The Narrative Gardener

Category: Writing Tips

  • Your Theme Is a Noun. That’s the Problem.

    The answer to this question unlocks your entire revision.

    A ginkgo tree sprout in sand
    Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

    There’s a question that comes early in almost every developmental edit, and the answer tells me more about what the revision needs than almost anything else in the manuscript.

    What is this story about?

    Not plot. Not premise. Theme.

    The answers fall into two categories, and they predict very different revision conversations.

    The first kind: “It’s about grief.” Or loneliness. Redemption. Identity. Belonging. A single word, sometimes two. A topic.

    The second kind: “It’s about how grief isolates you before it can connect you to anyone.” A sentence. A claim. A point of view the story is willing to defend.

    Both writers know what their story is about. Only one knows what their story believes.

    Why the sentence changes everything

    A noun theme is a container. It marks the emotional territory the story is exploring, but it doesn’t plant a flag anywhere inside that territory. Two novels can both be “about grief” and arrive at completely opposite conclusions about human nature. The noun doesn’t distinguish them. The sentence does.

    Consider a hypothetical manuscript—a quiet literary novel about a woman returning to her childhood home after her mother’s death to sort through the estate. The theme: “grief and memory.”

    Workable. But revision with that theme is like weeding without knowing what was planted. Something feels off, but there’s no way to articulate why, and no reliable basis for deciding what to cut, what to expand, what the ending needs to earn.

    Now the theme gets rephrased: “The things we inherit from the dead are never what we expected to want.”

    Suddenly the manuscript has a thesis. Revision has questions. Does the protagonist’s arc support that claim? Does she move from expecting one kind of inheritance to recognizing another? Are the objects she sorts through doing thematic work, or are they just set dressing? What does the ending need to deliver in order to feel like the story kept its promise?

    Nothing in the manuscript changed. The lens did.

    The revision test

    A thematic sentence makes a simple scene-level filter possible: is this scene evidence for the claim, a complication of it, or neither? Evidence and complication both belong—they’re the system working. “Neither” is where the hard questions start.

    This doesn’t mean every scene needs a theme stamp on it. Feeder roots don’t announce themselves. But they should be there, quietly pulling the story toward what it believes, even in scenes that look like they’re just advancing plot.

    A thematic noun can’t generate that test. A sentence can.

    The one-sentence exercise

    When theme is currently a noun, try finishing this sentence: “This story believes that ____.”

    Not “this story is about.” Not “this story explores.” Believes. The word forces a claim. It forces a verb. It forces the story to have a position rather than just a subject.

    The claim can be softened later. The nuance, the complication, the place where the story resists its own thesis—that’s where the most interesting thematic work usually lives anyway.

    But a claim that hasn’t been made yet can’t be complicated.

    Start with the sentence.

    If you try the exercise and the sentence won’t come, or keeps shifting, that’s worth paying attention to. It’s usually what a developmental edit unearths early on.

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  • What’s Actually Keeping Your Story Alive

    What readers feel but can’t name is usually theme doing its job.

    Closeup of a root mass

    Every spring, there’s a week in the garden when nothing looks like it’s happening.

    The beds are bare, or close to it. Whatever was planted in autumn is still underground, doing work that won’t be visible for weeks. A gardener who’s new to the season might look at that soil and see nothing—no evidence of effort, no proof anything survived the winter. An experienced one knows better. The quiet surface is usually the sign of a root system earning its keep.

    Theme in a story works the same way.

    The part that gets all the attention

    When writers talk about their stories, they talk about plot. Readers talk about plot. Query letters lead with plot. Editors examine plot. There’s good reason for this; plot is visible. It moves. It creates pressure and release, problem and consequence, scene and sequel. It’s the stem, the leaves, the bloom. It’s the part you can point to and say “here is where the story is.”

    But plot is not what keeps a story alive.

