Despite how busy and strange this month has been, I still managed to cross the Camp NaNoWriMo finish line for the fourth straight year in a row!  It's hard to believe I've been at this, in a constant and dedicated fashion, long enough for it to theoretically be a college degree.  This is, by no means, to say that I feel like I know everything about How To Be A Self-Published Author: that'd be impossible.  I will say that there are probably a few secrets lurking in the practice of surrounding yourself with people and experiences which make you happy and/or inspired.    (For the curious: those current experiences, for me, include watching the entirety of Twin Peaks, attending a community theatre performance of The Hound of the Baskervilles, helping a friend move, picking blueberries while there's still dew on them, and stepping up my artistic noodling away from the written word.)

Those of you with a sharp eye may notice that I've changed the Arts & Crafts section of my website and removed my link to my DeviantArt gallery, replacing it with an onsite one.  Not only does it make it easier for you all to see my art, but it helps pave the way for my secondary creative venture: an arts and crafts storefront called Gifts of Awen. Some of it is related to Aviario, but a good deal of it will be more inspirational and metaphysical in nature, focusing on the intent of creating magical and/or peaceful art for small spaces.  My first project for Gifts of Awen is a series of artist cards dedicated to the seven chakras.  Here's a peek at the first two, which I completed last night:

My goal is to also create postcards and other prints of these, along with other small art designed to help people find insight, inspiration, and a moment of peace in a busy, cluttered world.  Commisssions will also be available through the site: I have several slots currently open.   If you would like to see what else I have up at the moment, I'd be honored if you'd join me over at the storefront.   Those of you who follow me on Instagram will also see pictures of new pieces as they're completed and posted!   This may also mean the return of The Author's Oracle ... only time will tell.   For now, I'm headed back to my creative corner to chip away at The Proper Bearing and work on some more illustrations.   I hope you all have a lovely week!

Starting with the basics, ReadWriteThink has a checklist that's meant for classroom use, but still has some great starting points.  It's also printable for use in writers' groups, workshops, or NaNoWriMo Write-Ins!

Fiction University has two great pages: The Spit Shine, which is a great last run-through, and more importantly, Crossing Words Off Your List, which covers the author's most important self-editing tool.  The "Bad Words" list, which goes by many names, always serves the same basic prinicple: to help remove words which are either unnecessary or overused.  Every author has a handful which are unique to them, and sometimes they aren't even words.  (Confession: In The Cards had a lot of unnecessary ellipses before the final edit.)

Though those words are a good first step, they aren't everything.  Grammar Girl's Editing Checklist covers the bases on ... you guessed it, grammar!   This one is laid out simply, and yet very comprehensive, which makes it a good one to print out and keep in your editing binder if you prefer to edit on paper (like yours truly).

WordStream's Self-Editing Checklist includes talking points on all of the above, with an extra dose of humor.   I take their final point with a grain of salt, however: they stress paring down your sentences as much as possible.  While I'm a fan of a tightly written sentence, I also believe that keeping some of the proverbial meat on the bone helps you define your writing voice.  Your mileage may, as with most method advice, vary.  

Finally, there is my own Rainbow Editing Method, which I use in conjunction with my personal Bad Words file.  I developed it while I was working on From The Desk of Buster Heywood, and it's gone a long way toward helping me identify my own problem areas.  You're welcome to use it, too!  There's a wrap-up post with links to all the sections right here.

Now, I'm about to dive into my own manuscript, so I'll see you all next Wednesday!  Should you be up to the same task, happy editing ... and I hope you all have a great week!

We've finally reached the end of the Rainbow!  It's hard to believe that I started writing about this three months ago! Last week, I promised a tally of my own edits to From the Desk of Buster Heywood, and I do try to keep my promises.  I used this tally to find the areas of my writing that needed the most work and conscious effort, and hopefully I'll have different results when I start editing the next book, In the Cards.  For those of you who aren't interested in this sort of thing?  I apologize, and there is already a fantastic anecdotal entry simmering in my brain for next week. So, without further ado, proof of my own imperfection (she said, grinning).  

Sophistication (Original Entry)

• Starting sentences with action (-ing) verbs: 30
• Adverbs: ... I stopped counting and just started cutting the buggers.
• Abundance of short sentences: 0
• Overuse of italics or exclamation points: 1
• Cliches: 1
• Unnecessary Profanity: 0 (Some people swear like sailors.  Jeremiah is one of them.)
• Overuse of mundane  detail: 20  (Sadly, most of these were descriptors of office life.)

