Tales from Substack
Tales from Substack
Since January, I’ve been writing a monthly newsletter. You can subscribe for free to receive roundups of how I’m getting my writing done, shoutouts for great books I’ve read, and tips for emerging writers.
Every so often, I’ll post extracts here on my blog.
Tip Three: Edit in the Right Order
1. Structural Edit – This is the big-picture revision. Look at the overall shape of the story – do you hook the reader, maintain pace, have cliff-hangers and reveals in the right place? Are some scenes too slow, too fast, irrelevant? Are there too many/too few characters? Could some characters be combined into one? Do subplots need cutting/expanding/moving to different places within the main plot?
2. Line Edit – Once the structure is in place, this edit takes a line-by-line look at style, vocabulary, phrasing, clarity, logic and flow. It also looks out for character and plot inconsistencies – e.g. a brown-eyed, married father of two in chapter one morphs into a blue-eyed bachelor in chapter thirteen.
3. Copyedit – At a publishing house, this is done by a different editor to ensure a fresh pair of eyes works on the manuscript. It concentrates on spelling, punctuation, grammar, formatting and the publisher’s house style. It looks for consistency in all these points and will likely also pick up more character and plot inconsistencies.
4. Proofread – Another pair of eyes to make a detailed check in order to polish the manuscript.
The order of the edits is crucial whether you’re working with a publishing house or updating your own manuscript.
There’s no point in tinkering at the sentence level if the scene you’re working on would be structurally better if: it appeared elsewhere in the story; it featured different characters; it should be cut completely.
Attempting the edits in the wrong order would be like hanging wallpaper before you’ve done the plastering or even built the walls.
Tip Four: Dotting the Dialogue
*So far this year on behalf of the Henshaw Press Short Story Competitions, I’ve read 43 short stories and provided a critique for 23. One issue that often comes up is how to punctuate direct speech. Here’s my short and snappy guide:
Punctuation with speech tags
Speech tags are for verbs that can be spoken – he said, she asked, they replied etc.
‘I’m writing a story,’ he said. – The speech ends in a comma inside the closing speech mark. The subsequent speech tag ‘he said’ starts with a lower-case h.
‘What’s it about?” she asked. The spoken question ends with a question mark inside the closing speech mark. The subsequent speech tag ‘she asked’ starts with lower-case s.
‘I haven’t decided,’ he said, ‘but I’ll let you know.’ – The speech tag is inserted in the middle of ‘I haven’t decided but I’ll let you know.’ (one sentence). In this case, a comma follows the speech tag and the second half of the spoken sentence continues inside speech marks with ‘but’ starting with lower-case b.
Punctuation without speech tags
Words like smile, chuckle, grimace, grin, laugh, yawn are not speech tags; you can’t grin a speech.
‘I’m writing a story.’ He grinned. – Grin is not a speech tag, so the speech ends with a full stop and the next sentence starts with a capital H.
Similarly, the following do not contain speech tags and are punctuated accordingly:
‘What’s it about?” She laughed.
‘I haven’t decided.’ He scratched his head. ‘Please give me time to think.’
Keep it simple
The most striking thing in a section of dialogue should be the dialogue, not the speech tag. Stick to using she/he/they said most of the time. The reader’s eye will move smoothly over ‘he said’ and concentrate on the characters’ spoken words. Don’t trip up your reader with demanded, offered, ordered, inquired, exclaimed, retorted and many more thesaurus-happy alternatives.