    What keeps a story alive is the hidden network underneath it. The fine, almost invisible strands running just below the surface. Not the taproot of premise, not the thick roots of character arc, but the feeder roots. The small, threadlike filaments that don’t announce themselves. They just quietly pull everything the story needs to stay nourished.

    That’s theme.

    What feeder roots actually do

    In horticulture, feeder roots are the fine, hair-like roots responsible for the actual uptake of water and nutrients. They’re not structural. They don’t anchor the plant. They’re not the part anyone sees when they dig up a shrub or pot a perennial. But remove them, damage them, ignore their health, and the plant shows it—not immediately, not dramatically, but in a slow, creeping way that’s hard to diagnose until you look below the surface.

    A story with weak theme does the same thing. It might have a perfectly competent plot. The characters might be well-drawn. The dialogue might crackle. But something feels thin. A reader closes it and can’t quite say why it didn’t land. There’s no single scene to point to, no obvious structural failure. Just a vague sense that the story didn’t feed them the way they expected it to.

    The feeder roots weren’t doing their work.

    The excavation problem

    Here’s what makes theme genuinely difficult to work with in revision: writers are often taught to add it. To go back through a draft and insert thematic resonance, find the symbols, make sure the character’s journey “means something.”

    That’s not how theme works. You can’t transplant feeder roots. They either grow from the story’s own root system, or they don’t take.

    The work of finding theme in revision isn’t addition. It’s excavation. Tracing back what’s already alive in the story to the hidden system sustaining it. What does this story keep returning to without being told to? What question can’t it stop asking? What does it seem to believe, underneath all the plot, about the way the world works?

    Those answers are almost always already there. The feeder roots exist. The revision work is learning to read them and then making sure the rest of the story is actually drawing from them.

    When the roots are working

    When theme is working well in a manuscript, it rarely announces itself. It shows up instead in the weight a particular scene carries. In why a throwaway moment between minor characters lands harder than expected. In the reason a reader closes the book feeling something they can’t quite name, moved by something they couldn’t track while it was happening.

    The feeder roots did their job. The reader felt fed.

    The parts readers see aren’t always the parts doing the work. That’s not a flaw in how stories function. It’s exactly how they’re supposed to.

    If you’re in revision right now and something feels thin without a clear cause, it might be worth going underground for a bit. Not to add anything, just to see what’s already growing there.

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  • Stakes Are What Characters Believe They Can't Afford to Lose

    Readers don’t feel stakes. They feel what a character can’t imagine living without.

    Cypripedium acaule in the wild. Photo: me!

    A gardener doesn’t save a plant because the garden might look worse without it. She saves it because this clematis belonged to her grandmother, or because that struggling tomato represents the first thing she’s managed to keep alive in years.

    Stakes work the same way.

    When a character’s motivations feel abstract, when readers can’t quite feel the urgency even though the plot consequences are enormous, it’s rarely because the stakes aren’t high enough. It’s because the character hasn’t convinced us what they believe they stand to lose. Not in some theoretical future. Right now, in the reality they’re currently living.

    Plot Machinery vs. Belief at Stake

    A prophecy says the kingdom will fall? That’s plot machinery. It tells us something bad will happen to a lot of people in a future we haven’t lived yet.

    A prophecy says this character will become the very thing they’ve spent their whole life proving they’re not? Now there’s a belief at stake.

    The difference is that the second prophecy threatens something the character has already invested in. It puts at risk a story they’ve been telling themselves, possibly for decades, about who they are. And that kind of threat lands differently, because the reader can feel the weight of everything that’s already been spent defending it.

    This is why stakes that exist only in the future tend to fall flat, even when they’re technically catastrophic. Readers can’t feel a kingdom falling. They can feel a person discovering that the thing they were most certain about themselves might not be true.

    The Real Question Underneath the Stakes

    When I’m working with a manuscript where the tension isn’t landing, I often stop asking “what are the consequences?” and start asking something else entirely: What does this character think failure would mean?