Show vs. Tell (Original Entry)

• Summaries of big plot events: 0
• Inability to resist the urge to explain: 12
• Repetition of detail: 7
• Overuse of words/plot devices/effects: 5  (These were mostly quirks that I had to find new descriptions of.)
• Redescription of events: 1

Character & P.O.V (Original Entry)

• Telling traits vs. showing them in other ways: 6
• Backstory that only needs to be known, not shown: 5 (One of these was a hefty 15 pages in the first chapter: a flashback that will probably show up as a short piece elsewhere.)
• Real dialogue vs. pure exposition: 3
• Inconsistent P.O.V: 4
• Description inconsistent with emotion: 2

Character, Pacing, and Beats (Original Entry)

• Details the character wouldn't notice: 4
• Character development disproportionate to plot: 0
• Ineffective or absent tangents: 13
• Overabundant hobbies or mentions thereof: 1
• Beats (poorly spaced): 0
• Beats (mundane): 3
• Beats (rhythmically awkward): 5
• Imbalance of passage length: 1
• Imbalance of chapter length: 0

Dialogue, Monologue & Sound (Original Entry)

• Emotion in description instead of dialogue: 2
• Replace verbs with "said": This is another one where I stopped counting and just had at it.
• Unnecessary speaker attribution: I stopped counting these, too..
• Noun before name: 0
• Inconsistent character reference: Tons.  90% of these were Cam vs. Cameron. 
• Ellipses for gaps: All present & accounted for.
• Dashes for interruptions: Also all present & accounted for.
• Dialogue without room for misinterpretation: 0
• Awkward dialect: 0
• Unnecessary interior monologue: 9
• Unnatural-sounding or out-of-character dialogue: 9
  

Voice (Original Entry)
I could break these down by chapter, since I did make a list of them, but that would ruin so many surprises.  Here are the things a lot of my favorite passages had in common:

• description of strong emotion
• personified concepts, 
  
• witty banter or funny dialogue
• atmospheric scene setting
• tense conversations
• use of foreshadowing or placing of points
• pulling together any of those foreshadowing instances or points

Other Edits & Instances of "Kill Your Darlings"
A lot of my generic edits, done in pink ink, involved tightening up sentences, or reordering them so that they read more smoothly on the page.  A few places needed a little more "oomph" to ramp up suspense, and others needed extra taken out to speed up the pace.  My proverbial darlings, passages that I loved but didn't necessarily need, got highlighted in yellow.  The fifteen pages in Chapter 1 I mentioned earlier were a doozy, since that scene was the first glimpse I had of Buster's sister, Dee, and loved her immediately.  I also had a few funny lines which were pretty good, but didn't fit Buster quite right.  These have been saved and tucked away for later use. One particular darling remains, but in a pared-down and much more subtle form, to help tie the first book to its successors.  I won't give it away, but a couple of books from now, it'll be clear as day in a reread.

That officially wraps up my entries on the Rainbow Editing Method!  Thank you for sticking through it with me, and I hope that some of what I've had to say over these last few months has been useful ... or at the very least, somewhat entertaining.  See you all next Thursday!

Okay, now you all know what my favorite color is - and my Gram's, too.  One of these days I intend to tell you all about her and how much I owe to her for my creative spirit, but today is not that day.  Today we are at the end of the Editing Rainbow, and the pot of gold is a marked-up manuscript ready for you to go through and clean up.  I know, at first glance it doesn't sound that rewarding, but I get excited about these things. It means that the thing you spent SO LONG putting together and pulling your hair out over is one step closer to being presentable to the general public, and not just your long-suffering close friends & beta readers.  (Hi, ladies, you know who you are, and I love you all.)

The best part is that purple, Voice, is the easiest color to edit.  I don't even have any bullet points, this week.  It's that simple.  

This is the part where you go through your manuscript and look for the bits that make you say "YES. I have read this story so many times that my eyes are about to start bleeding, but I still absolutely love this."  It can be as big as a whole scene, or as tiny as a description ... One which sticks out for me during my edit of From the Desk of Buster Heywood is the detail of a lost mitten "marinating in a pile of slush".  I just love the way it sounds and flows on the page, and the picture is crystal clear to me.  Go through your draft and find those parts.  Underline them in purple.   If you have any lines that are the exact opposite which you haven't already cleaned up with other colors, put a jagged purple line to set them apart.

