits. The first is looking at a sentence and seeing if you can say the same thing with fewer words while still conveying the same meaning. If you can, cut those words. The second is using the find function and getting rid of words like: 

• That

• Just

• Like

• Probably

• Most likely

• Literally

• And your hedging verbs that don’t need to be there for anything other than clarity.

Redundancies

Redundancies are one of the first things that I look for when I get a new manuscript from our authors to nip in the bud. These are things that we all put into our manuscripts without thinking, but once you review them, they’re implied. Here are a couple of examples of phrases I take out to make things more succinct and take out the implied portions. 

He shrugged his shoulders. → He shrugged.

He nodded in agreement. → He nodded. 

He stood up. → He stood.

He sat down. → He sat. 

All of these can also be combined with whatever sentence is coming next.  For example:

Shrugging, he went into the next room. 

Join us in two weeks for the final blog in this mini-series where I talk about keeping track of your characters. 

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Editing: Cleaning Up Dialogue

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

Ahh, the dreaded dialogue. I wanted to start with editing your dialogue because it’s simultaneously the easiest and the hardest thing to do. A lot of us struggle writing dialogue in the first place, and now we’ve got to edit to make it better? Gross. 

You don’t need every dialogue tag

Let’s start with the easiest part of cleaning up your dialogue, and that’s with the tags. 

What purpose do tags serve, you ask? Well, their most important purpose is to easily let the reader know who is speaking. It also lets the reader know how the character is speaking—but these aren’t always necessary. Let me give you a few examples of what I mean and how to clean them up.

“I can’t stay here anymore!” Alan yelled. “I can’t take it—I’m leaving.”

Now we know who’s talking in here, but Alan yelling is implied by the fact there’s an exclamation point. You’re better served by either taking out the dialogue tag altogether or using an action beat instead.

“I can’t stay here anymore!” Alan grabbed whatever he could and threw it into the open suitcase. “I can’t take it—I’m leaving.”

It’s more effective for setting the tone of the scene and how frustrated Alan is while he’s planning on leaving. Now let me give you a less clear example of where you can either keep or change the tag: 

“What do you mean you’re leaving?” Charlotte asked quietly, her lip quivering. 

If we take out the qualifier of asked, the dialogue tag becomes redundant and we don’t need it. But, with that qualifier, it’s telling us the intonation in which she asks, and becomes a little more important. However, I’m still a believer that it can always be improved:

Charlotte’s lip quivered. “What do you mean you’re leaving?” 

This cuts the unnecessary dialogue tag while still, to me, implying that she’s saying something quietly because she’s emotionally distressed. And don’t be afraid to move your action beat or tags around to make your dialogue more impactful!

Tone

Tone is one of the harder ones to fix, because it’s often a more pervasive problem throughout an author’s manuscript. Your characters need to have their own developed voices so that they become distinguishable from each other, and if there’s a narrator, the narrator’s voice. This is not only important for the readers, but the author to develop story arcs and series arcs for the characters.

My suggestion for keeping track of this is to create a character sheet with basic information about their personality and character arcs planned throughout the book or series so you can easily reference what kind of character they are.

Context matters

The context in which your characters speak to each other really matters. If you have a mother and daughter talking to each other, they might be a little more blunt and gossipy as compared to coworkers or people they’re trying to flirt with. Switching back and forth between the two might make it feel like there are some character discrepancies, so looking at the context in which things are said will help you determine if you’ve created a problem you need to edit away.

What’s the point?

Every piece of dialogue needs to have a point. While people will talk to fill up the space, your characters shouldn’t. Every bit of their dialogue should serve a purpose to move the plot and their character development forward. 

The biggest test of whether or not you’ve written your dialogue with purpose is if you can remove an entire scene of dialogue, or a sentence here and there, and the plot will remain the same. 

Keepin’ it Real

The way that we speak in real life is not the way that our characters talk in books—and for good reason. Truly realistic dialogue is going to sound inane and not going to interest your reader into “listening” to a conversation they could hear on the street or in their own living room. Like mentioned in the previous section, your dialogue must have a point that moves the plot forward. 

So when you’re going through your edits, take a close look at your dialogue and if your characters are stumbling over their words without purpose (like they’re naturally shy speakers and can’t get through a few sentences without saying um or pauses), take it out or change it to have purpose. 

Join us in two weeks for our next post in this series where I talk about cutting the fat.

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Editing: Overview

A Necessary Evil

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

Editing. It’s the bane of every author’s existence—aside from the inability to put perfect words to paper the first time. We’ve previously talked about editing before in a nonserial post, but we wanted to talk a little bit more about the more specific parts of editing. Over the next three posts, we’ll talk about some of the biggest parts of your editing passes. 