    Not what would happen. What would it mean.

    Would it confirm the thing they’ve been dreading was true about themselves all along? Would it prove that they were right to never trust anyone or devastatingly wrong to start? Would it mean that every sacrifice they made was worthless, that the story they told themselves to survive was a lie?

    That’s the real architecture of stakes. Not the external consequence, but the internal verdict failure would deliver.

    A character fighting to save their village is fighting a plot. A character fighting to save their village because if they fail it will prove that their father was right—that they were never enough, that they’d ruin everything they touched—that character is fighting something that readers feel in their chest.

    The external stakes give the story shape. The internal ones give it weight.

    Why Abstract Stakes Create Abstract Tension

    What tends to happen when stakes stay at the level of plot consequence is readers understand intellectually that something bad will happen, but they don’t feel urgency. They’re watching the story rather than living it.

    Abstract stakes create abstract tension, the kind that produces mild concern rather than breath-holding. You can raise them as high as you want. End of the world. Death of everyone the character loves. Destruction of everything they’ve built. If the character hasn’t shown us what they believe they stand to lose—the specific, personal, identity-level thing—the reader remains at a safe observational distance.

    Specific beliefs are what collapse that distance. When we understand that this character has staked their entire sense of self-worth on a particular outcome, we can’t watch from outside anymore. We’re in it with them, because we know what failure would cost in a way that no amount of plot consequence can manufacture.

    What This Looks Like in Revision

    When I’m doing a developmental edit and the stakes feel flat, I’ll look for a few things.

    First: has the character articulated, to themselves or to us, what failure would say about them? Not what it would do to them. What verdict it would deliver. That distinction matters enormously.

    Second: is there a belief already established in the manuscript that the stakes are threatening? Stakes feel earned when they connect to something the story has already built. If the character has never shown us what they most need to believe about themselves, we won’t feel the threat when that belief is put in danger.

    Third: is the character aware of what’s really at stake, or only aware of the surface consequence? Sometimes the most powerful dramatic tension comes from a character who thinks they’re fighting for one thing while the reader can see they’re actually fighting to preserve a belief they can’t even name yet. That gap between what the character thinks they’re protecting and what they’re actually protecting is one of the richest places a story can live.

    The Clematis and the Tomato

    The gardener saves the clematis because it was her grandmother’s. She saves the tomato because it’s evidence that she can sustain something, that she’s capable of keeping things alive.

    Neither of those plants matters objectively. A garden assessment would tell her they’re both struggling and probably not worth the effort. But stakes aren’t objective. They’re personal, specific, already emotionally loaded before the crisis arrives.

    The best stakes in fiction work the same way. By the time the moment of reckoning comes, the reader should already know, because the story has shown them, exactly what this character believes they cannot afford to lose. Not the kingdom. Not even their life.

    The thing that would crumble if they failed. The piece of their understanding of themselves they’ve been tending, sometimes without even knowing it, for the entire length of the book.

    That’s what’s really at stake. And when readers feel it, they don’t just follow the plot.

    They hold their breath.

    Stakes are one of the most nuanced elements to diagnose in a manuscript and one of the most rewarding to untangle. If your story’s tension isn’t landing the way you want it to, a Story Ecosystem Assessment™ looks at exactly this kind of systemic question. Learn more here.

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  • A Story’s Point of View Sets the Rules for Curiosity

    What your narrator can’t—or won’t—see shapes everything your reader feels.

    a hornet's nest up in a tree in a forest
    Not everything that catches the eye is meant to be understood. Credit: me!

    What the narrator is allowed to wonder about shapes everything a reader experiences.

    A limited third-person narrator can’t casually speculate about what’s happening in the next town over. An omniscient voice can, but if it chooses not to, that silence becomes its own kind of information. A first-person narrator might fixate on a detail that seems irrelevant, and that fixation tells us as much about the narrator as the detail itself.