The lines that you like the sound and look of best are the ones that fell into your lap while you were sitting under the word tree - they are yours by chance, ripe and ready and perfect.  They are the cornerstones of your writing voice, and I would be willing to bet that you didn't even think about being "voice-y" or "really good" when you wrote them.  Be proud of these.  Hold them up in front of your mirror and say "Damn, you wrote this?  You rock!"  Take a nice ego boost and feel good about yourself.   This may be the least rule-intensive part of the editing method, but it may also be the most important, because it's about building confidence in your own writing.  You might have all those red adverbs, clunky blue beats, and redundant orange bits in there staring you down, and sure, fixing them all is going to be tricky and daunting, but hey!  You have all that purple that you're still proud of in the middle of it all, holding it together.  You're a badass. You wrote a whole entire book, and there are parts of it you don't immediately want to throw out the window, even in what Anne Lamott calls the "shitty first draft". Go, you.

Now that you've had your moment of triumph, it's time to take that purple prose and look at it under a magnifying glass.  What is it that made those passages work for you?  Why do they sing?  Do they have a common thread, or were they just a perfect fit for that particular point in the story?  You're figuring out your strengths, the place where your voice shines.  Once you break that down, you can apply it to the places that aren't so strong.  The biggest discovery I made during this phase was that I write best when I can relate closely to someone in the scene... so going forward, I tried to find something I could do the same with in as many situations as possible, even if the character wouldn't react the same way I would.  I know a lot of writers say this, when they talk about writing, but they say it because it's true: bring yourself to the page.  Your readers will notice the life there, every time.

So, that's it for purple.  It's all about following your heart and your gut.  But what happens when you finish that whole rainbow?  That's up to you.  I thought I'd be good just typing in my corrections, but then I decided to take a tally of how it all wound up and find what my biggest weaknesses were.  I'll be sharing my breakdown in next week's post, so that when From the Desk... is finally available, you can compare and see just how much I hacked it apart before sharing it with you. 

Oh, and here's Anne Lamott's essay on shitty first drafts, courtesy of Canvas online courses.  There's a link to a PDF of it, there.  If you like what you read, I suggest you pick up the book it became part of, "Bird by Bird".  It's one of my favorite books on writing - I'm saving the others for a later post.  Here's to the rainbow, and I'll see you next week!

Really, if there's one thing all of these dialogue-editing points have in common, it's this: don't bring your reader up out of the scene.  Think about the last time someone interrupted you while you were in the middle of a really good book.  Now, imagine if the author did that to you!  These editing points will help keep your reader comfortably engrossed in your scenes, and they'll come back out to the real world and remember that they were actually reading a book when they're ready: not when you remind them that they are.

Okay, here's the deal.  I know I said that this would be the last post in the Rainbow Editing Method, but I'm feeling like it needs one more to pull it together and wrap it up well.  So, I beg your patience in that regard. The second shade of blue - Dialogue, Editing and Sound - is dark blue. I tend to be heavy on dialogue, since I write a lot of loudmouths who like to bicker with one another.  So, since this is the biggest checklist I have, let's dive right in!  We'll start with mechanics and move into meatier stuff toward the end.