After each post goes out, we’ll update this post with links for easy navigation.

Cleaning Up Dialogue

I wanted to start with editing your dialogue because it’s simultaneously the easiest and the hardest thing to do. A lot of us struggle writing dialogue in the first place, and now we’ve got to edit to make it better? Gross. In this post I’ll talk about how you don’t need to use dialogue tags all the time and give several examples of how you can use action beats instead, add tone for your characters that make them unique, contexts in which your characters might feel like they’re out of character when they’re not, and purposeful dialogue. 

Cutting the Fat

Ironically, I already cut the fat from this blog series. Originally instead of the three posts, there were going to be four, one of which covered unnecessary words and phrases. In this post, I really practice what I preach, which I think is important if we’re going to be doling out guides for public consumption. Cutting the fat doesn’t necessarily mean you have to get rid of everything, but trimming it down to be more purposeful. In this post I talk about killing your darlings—and what that really means—and when you can combine characters to avoid being redundant, and getting rid of unnecessary words and phrases that are implied by the context or statement in general.

Keeping Track of Characters

I wanted to keep this for the last post because this is a little bit different—it’s more preemptive. Keeping track of your characters will help you edit when it comes down to it, yes, but it will also help you from making the mistakes in the first place. In this post I’ll talk about your characters in general, like where they come from, their physical appearance, and personality traits. It might seem like boring and obvious information when you get down into the nitty gritty of everything, but this will be an invaluable resource for authors and editors alike to keep the mistakes as few as possible. 

Join us in two weeks for our first post in this mini series where I talk about cleaning up your dialogue.

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Knowing When to Ignore Advice

Sometimes you should just cover your ears

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

It’s a given that, as writers, we need to have critique partners, alpha readers, and beta readers to see the issues with our work that we don’t see ourselves. (It’s our baby, damn it; nothing’s wrong with it! Except there is, but I digress.) A lot this post is going to feel like it’s glaringly obvious, but oftentimes, we fall into the pit of wanting to fix everything that a trusted person points out in our work, but that’s not always the best thing for the world we’re building. So how do you know when you should take the advice and when not to?

When it affects later books

Plans change frequently, but carefully laid plots that span several books shouldn’t. This is a mistake that’s easy to make for your critique partners—and even publishers. I’ve been guilty of asking one of our authors to change something in their books that I didn’t think needed to be there, only to find out that it set up a plotline that became fruitful in the next book. The trick is not to let the critiquer to convince you that you’re going down the wrong path because they can’t see where your plans are going yet. 

This is probably the easiest one to move on from without feeling like you’re not exploring all the possibilities where it could go. 

It goes against your principles

This one will also be pretty easy for you to do...maybe. There are certain things that sell, as we all know. But do you really need to put it in your book to please others?

No.

Plain as that: No. If something is uncomfortable for you to write, such as a sex scene or torturing someone in detail, don’t put it in there. You can find other ways to imply the same material and still keep it within your moral comfort zone. Or not have it at all—there are ways to make something compelling enough to sell without having something salacious. 

It’s not your voice

We develop specific voices as authors, and different ones for each character. There are authors you can recognize even with small excerpts of their work, and that’s a very good thing. Readers like the familiar, even nostalgic, when they’re reading or rereading your work. So what do you do when your critiquers, alphas, or betas suggest a change that would change the general tone of your work?

First, you need to assess whether or not their suggestion would help the book in the long run. Second, you’d want to see if you can implement the change in the same tone that you’ve held throughout the book. 

If you can’t put it in your voice, consider whether the feedback is actually worth taking. Just like with characters acting out of character, you don’t want to sound like someone else while you’re writing. 

It is so out of character for your characters

As authors, we take the time to carefully craft our characters’ appearance and personality. So, when there isn’t a reason for your characters to act out of character—like there’s a situation that they’ve put themselves in which they really need to act out of character—they shouldn’t be going against the very nature you created for them. 

For example, if you have a mild-mannered pastor in your novel as a side character, and your critique partner suggests that they should call someone and obscene name because they’re frustrated with another character not getting their point, it won’t fit. 

It’s not their book

Finally, it’s not their book. A lot of critiquers will want an author to change a plotline more to a way that they would write it instead of the way the author would write it. Some of these might have some meritorious ideas, and if they can be implemented, great, but in general, author’s plans win. A lot of critique partners, especially ones who are just starting out, can’t tell the difference between suggesting a good idea and insisting that the author write the book the way they would write it because it would be, “so much better.”

Just remember when you go through the suggestions of your readers and critiques, take them with a grain of salt and evaluate their merit before implementing everything that they say. Sometimes it’s just hooey. 

Join us next week for the latest installment of our Misused Advice series when we talk about having likable main characters.

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