    Point of view isn’t just a technical choice. It’s the boundary around what gets to be interesting on the page.

    The Microclimate of POV

    Think of it like a garden’s microclimate. A shaded bed under oak trees can’t grow sun-loving tomatoes, no matter how much the gardener wishes otherwise. But it can grow hostas, ferns, hellebores (if they aren’t buried in snow!)—things that thrive in exactly those conditions. The limitation isn’t a flaw. It’s the environment that determines what flourishes.

    A close third-person POV creates a microclimate of immediacy and interiority. The narrator wonders what that look meant, whether the silence is angry or sad, why the room suddenly feels smaller. The reader is pressed up close against the character’s perception, living inside the gap between what’s observed and what’s understood.

    An omniscient narrator operates in full sun. It can see everything, move anywhere, tell us outright what a character feels or choose to withhold that information for effect. That withholding, when an omniscient narrator goes quiet, carries a different kind of weight than a limited narrator’s uncertainty because the reader knows the narrator could tell them. The silence is chosen.

    First person is its own microclimate entirely: the most intimate and the most unreliable. What the narrator notices, what they obsess over, what they skip past without comment, all of it is characterization. The reader is always reading two texts simultaneously: what the narrator says and what the narrator reveals without meaning to.

    Each POV creates conditions. The writer’s job is to know what grows there.

    When the Microclimate Gets Confused

    Here’s what tends to go wrong, and it’s more common than you’d think: the narrative voice starts wondering about things its POV can’t actually sustain.

    A close third-person narrator who suddenly speculates about another character’s childhood. A first-person narrator who describes their own facial expressions as though watching from outside. An omniscient narrator who dips into one character’s interiority so deeply and so consistently that readers forget it’s supposed to have a wider view, and then they feel jarred when it suddenly pulls back to tell them what’s happening across the kingdom.

    These aren’t always catastrophic errors. Sometimes they’re barely noticeable. But they erode something important: the reader’s trust in the container.

    When the rules of curiosity feel inconsistent, readers lose their footing. They’re not sure anymore what the narrator knows, what it’s allowed to know, or whether the boundaries will hold. That uncertainty doesn’t create productive tension; it creates a low-level unease, a sense that the story isn’t quite in control of itself.

    The fix usually isn’t to change the POV. It’s to understand what the chosen POV permits, and then be rigorous about staying inside those conditions.

    What This Looks Like in Editorial Practice

    When I’m working through a manuscript and scenes feel flat or slightly off, technically competent but missing something, POV confusion is often what I find underneath.

    Not the wrong POV choice. The right POV choice being inconsistently applied.

    I’ll ask: what is this narrator allowed to wonder about? Then I’ll look at what they’re actually wondering about. When those two things diverge, that’s usually where the flatness lives.

    Sometimes the narrator is failing to use the full range of curiosity their POV permits. A close third-person voice that reports events without ever speculating, questioning, misreading—that’s a narrator not taking advantage of the microclimate. The conditions are there for interiority and immediacy, and the story is growing lettuce in the shade instead of intricate, mysterious hellebores.

    Sometimes the narrator is reaching past what the POV can sustain, grabbing for information or certainty it hasn’t earned, or shouldn’t have. That’s the sun-loving tomato problem. The gardener keeps trying to force it, and the plant keeps struggling, and the problem isn’t the tomato. It’s that this bed doesn’t get enough light.

    Curiosity Has a Container

    The magic isn’t in choosing the “right” POV. Every POV is right for something. The question is always: what kind of curiosity does this container permit, and is the story growing things that thrive in those conditions?

    When a scene feels flat, it’s worth asking not just who the narrator is, but what this narrator is allowed to wonder about and whether the story is actually using that permission, or ignoring it, or accidentally exceeding it.

    Curiosity has a container. The story grows best when the writer knows its shape.