• Always put name before noun.  Unless you're from Elizabethan times, "said William" is archaic.  Enough said?
• Keep character references consistent.  I know, I get tired of writing a character's name over and over, too.  But if you're writing a party scene and "the meter maid knocked over the chocolate fountain", your reader's probably going to have to stop and remember whether that's referring to Lucy, Rita, or Prudence.
• Use ellipses for gaps or pauses, and dashes for interruptions.  I had to break myself into this habit: I'm pretty fond of dashes.  But if you're consistent with these, it's easier to distinguish between someone who's mid-thought, or just noticed something that's about to turn your scene on its ear.
• For the most part, use 'said'.  I admit to fighting this one tooth and nail, until I realized how much weight good dialogue could carry.  Nothing jerks your reader out of a great conversation by the collar like building up to a reluctant confession, then having your guilty party whisper, sigh, or (heavens, no) murmur it.  If you absolutely need to remind the reader who's speaking, but have no beat to go with it?  Said.  Said, said, said.  It's such a simple word that they'll roll right over it without hesitation.  With that in mind....
• Can speaker attributions be dropped or replaced with beats?  If you have two characters in a conversation, your reader should only need an occasional reminder of who's speaking.  Likewise, if only one person in the room is written with a specific dialect, they'll go stickin' out right an' cleah without you needin' ta point 'em out.  Ayuh.   If you can't axe an attribution and you're dead set against a simple "said", put a beat on it: have the character do something relevant to how they're feeling or where they are.  
• Let dialogue show emotion as much as possible, not the description.  It's far more telling and interesting to have Bill say: "That dirty, rotten, spud-muttering jackanape!  I was saving that last can of Pepsi Clear for a special occasion!" than "Liam took the last soda".  Of course, if it adds to the scene, you can always throw in a nice, solid beat like kicking the fridge closed and stubbing his toes in the process.   Just remember that people can use very different words, depending on how they feel, and don't always think before they speak.  Which leads us to...
• Let dialogue be misinterpreted! Communication is a tricky business: your characters aren't always going to understand one another.  Terry may say his friend is over-reacting about that can of soda, until Bill explains that it's the last of a case his great-aunt brought to his high school graduation.  (Hey.  We never said poor Bill was 100% sane.)  If you let your characters misunderstand from time to time, your scenes could end up going in some unexpected, yet useful, directions.  Obviously, this sort of thing applies to language barriers, too. 
• Is your dialogue in-character?  At the surface, this seems like a pretty dumb question: you're the author and they're in-character if you say they are, right?  Wrongo.  Aside from killing off favorite characters, losing sight of their motivation is the most likely thing to make your reader want to throw your book across the room and hesitate to pick it back up again.  I had some fantastic zingers coming out of Buster's mouth during a climactic moment: really great, hard-hitting stuff.  But I was caught up in what some of the best lines would be for the scene in general: not the best lines for Buster, who  wasn't anywhere near mean-spirited enough to actually say them.   Re-reading that scene in the context of the rest of the novel felt like watching a stranger.  So, the lines went back into my bin of words, where a harder character with far less tact and consideration will probably dig them out later.
• Interior Monologue: Is it necessary, and does it sound different from your narration?   As a rule of thumb, try to only share the interior thoughts of your main character.  If you delve into the heads of too many other people, readers may be confused about who they're supposed to focus on.  You're following one - maybe two or three - people through this story, and they're the ones you want to have people relate to the most.  But if your main character's internal voice sounds too much like your narration, you may need to step back to the previous checkpoint and get inside their head a little.  You might have all sorts of flowery, wordy ways to think about what's in front of them: but they may not be the sort of person to have the same thought.
• Read it aloud.   The best way to check your dialogue is to sit down with it and read it like a script.  If it sounds scripted, it needs work so that it'll flow like a natural conversation.  I know that we're talking about writing, here, but for a great example, check out this snippet of conversation about self-defense from Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof".  (The movie is rated R, so avoid it if you're not fond of strong language.)

Happy April and happy spring, everyone!  I know that there's still snow on the ground for a lot of people, but the smell of things thawing is finally in the air here in my little corner of New Hampshire.  I've got the window cracked, one of my favorite singers on the stereo (Sara Bareilles, for those curious), and a half hour to write this before my "real job" starts.  So let's delve into the first blue part of our editing list, which deals with Beats and Proportion!

First off, what are "beats"?  When it comes to writing, they're the breaks in dialogue or action.  Chelsea said is a beat, for example, as is He stopped to wait for the traffic before crossing.  You need beats to let your reader digest what you've given them so far - it's like pausing to let someone else speak in conversation, even though you can't actually let your reader talk back to you.

Proportion is pretty simple - your passages need to be balanced.  Follow up lengthy descriptions with short ones, or try not to have too many long conversation-heavy scenes in a row.   

Now that I've defined things a little bit, let's move on to this week's checklist!  As my mother would say, "It's a big'un, Jase."

