Category: Revision and Editing

Another Burning Controversy of the Literary Kind

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Forget politics.  Forget philosophy.  If you want to start an argument in a room full of wordsmiths, raise the question of whether one space or two should follow a period.

Consider, for instance, this blast of the trumpet against the dreaded two-spacers, published back in 2011:

Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.

And yet people who use two spaces are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste.

In part the divide is a cultural one, with typographers (who work with proportional fonts and are concerned with beauty and readability from the consumer’s end) on one side, and writers and editors (who have traditionally worked with monospaced fonts and are concerned with making the text clear and easy to work with on the production end) on the other side.

There’s also a generational component in the spacing war.  Older writers, who learned to type on manual or electric typewriters that produced monospaced output, were trained to space twice after a period, for clarity’s sake.  Writers who came later to the trade, on the other hand, learned keyboarding on personal computers with access to proportional fonts, and were taught the typographer’s one-space principle.

Who’s right?  It doesn’t matter.  The glory of word processing is that you can write your book whichever way you were taught, without having to worry about retraining your spacebar thumb.  Then you can go to your publisher’s guidelines, and see if they have a stated preference.  If they do, then use the mighty power of global search and replace (if your word processing program doesn’t already come with a built-in “convert two spaces to one space/one space to two spaces” option) to make your text conform to the desired standard.

If the publisher doesn’t have a preference, then go with what you’ve got.  Or, if you’re still uncertain:  If you’re working in a monospaced font (which is to say, in Courier New – there are other monospaced fonts out there, but when an editor thinks “monospace” they think “Courier New”), then space twice after the period.  If you’re working in a proportional font (which is to say, Times New Roman, because the last thing an editor wants is to read a manuscript where the author has gotten cute with the fontwork), then space once after the period.

And don’t stress out about it.

Structural and Cosmetic Renovations

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There are two kinds of writers, the ones who like cats and the ones who don’t   the ones who prefer music while they’re writing and the ones who need absolute silence the ones who find revision to be at best a painful but necessary chore and the ones who think that it’s the best part of the writing process.  What there aren’t, though, are successful writers who never revise at all.  Those rare writers whose first drafts come out submission-ready usually turn out to have gone through the whole process in detail inside their own heads before they ever start putting down words on screen or paper.  But even the writers who enjoy the revision stage of the process have parts of it they like better than others.

There are, as it happens, at least two different kinds or stages of revision.  One is major structural revision, the sort of work that involves disassembling large chunks of the manuscript and putting them back together in a different configuration, often with new material added in.  This can be a tough job, because it requires holding in your head both the story as it currently exists and the story you want to morph it into, all the while doing the cutting and pasting of the old stuff and the creating of new stuff.  The advent of word processing has made this part a lot easier — time was when “cut and paste” was not just a metaphor, it was the literal way the job was done.

I was around for the tail end of that era, when the “paste” part had been replaced by “transparent tape”, and if you did the work carefully enough and had access to a good Xerox machine, you didn’t have to retype the whole thing all over again.  But within a year of my finishing my dissertation, we had our first household computer-and-printer lashup, and I was happy to bid the old ways goodbye.

The other main type of revision is the line-by-line and word-by-word tweaking of the piece in question, with the goal of making it run as clearly and effectively and, well, tunefully as possible.  This is the part that I’ve always liked best, playing with the words and the sentence rhythms and the paragraph beats, getting the sounds of the piece to fall into line.  (Other people, it’s only fair to say, find this part to be not much better than drudgery.  It takes all kinds.)

And after that, of course, you come to the kind of revision that isn’t really revision at all, it’s stalling.  When you get to the point where you’re putting commas in during the morning and taking them out again in the afternoon, and then going back the next day and rewriting half of the same sentences with semicolons and then reverting them to commas again — at that point, my friend, you’re mostly working to put off the day when you’re going to have to rename your “NameOfStory working draft” to “NameOfStory final version” and get the thing out of the house and into somebody’s submissions queue.

The Season Approacheth

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With National Novel Writing Month receding into the past, and the midwinter giftgiving season drawing ever closer, it’s time again for a display of crass commercialism on my part.

If you’ve got your NaNoWriMo manuscript in hand, and would like help in taking that finished product to the next level, I’m here to help.  My base rates are $1500 for a novel, or $100 for a first chapter sample (or for a short story, if that’s what you’ve got.)  More details can be found here.

Also, if you’re looking for a present to give to the writer in your life, you can give them a virtual gift certificate for a line-edit and critique — you can purchase my services in advance at the usual rate, and they can schedule the job whenever they’re ready.  If you like, I can even send you a PDF of a nice-looking gift certificate that you can print out and put into an envelope, or in a great big enormous box with a lot of packing peanuts, if that’s how you roll.

Weather, We’ve Got Weather

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And I might even have had a blog post last night about short stories, and how long it takes to write one, if we hadn’t been in the part of northern New England that had freezing cold and high winds all day yesterday, and had the power go out for nearly five hours yesterday night.

Which wouldn’t have been bad — only annoying, and boring, and putting a serious delay in all the work I had in hand for the evening — if we didn’t also heat the house with electricity.  We toughed it out by candlelight for the first couple of hours, until our laptops ran out of juice; then we gave up and huddled under the down comforter and all the blankets until the power came back.

Then we spent today playing catch-up, and putting the finishing touches on the short story we were working on when the power went out.  This is a short story that either took us a couple of weeks to write, or took us about nine years.  We would periodically pull it out, and work on it some, and throw out bits and put in more bits, and come up against a brick wall and put it away again . . . and this went on, as I’ve said, for years.†

Then about a week ago, revelation hit and the wall broke and we had a finished draft.  The rest of the work was revision, seven drafts of it.  (I figure I’m in good company; the humorist James Thurber once claimed that most of his seemingly effortless casual pieces for The New Yorker went through at least six drafts before submission.)  Next comes sending the story out on a blind date with an editor somewhere, with all the concomitant angst and uncertainty.