    And the editor’s job, sometimes, is simply to help the writer see the microclimate they’ve already created and understand what it was always capable of growing.

    POV is one of those elements that tends to reveal itself slowly across a full manuscript, which is exactly why it shows up in Story Ecosystem Assessments™. If something feels consistently off in your narrative voice and you can’t quite name what it is, that might be worth exploring. Learn more here.

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  • The Scene Wants Something Small

    Microwants give a scene shape.

    a tiny pink flower against a blurry background.

    I’ve noticed that scenes feel strongest when the character wants something very small.

    Not “justice” or “redemption” or “to find themselves.” Those matter, but they’re the novel’s work, not the scene’s work.

    A strong scene needs a character who wants to avoid eye contact at the dinner table. Who needs to get out of this conversation without lying. Who’s trying to steal thirty seconds alone in the bathroom before someone notices they’re gone.

    Microwants give a scene shape. Abstract desires tend to dissolve into atmosphere.

    The Tomato Stakes Problem

    It’s like the difference between “create a beautiful garden” and “get these tomato stakes in before the storm hits.”

    One is a lovely idea that could meander anywhere. The other has urgency, specificity, a clear finish line, and probably some mud and splinters along the way.

    When a character wants something concrete and immediate, the scene has traction. Readers can track whether they get it or don’t. The tension stays taut because the stakes are right there, graspable, now.

    The larger wants—the thematic ones, the soul-level yearnings—those build across the manuscript through the accumulation of these small, specific moments. They emerge from the pattern, not from a character standing in the rain thinking about meaning.

    What It Looks Like on the Page

    Here’s a before and after that shows up in manuscripts more often than you’d think.

    Before:

    Libby sat across from her mother, feeling the familiar weight of everything unsaid between them. She wanted, more than anything, for things to be different. For her mother to really see her. For all of it to finally make sense.

    There’s real feeling in that passage. But the scene has nowhere to go. “For things to be different” isn’t a want—it’s a weather system. It can’t be achieved or failed within the next three pages. The reader has nothing to track.

    After:

    Libby kept her eyes on her water glass. If she could just get through the next ten minutes without her mother asking about the job, she could excuse herself, drive home, and fall apart in private. Ten minutes. She just needed her mother to keep talking about the neighbor’s new deck.

    Now we have a scene. Libby wants one specific thing—to deflect one specific question for one specific window of time. The reader is immediately enrolled in whether she’ll get it. Every line of dialogue her mother speaks either threatens that goal or delays the threat, and we feel the difference.

    The emotional content is the same in both versions. Libby is overwhelmed, unseen, holding herself together by a thread. But in the second version, that emotional weight is being carried by a concrete, immediate want. The abstraction has been given a body.

    What This Means in Revision

    When I’m line editing and a scene feels like it’s floating—technically competent, emotionally present, but somehow inert—the first thing I look for is the micro-want.

    I’ll ask: what does this character need to accomplish, obtain, avoid, or survive in the next few pages? Not in their life. Not in the arc of the novel. Here. Now. In this room, at this table, in this conversation.

    Sometimes the writer knows the answer and just hasn’t put it on the page yet. The microwant is there in their notes, clear as anything, but they assumed readers would feel it without being shown the specific shape of it. A light revision brings it forward.

    Sometimes the microwant genuinely isn’t there; the scene exists to convey information or emotion, but no one in it actually wants anything particular to happen. Those scenes usually need more significant rethinking, not because they’re badly written, but because they’re doing the wrong job. They’re atmosphere when they should be architecture.

    Turning atmosphere into architecture is some of the most satisfying editorial work there is. Finding the physical action that carries the emotional weight. Locating the small, urgent want buried underneath the abstraction and helping it rise to the surface, the way you’d stake a climbing rose that’s been growing along the ground. It was always going to bloom, it just needed something to climb.

    The Larger Wants Are Still There

    None of this is to say that theme and soul-level yearning don’t belong in your manuscript. They absolutely do. They’re the whole point.