• Are the details in the scene the ones that your focal character would notice?   Not everyone would see the discarded matchbook in the gutter at the scene of a crime, or know the name for the specific cut of a man's suit jacket.  If Desmond sells produce at a farmer's market, he might not know what key a song is in on the radio ... unless, of course, his dear girlfriend Molly is the singer in a band, in which case, he might.  You have to know your characters, and know what they would know.  If they wouldn't know or notice something, you shouldn't show your reader!  Leave it for another character who might, in a later scene.
• Is character development proportional to its influence on the plot? Simply put, if one of your minor characters has a gigantic revelation about the direction his life is taking, he's going to steal the spotlight from your protagonist ... and maybe that spotlight should have belonged to them all along.  Keep your Big Moments saved away for the characters and events that have the most bearing on your plot, and you won't confuse your reader into thinking they should've been rooting for Red-Shirt Guy the entire time.
• Are tangents effective - OR, if you don't have any, do you need them? You could have a great idea for a small vignette involving one of your minor characters wrestling with flying a kite in the park, to break up the melodrama of the nasty divorce you've been focusing on for the whole chapter, sure.  But unless there's some way you can make that kite crash recklessly to the ground and tie it, thematically, to the mess you're writing around it, or have the peace of the scene be a direct contrast, it might not belong where you're putting it.  As far as needing tangents, try picturing your passage in the frame of real life to see how it plays.  Rarely, people stay on the same topic when they're having a conversation.  If April and Jon have been talking about the placement of bruises on a victim in the morgue for two pages straight, they should probably shift gears and start wondering what they're going to have for lunch (it's okay, they do this all the time, they have stronger stomachs than we mere mortals).   I apologize if this explanation is a little vague or muddy - judging the effectiveness of your tangents is likely to be an instinctive thing.  If you aren't sure if it fits, ask a friend or beta reader to give you their opinion.
• Don't overdo personal hobbies.  Sure, one of the best ways to give someone depth is to give them a hobby.  One of the protagonists in my second novel, Troy, was an Eagle Scout ... but he's not going to refer to that every chance he gets.  Not every detail he sees or conversation he has ties back to a merit badge, or a camping trip, or something he did for the community.  It's a handy way to explain how he might know some things (as in that first checkpoint above), but if I beat that detail into the ground, it's going to draw focus away from what's really going on, and more importantly, annoy my reader.  Never.  Annoy.  The Reader!
• Is there a balance between long and short passages?  This one's pretty self-explanatory.
• Does chapter length vary to good effect?  If all your chapters are exactly twenty pages in length, you may not realize it, but you're making your writing monotonous.  Unless, of course, you are of the school of folks like the late, great Terry Pratchett, and don't believe in chapters.  In which case: "Hey, that's just, like, your opinion, man."

Are Your Beats ....

• Well-spaced?  If you place beat after beat after beat, it would be like saying "Look at this.  Okay, now this.  Now this!" and not letting the reader have space to actually see what you're telling them to look at.  Sometimes, for the sake of tension or speed in a scene, you can do this to convey a sense of urgency (an emergency room is a good example), and your reader can double back and re-read if they need to.  But mostly, you don't want to make them revisit much.  You want to keep them moving forward.
• Not mundane?  Remember last week's green checklist, when we touched on trusting your reader to know the basics?  This is pretty much the same thing.  Don't tell them how he opened the bag of bread, took out two slices, and put them in the toaster, just say he loaded the danged toaster.  (Blogger's Note: If you're doing this to up your daily word count for something like NaNo, that's your cup of coffee, as long as you edit it and pare it down afterward, for the love of literature.)
• Character Cues/Details? As often as possible, the way your character does things should reveal something about who they are, so that you don't have to just up and tell your reader at some other point.  Remember the orange list?
• Rhythmically sound? The best way to test this is to read it aloud and see how it feels and sounds.  Do it in your car, in your bathroom at home, in a soundproof recording booth, or even in the middle of a bus if you're not super-self-conscious like yours truly.  If you stumble over a certain part, you might need to consider fixing it.

That about does it for this week's checklist - and look at that, I made it through with a minute to spare.  Pardon me while I run like a coordination-challenged gazelle so that I can make it to work on time.  Next week is all about one of my personal favorites: dialogue!  It's gonna be a fun one.  Until then, keep writing, keep reading, and keep on rockin' in the free world.

Welcome to the third week of the Rainbow Editing method!  We're halfway through!  Before I begin the list, however, I want to let you all know that Camp NaNoWriMo is beginning in just a little under a week!  For those of you familiar with the concept of regular NaNo, it is much the same, but with the option of setting your own word count goal, and the ability to create "cabins" of fellow writers for moral support and discussion throughout the month.  My first Camp sessions were last year, and I had a fantastic experience.  I recommend Camp for people who are thinking of trying NaNoWriMo to get into a writing habit, but aren't sure if they can handle the full 50k goal that November sets. For more information, you can check out their website here (which will open in a new window for you).  If you're feeling supportive and would like to cheer me on, my profile page is here, and it will chart my progress.  Now: on to the editing!

"Be still, so that your characters can speak for themselves and come alive in their own way." - Frederick Buechner

Green's area of focus is Character and Point of View.  I'm not talking about figuring out who your characters are - if you still aren't sure about that, even after a first draft, you're not ready to go over the rainbow yet.  With editing, you're looking at Character in terms of whether or not it fits or not.  Would your main character use euphemisms like "golly jeepers" or would she just rip right out on a streak that would make a minister blush?   E
verything on this list is rooted in one purpose, the most important one of all for fiction writers: connect your reader to your characters.  These are both some of the best tricks for doing that, and some of the biggest things to avoid. 