Persistence.  Persistence is key.

†We didn’t have the external spur of an anthology we’d promised the story to, and we’re not primarily short story writers anyhow; otherwise, the process might not have taken so long. A good part of the final, successful effort involved throwing out all of the short story’s misguided attempts to turn into a novel.

A Commercial Reminder

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For those who may be interested:

As of today, my base rate for doing a line-edit and letter of critique on a standard-weight novel is $1500.  The $100 deal for critiquing a short story or the first 5K words/first chapter of a novel still stands, however, and a client who takes that deal and later comes back for a critique of the entire manuscript still gets $100 off of the whole-novel fee.

Meanwhile, the local rains have (temporarily) stopped, and the thermometer is dropping.  Our local purveyors of fresh and organic vegetables anticipate sub-freezing temperatures on the higher elevations, which means no more fresh zucchini for zucchini bread.

Presented for Your Amusement

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Revision:  The Game!

Welcome to REVISION: THE GAME!
You are in a WRITER’S ROOM.
There is a desk here.
There is a chair here.
Exits are W and E.
What do you do?

One of those humorous pieces with a lot of  good advice buried inside it.

This next one is at least tangentially writing-related, but mostly I’m linking to it because it’s funny, and because at various times in my life I too have been trapped in Paper-Grading Hell.

And Then I Was Eaten by a Grue

>read essay
With trepidation, you lift aside the cover sheet. Suddenly, the world around you seems to melt away…

Hell
You are in a maze of twisty little paragraphs, all alike. The path ahead of you is littered with sentence fragments, left broken and twitching at your feet as their pathetic spaniel eyes implore you to put them out of their misery. Dangling modifiers loop happily through the branches overhead. In the distance, that sound of undergraduate feet has turned into a heavy, erratic thwump – swoop – THWUMP you recognise immediately – it’s a badly-indented long quotation, and it’s coming closer.

>run
You wish.

Tales from the Before Time: Classroom Issues

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For a long time, I was — to put it mildly — skeptical about the value of classroom writing instruction, if by “skeptical” we mean “unconvinced of its utility and halfway convinced that its influence is largely malign.”

I blame early-writing-life trauma.

Picture me, in the eighth grade, bookish and awkward and laboring under the further social burden of being a new kid in the sort of town where everybody has gone to school together since first grade.  I wanted desperately to be — well, not popular, because popularity looked like it came with more strings and preconditions than I felt like dealing with, but ordinary.

At the same time, I was already a beginning writer, turning out lachrymose poetry and lumpy prose and working hard at my efforts to improve both (harder, in fact, than I ever worked at any of the  “draw one line under the subject of this sentence and two lines under the verb” exercises in our English textbook .)  And I was as hungry for outside validation as any writer, beginner or established pro.

Unsurprisingly, there came a day when I had a finished story in hand and wanted somebody else’s opinion on it.  (Needless to say, the story sucked.   I was, after all, only in the eighth grade.)  So I screwed up my courage to the sticking-point and showed the story to my eighth-grade English teacher, hoping to at least get some useful commentary out of the deal.

This was a big mistake, because she liked it.

She liked it so damned much she read it out loud to all her English classes.  Which put paid to any hopes I might have had of appearing ordinary, and got me out of the habit of trusting English teachers about anything.

Public Service Announcement

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We interrupt your irregularly scheduled blog reading with a business-related announcement.  Related, that is, to my editorial and critique services (see the sidebar link for more info.)

After careful consideration, I’ve decided that as of 15 September I’m going to be slightly raising my basic-rate flat fee to $1500 for a line-edit and critique on a standard-weight novel.  Novellas and doorstops will remain separately negotiable.  And as before, I will also line-edit and critique a short story or the first chapter/first 5000 words of a novel for $100.

My reasons for doing this are twofold.  One is that the increased rate should, I hope, enable me to better strike a balance between the need to keep the household exchequer in a healthy-enough state, and the need to have sufficient time to work on my own contractual writing obligations.  The other is that I’ve done enough research into the going rates for editorial work to satisfy myself that even with the projected increase, my rate remains at the relatively inexpensive end of the scale.

I’m giving this one-month heads-up so that anyone who wants to take advantage of the old rate can do so; those pre-contracted jobs will go into the editing queue ahead of those from people who sign up after September 15.

Thought for the Day

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One of the many things I like about writing in the digital age: you can compose your text in any typeface you like, from Courier to Comic Sans — you can even write in Wingdings, if a wayward spirit so moves you — and then convert it for submission into whatever font it is that your publisher wants even if what your publisher wants is so butt-ugly you couldn’t write an original sentence in it to save your life.

I like to compose in single-spaced Courier New, then double-space it for editing and revisions.  Sometimes I’ll switch to Century or Times New Roman, just to change the physical layout of the words on the page, and their relationship to each other — it’s an easy way to get a fresh look at the text if it’s starting to get stale.  Double-spaced 12-point Courier New is good for doing printouts for readings, because you can get a good estimate of time that way:  One page with standard margins is roughly 250 words is roughly one minute if you’re reading it aloud.   But again, you can always get the estimate, then switch to some font you like better.  (Orator, as its name implies, is a good clear font for making reading printouts, though it does take up more paper than Courier or Times New Roman.)

Everybody has their typographical preferences, and in this age of electronic writing, we get to indulge them.  And it is good.