    But they belong to the pattern, not the scene. They accumulate. They emerge. A character who spends a hundred and twenty thousand words desperately engineering small, specific escapes—from conversations, from eye contact, from the one question they can’t answer—will arrive at their moment of reckoning carrying the full weight of every one of those microfailures and microvictories. The reader feels the theme because they lived through the accumulation of scenes that built it.

    A character who spends a hundred and twenty thousand words wanting “to finally be free” will arrive at that same moment and find that the reader has been waiting for something to happen.

    Because a scene without a small want is just two people talking in a room.

    A scene with one? That’s where the story lives.

    If this resonates with something you’re working through in revision, a Story Ecosystem Assessment™ might be exactly what you need. I look at manuscripts through this kind of lens—finding the places where the architecture has gone soft and helping you figure out why. You can learn more here.

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  • Come Celebrate The Conflict Thesaurus Vol 2 Book Release (& Maybe Win Something Awesome!)

    I always get a bit excited when a book I’m waiting for finally releases, so it’s great to finally share that The Conflict Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Obstacles, Adversaries, and Inner Struggle (Vol. 2) is now out!

    This SILVER EDITION is the twin of the GOLD EDITION and continues to explore all the ways we can better leverage the conflict in our story.

    If you are new to these “thesaurus” books, each one is part writing guide, part brainstorming tool.

    The first part of this book dives into how conflict powers your plot and is the golden thread that weaves your inner and outer stories together. It also digs into how to craft great villain clashes, character agency, how to maximize tension, what goes into a satisfying story climax, and more.

    The second part of the guide is a mother lode of conflict scenarios (115 to be exact) built to get your imagination thrumming with ideas. You must see it to believe it.

    I’m part of Angela & Becca’s Street Team, and I have news:

    Writers Helping Writers is hosting a Writing Contest!

    A book about conflict needs a FIGHT CLUB Story Contest, right? Exactly! So if you want to show Angela & Becca how good your conflict-writing skills are, check out this contest and see what you can win.

    GIVEAWAY ALERT!

    Angela and Becca are also hosting a must-enter giveaway. They’ve filled a vault full of their favorite writing books and are giving away some digital 5-packs, winner’s choice!  

    So much fun. Make sure to head over and enter, and good luck!

  • Blog Takeover! Help, I’ve Been Hijacked by The Conflict Thesaurus!

    Heads up, Writers! The Conflict Thesaurus Is Here!

    Writers, Can You Survive Danger & Death in the Conflict Challenge?

    I don’t know about you, but I get a little excited when a new writing guide comes along. Today I get to spill the news that The Conflict Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Obstacles, Adversaries, and Inner Struggles (Vol. 1) has hit the shelves.

    This guide is about that killer ingredient our stories need: Conflict. It shows you exactly how to use conflict to raise tension, create a fresh story premise, and pull readers in. The guide also dives into over 100 conflict scenarios and how each can be endlessly adapted to challenge a character inside and out. Problems, Moral Dilemmas, Ticking Clocks, Obstacles, No-Win Scenarios…this book is plot brainstorming in overdrive!

    I’m part of Angela & Becca’s Street Team for this release, and we have an important question to ask you:

    Can You Survive Danger as Well as Your Favorite Protagonist?

    Sure, it’s easy for you to use conflict to torture your characters and make them struggle, but what if it’s you in the hot seat instead? Will you make good decisions, or bad ones?

    It’s time to find out by taking the Conflict Challenge! I dare you to become the protagonist in a special story Angela & Becca have created. And heads up, if you survive, you win some pretty cool stuff!

    GIVEAWAY ALERT!

    While you’re at Writers Helping Writers taking the Conflict Challenge, make sure to enter The Conflict Thesaurus celebratory giveaway, too. But hurry – it’s only on for a few days.