• Don't tell a trait when showing it will do.  This is close to last week's Orange list ... so it's no surprise that it's the first on the list.  If a character is nervous, show him picking at a loose thread on his sleeve while he waits to meet someone, instead of just saying that he nervously sat in the foyer.  If they're impatient, have them tap their feet or repeatedly check the clock.  If they don't want to be there, they might hunch in their chair or wrap their arms around themselves.  When you run into trouble assigning visible evidence of an emotion or trait, try going to a public place and watching people, or remembering how people you know act.  Or, of course, you could always check out The Emotion Thesaurus by Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman.  I've been following them on Twitter for about a year now, and they're both fantastic women and incredibly helpful.  Tell them "msfeistus" said hi.
  

• Backstories and Flashbacks: Yes, knowing your main character's history (and some of the supporting cast's, too) is necessary to crafting a plot that your readers can sink their teeth into and really care about.  The tricky part is knowing when showing that history to them directly is necessary!  That flashback about the main character playing poker with her uncle is cute, and telling, but while she's in the middle of a high-stakes game that could cost her the last of the money in her wallet, four hours from home with a broken-down rental car... are you really going to want to put the brakes on and tell your reader about it?   Maybe she could just coolly rearrange the cards in her hand and hope to herself that all her uncle's bluffing lessons after Thanksgiving dinners paid off, instead.  It tells the reader what you need them to know without yanking them out of that vital moment.
  
• Why are they saying it?  Or, in other words: check your dialogue.  This is, in my opinion, the worst mistake that can be made with dialogue, and lazy to boot.  It's easy enough to have two characters talking about last night's car accident outside their workplace, and yes, in some cases it could make for some really snappy dialogue.  But in most cases, it's much better to show one of them having to walk two extra blocks because their usual parking spot is taken up by traffic cones and yellow tape, because they're still cleaning up the broken glass and dealing with the bent road sign on the corner, right?  You can see "car accident" written all over that without someone else having to say it out loud.
• Pick a point of view and follow it.  I'm not just talking about first-person vs. third-person, I'm talking about whose head you're letting the reader into.  If you're primarily putting Elwood in the driver's seat, stopping in the middle of the highway and deciding to let Jake drive isn't going to work so well.  If you're going to need to show multiple characters' points of view, be sure to divide the attention you give to them equal, or it's going to jar your reader.  For example: From the Desk... follows Buster around almost 100% of the time. Somewhere in my second chapter, I got a little too far into his friend Cameron's head and started telling the reader what he was thinking ... after I'd just spent over 20 pages showing the reader how the world looks according to Buster.  It didn't fit with the flow, and I had to rework the passage.
• Don't just describe... transport.  If a scene is particularly dramatic or vital, your setting and descriptions should match your character's mood.  I'm not saying it has to be raining in every sad scene or that lightning should strike every time your villain breaks into peals of maniacal laughter - though being able to feasibly write those kind of scenes is ridiculously rewarding sometimes (she said, glancing at her outline for book #2).  What I'm trying to say is that any setting can be emotionally charged, and any action can be written to betray how someone's feeling while they're doing it.  When Katrina walks, is she noticing the way the sunlight catches glasses in a store window and makes them sparkle?   If Marvin is drinking his tea, is he huddled around the cup or leaned back in his chair with his feet up?   The same alley can look like a wide open space to a murderer or as small as a coffin to the person he's followed there... catch my drift?

Next week we're going into a blue period: there are two shades of blue in the editing spectrum!  Please come back and join me for Sky Blue, where we'll start listening to our writing and not just reading it.

Welcome back!  For the second week of the Rainbow Editing checklist, we're covering orange!  Symbolically, orange is a color of action and intelligence, so I thought it appropriate for the over-quipped, sometimes under-used "Show, Don't Tell".  The thing I've discovered about SDT: the showing doesn't apply so much to over-detailing every pebble on the road and piece of litter as it does the emotional content of a scene.  But we'll get to that. 

 Ready for the list?  Let's go!

• Main Events are for big scenes, not summaries.  At first glance, this might seem like a no-brainer.... and for the most part, it is.  For example: having your character leave work and then segue straight to the next morning, when he starts to think about how he'll go about a normal day after being mugged, is a sure-fire way to make your readers spam you with hate mail, or, if they're only beta-readers who know where you live, storm your porch with pitchforks and torches.  Not to mention that, uh, what writer doesn't look forward to writing a scene full of tension and that delicious, delicious drama?
• Resist the urge to explain (R.U.E).  I was surprised how guilty I was of this in a few scenes.  What RUE boils down to is that you need to trust your reader.  If someone's running a bath, you don't have to tell them exactly how they turn on the water, or that they have to wait for it to fill up, or test the temperature before getting in.  Everyone's run a bath.  Most people have started a car.  And even if only a small portion of the population has built their own computer tower from scratch, you still don't need to walk them through every step of the process.  Times like this are when you shouldn't show the external details: they're when you should turn that showing focus inward and let your reader know what's running through your character's mind: but only if they're thoughts worth showing.  For goodness' sake, they don't need to know that your protagonist's nose itches.
• Once Is Usually Enough:  If you hark back to the Sophistication checklist, you may remember that I said that routines only need to be described once.  If you're going to describe that routine, do it at a place in the plot where its impact on the character or plot is at its clearest, for maximum effect.   Finally, be wary of characters who have similar growth paths ... if two need to grapple with the death of a family member, let one carry the burden and give the other a different means toward development.  If you can't find one, maybe that second character isn't necessary after all.  I know, I know: it terrified me to think that someone I created and poured life into might be unnecessary, too.  It doesn't mean you can't use them at all.  Just save them for later.  It will be okay.  I promise.
• Don't overuse favorite words, phrases, or stylistic effects. As you go through your work, make note of things that you use in abundance (one of mine was, strangely enough, the phrase "a minimum of fuss").  Certain characters will develop quirks: polishing their glasses while they think, rubbing the back of their neck when they're nervous, shaking their leg under the table when they're bored.  That's fine!  It helps give a clearer picture of them to their reader.  Just make sure they aren't doing it in every. single. scene.  In terms of stylistic effects, I have a writer friend who's very fond of the "fake-out": making something seem much more or less important than it really is... but she is careful how she uses it, and to what effect.  Just like the description of a routine I discussed above, use your favorite stylistic tricks where they'll have the most impact on your plot!  If you start with a fake-out, for example, you may be setting your reader up to not trust you at all... and that's hardly the relationship you want to have, now, is it?
• Try not to re-describe, even with in-character recaps.  Yes, once Big Event A happens in your plot, it is very likely that not everyone in your cast of characters will be around.  The poor soul who experienced it is going to have to tell everyone else.  But RUE!  To paraphrase Mater the Truck: they remember, they was there, too.  Which means that they only really need to sit through one explanation in order to understand the lasting impact it had on your poor soul... unless, perhaps, there's a difference in the telling between people that might show something telling.  In that case, just skim the parts you've already covered with a dialogue beat (we'll get to beats in the blue sections, soon).   

Overall, the main theme of the Orange checklist is to trust your reader, and assume that they are relatively intelligent.  They'll remember what you've already told them, and they have everyday experiences of their own to bring to the table.  You don't want to show them how life works, in general: you want to show them how life works for this group of characters that you've created, and you want them to become involved and care about the way it ends out.  I don't know about you, but telling me how great a book is doesn't really make me care about it.  If you sit me down on a couch, put that book in my hand, and say "Here.  Read this.  I'll go occupy myself while you enjoy it"?  I will.  I may, in fact, forget that you're there.  And isn't that what we want our readers to do?

Next week, get ready to go green, when I cover character and point of view.  See you then!

This week marks the first in a series of seven posts about the Rainbow Editing method I discussed in my last entry.  Are you ready?  Let's paint our manuscripts red!  I know that for a lot of people, the thought of red pen conjures up images of merciless markings by teachers ... which is probably why I chose it for my first group of editing criteria: what Self-Editing for Writers refers to as Sophistication.  It's a far less intimidating way of saying "spelling, punctuation, and style".  Here are the items that fall on my red Sophistication checklist:

• Action sentences which start with "As", or verbs ending in "ing".  Replace these with a more active voice.  Crossing the street makes the street seem more important than the person doing so.  Buster crossed the street is much more lively and unlikely to make your reader remember they're .... well, reading.
  

• Adverbs: you know, those pesky yet ever so tantalizing descriptive words ending in "ly".  Easily, you could pepper your writing with them ... but why say that someone did something angrily instead of showing how they convey that emotion?  Which is the clearer picture: Angrily, Jeremiah served Daniel his drink or Jeremiah set Daniel's drink down with a force that rattled the ice in his glass?  .... Yeah, I thought so.  That being said, I must confess that adverbs are my worst enemy, especially when I'm rushing to meet a word count or get an idea out of my head, and not thinking quite so much about the quality of my work.
  