    So, take the challenge…if you dare. And don’t forget to come back and let me know how you did against Camp Deadwood!

    If you’d like to find out more about how The Conflict Thesaurus can help your character construction and story, these spectacular writers have put together some posts about conflict and its importance. Check them out with these links:

    You can find links to purchase The Conflict Thesaurus and any of the other Writers Helping Writers thesauruses here: https://writershelpingwriters.net/bookstore/ . Get yours TODAY! Your characters will thank you!

    See you soon!

  • Character Discussions — 8 Steps to Side Characters by Sacha Black & “The Walking Stick” by Donald Maass @Writer Unboxed

    Hard on the heels of finishing Sacha Black’s newest masterpiece 8 Steps To Side Characters, this article, “The Walking Stick” , appeared in my inbox. Sacha’s book left my mind reeling, digesting much of what I knew stated in a different way that added clarification and inspiration. Then I read Mr. Maass’s no-punches-pulled airing on the idea of ‘authentic’ characters and what authenticity really means.

    Yep, mind-blown. 🤯

    To keep your characters from falling flat, starting flat, or feeling flat, I highly recommend these two resources. Happy writing!~

    Solid side character instruction with a slathering of singularly-Sacha humor. I recommend it highly!

    The Walking Stick

    August 4, 2021 By Donald Maass Leave a Comment

    There’s a concept in storytelling that I’ve long tried to understand: “authentic”.  Mostly it’s invoked with respect to characters.  It’s important to know them.  It’s important that they act and speak in ways consistent with who they are, whether entering a room or rocketing to the stars.  It’s also important to know how they came to be who they are.  Back story wounds and burdens shape and define them and become the engines of change.

    If writing is “authentic” then every gesture, action and utterance is “honest” and everything observed is rendered in a way both original and pinpoint accurate. “Authentic” means writing not to formula but as characters would actually behave, whatever the circumstances.  “Authentic” means they go about their business in their own ways, not the author’s.  Even when they are inspired by real people or reflect the author’s own experience, if characters are “authentic” then a story will always have internal logic and integrity.

    It’s something like that.

    What bothers me is, how does knowing characters and honoring their independent existence help you to write a story?  I mean, it’s nice if characters behave in ways that are lifelike—or which at least conforms to our understandings of them—then, so far, they can only display who they are.  A backstory-induced need is a good thing and can propel a character toward some sort of emotional resolution, but by doing what?  On top of that, when characters are strongly defined and consistent how can they surprise us? read more…

  • Reblog — Thinking Fiction: The Book as an Object — An American Editor

    This topic caught my eye while I was scrolling. I enjoyed the discussion about the phases a manuscript goes through as it passes to different people on the publishing journey. We all believe our writing to be a part of us, but isn’t the idea that it becomes “real” only once someone else has read it a bit ironic? The section about the author-editor relationship and how an editor views a book is informative—something to be kept in mind when you send your work out. Well worth reading for writers and editors, enjoy!~

    Carolyn Haley Writing a novel has often been likened to having a baby. The analogy is apt, in terms of gestation, obsession, pain, thrill, frustration, and all that goes with the long-term development of a new life. Less often discussed is what happens later in the process, when it’s time to push the fledgling out […]

    Thinking Fiction: The Book as an Object — An American Editor

  • Reblog — 11 Techniques for Transforming Clichéd Phrasings — WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

    One of the editing tips I recently posted on my social media channels for Red Leaf Words Services had to do with rephrasing clichés in your own unique way when you want to use the basic idea. This post from the informative ladies at Writers Helping Writers shows you how to do just that. Your readers will thank you!~

    One of the things that pumps me up the most when I’m reading a book is when the author phrases things in a way I’ve never seen before. It could be a familiar concept or image—red hair, an urban street, fear—but when it’s written differently, I’m able to visualize that thing in a new way,…

    11 Techniques for Transforming Clichéd Phrasings — WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®