• Short, punchy sentences in abundance.  This is more likely to crop up in dialogue, because people are more likely to talk that way than you're likely to describe things that way.  (I would personally make an exception if this trick is used stylistically for humorous purposes, but do so sparingly.)   In dialogue, however, those short sentences  can be strung together with commas or ellipses.  "I know," Cam said.  "She's strung out, it's totally weird... I'm getting worried."
  

• Italics and exclamation points.  This is also, to me, a stylistic choice, and OK if used sparingly.  I tend to use italics for internal thought or stressing words in particularly emotional or heated bits of dialogue.  Exclamations are reserved for similar occasions.   I have also seen a lot of editors and writers giving bad press to the interrobang (?!), but find it useful for rare usage in dialogue which is equal parts shock and confusion.  (I think both instances of interrobang use in my first novel belong to poor Buster ...)
  

• Cliche figures of speech.  Don't worry, if a character is likely to spout them to the dismay of their friends and colleagues, let them loose.  Cliches as a personality quirk are fine ... but you should attempt to avoid them in descriptions (unless, like short sentences, you are lampshading them for the sake of humor).   The bag was heavy as a rock isn't half as effective as the weight of the bag nearly tore his arm from its socket.
  (The link within this example could potentially steal hours of your life. You have been warned.)

• Unnecessary profanity.  Have you ever known someone who held the opinion that stand-up comedians with clean language are funnier than those who riddle their routines with curses?  I may not agree in that respect, but profanity has no place in your descriptions.  Also, most people don't cuss blue streaks on a daily basis.  I have a few characters with foul mouths, but Aviario isn't populated with clones of Eminem or Samuel L. Jackson. 
  

• Abundance of mundane details.  Sorry, Hemingway fans.  For the most part, describing every single tiny thing your character does is going to slow your plot down and bore the living daylights out of your reader.  Most readers are well-versed in the ins and outs of basic daily routines.  If you have someone with a desk job, the reader will assume that in the morning, they'll power on a computer, check email, et cetera.  If the character has a crazy morning, but an uneventful afternoon, you can skip to the next noteworthy event in your plot by briefly summarizing the time that has passed.  Trust your readers to be intelligent... if you leave the mundane things out, they'll fill in the blanks.  Even if you have a character with OCD, you should only need to show their meticulous routine once to get the point across .... but that's edging into Orange, which we'll cover next week.
  

And so, we come to the end of the Sophistication checklist.  Which item on the list do you feel you need to work on the most?   Be sure to let me know, and please come back next week for the orange checklist, when we pull Show vs. Tell out from where it's been beaten into the ground.

Back in January, I finished my first, quick edit of From the Desk... and knew that it would not be enough.  I needed to roll up my sleeves and dig in.  Unfortunately, most of the editing advice I had seen in blogs and writers' sites was only helpful in a vague sense.   I knew I had to tighten my writing, but not how.  I knew I had to exterminate my adverbs, but I wasn't sure why.  Most of all, I saw that I had to "kill my darlings", but didn't know how to make it a mercy killing that would actually make the end result better without them.

Enter a book that has landed itself a spot in my top five writing guides and memoirs: Self Editing For Fiction Writers, by Renni Browne and Dave King.  You can read more about the book itself - and find yourself a copy, if you're so inclined - here on their website.   I'm not here to review, but here to tell you how I combined their wisdom with a "rainbow editing" tip I saw on a writer's blog several months ago. 

Each chapter in Self-Editing focused on a particular skill-set: character voice, dialogue, grammar, style, and so on.  Since I mostly do my editing during my lunch breaks at work, I refrained from taking notes, as I was hoping to come up with something portable that would take up a minimum of space.  Instead, I flagged each point that I found could pertain to my projected editing process.   Once I finished, I assigned a color to each skill-set and consolidated the chapters into checklists: simple descriptions of things I could scan for and mark to correct when it was time to edit my digital copy.   Then I bought a set of my favorite writing pens in rainbow colors, and got to work. 

I hit the halfway point in my hard-copy edit yesterday, and I'm happy to report that the method is working extremely well, so far!   In addition to helping me catch everything, I can use it as a sort of score-card for my writing style: more of one color than another means that it's an area I need to focus on improving when I start work on In The Cards again, this coming April!   

Since this method works so well for me, I feel like I should share it with any other writers out there - so expect one color checklist each week while I finish up my editing!