Inventing Reality Editing Service

Five Great Quotes about Writing as Self-Discovery

“I feel I'm able to get rid of any demons lurking in my psyche through my writing, which leaves me free to create all of this and to enjoy our family life, stepping away from all the fictional traumas and the dramas. If I write about family in crisis, then I won't have to live through it, I guess.” – Jodi Picoult

“I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.” – Robert Frost

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” – Anais Nin

“Words are a lens to focus one's mind.” – Ayn Rand

“Writing for me is a reckoning.” – Kao

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like San Diego, California, or a small town like Eek, Arkansas, I can provide that second eye.

Build character by looking at his values

Successfully building a character in a story almost always is the one challenge a writer absolutely must get right. It’s also often the most difficult challenge facing any writer.

To create a character, first ask yourself, “What matters most to him?” It might be duty, proving oneself to his father, knowing the truth, helping others, or any of a thousand other values that motivate people to behave in a specific way. Upon determining this value, devise a set of physical features and personality traits that lend themselves to revealing it.

Hence, don’t give a male character “blond” hair simply because that’s how you envision him. Instead, this blondness ought to serve a purpose – perhaps it shows him as youthful or possibly it’s because he spends a lot of time outdoors so the sun has “bleached” his hair color. This can be difficult as the more important a character is to a story, arguably, the more physical description of him should be given.

Of course, these qualities should result in a believable character. Even if writing genre fiction, you’re aiming for verisimilitude. Without that, readers will have difficulty identifying with the character.

Such believability can be established by creating the character in the world where your story occurs. That is, every character is extrapolated from a culture. Hence, a modern-day character who is a rogue might wear long, unkempt hair as would a pirate, but he probably wouldn’t don shorts with puffed sleeves and wear breeches, which are clothes out of the 1500s.

Another way to establish believability is to ensure that every reader understands how the character came to be the way he is. This may require you to create a biography or resume for your character; the bio and resume wouldn’t be provided in its entirety to readers but can help you as a writer think through how the character came to be the person he is. The relevant details then would be included in the story.

Always remain flexible as creating a character. Just because you’ve devised a character’s history, you’re not stuck with or limited to it. A character’s background can be changed as necessary while you write the story and develop him. The only rule is to be consistent in the presentation of the character’s background.

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Portland, Oregon, or a small town like Papa, Hawaii, I can provide that second eye.

Get pullquotes on your Amazon.com page

Self-published authors have long known that reviews on their book’s Amazon.com sales page translates to purchases. Readers often decide to buy a book based on the reviews – and a book with only one or two reviews (or worse, no reviews) probably won’t impress a reader as much as a book with a dozen or more.

Unfortunately, the more reviews your book has, the less likely readers are to wade through all of them, meaning the best couple of comments might be skipped.

To aid readers and authors alike, Amazon.com sometimes will add a set of three quotations, pulled from your reviews, to the top of the list of customer reviews. The pullquotes are selected by a computer algorithm that looks for common phrasing and wording used throughout the reviews of your book. It then pulls a quotation representative of the three most common phrases/words.

These quotations are quick and easy to read, include a note of how many other reviewers made similar statements, and are linked to the full review where the quotation was made. Because of this and their location, these pullquotes alone are powerful enough to generate sales.

The pullquotes won’t appear, however, until your book has enough reviews. How many that is remains a secret, but most of my editing clients say around 10 reviews leads to pullquotes. Of my own titles, one with as few as five reviews includes the quotations; my books with only three reviews do not, however. So, if you’ve ever needed any motivation to get at least five reviews for your book, you now have it.

Currently, authors can’t select which pullquotes are used. So long as the majority of your reviews are positive, however, they will be beneficial.

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Tampa, Florida, or a small town like Deadhorse, Alaska, I can provide that second eye.

Consider differences between paper, ebooks

In today’s publishing world, you need to sell both a paper and an ebook version of your title. There are plenty of readers for both platforms and many who prefer one over the other, so to limit yourself to either a paper or an ebook severely limits your potential number of buyers.

While the same content generally appears in both the paper and the ebook versions of your title, there are differences between the two platforms. Knowing those differences can help you plan how your book will be presented in each platform and make each version better.

Ebooks differ from paper books in five major ways:
g Page numbers – Ebooks do not have page numbers because the reader can change the font and font size, meaning there’s no analog between what’s seen on the ereader’s screen to what’s seen on a paper book’ page. Most eboks instead tell a reader what percentage of the book they’ve read or thumbed through.
g Interactivity – A paper book can list a website URL and a bibliography of other titles to read. As an ebook can be linked to the web, simply touching word or a title can take you to that source.
g Article-like content – Though hardly true of all ebooks, the short magazine-like approach to content is quite common among titles written primarily for electronic consumption. In contrast to a paper book, the small screen lends itself well to short paragraphs and belleted points.
g Nonconducive to pictures/poetry – Because the font sizes can be changed and the small screen size, ebook wreak havoc with line breaks in poetry. Pictures also are limited in size; while a paper book always can be made larger so that photographs run larger, all ebooks must fit a single size, which is that of an ereader’s screen.
g Price – For the moment, ebooks invariably are less expensive that paper books. That only makes sense, as an ebook can be sent electronically via the Internet to your ereader wherea a paper book requires trees, printing plants, warehouses, and trucking to create and then delver the book to a reader.

The upshot of these major differences greatly effects you during the self-publishing process. For example, you’ll likely need to format the title twice, once for your ebook and once for your paper book. You may want to add links to your ebook and not spell out the URLs. You will have to consider how photos are sized for the two different versions. You’ll have to determine and set different prices for each platform. And those are just a few of the obvious differences.

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Austin, Texas, or a small town like Bald Knob, Arkansas, I can provide that second eye.

Tighten writing by deleting unneeded attribution

If introducing a character through some action, there's no need to add that they “said” something and then provide their line of dialogue. Simply describing what they're doing is sufficient to show that they are giving the next line of spoken dialogue - so long as that dialogue appears in the same paragraph as their described action.

For example, instead of writing:

The nurse decided to step in. She said, “Sweetheart we need to redo these stitches and then get you into surgery and fast. It is dangerous for you to be losing this much blood.”

Write this:

The nurse decided to step in. “Sweetheart, we need to redo these stitches and then get you into surgery and fast. It is dangerous for you to be losing this much blood.”

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from an urban area like California's Inland Empire or a rural area like Loving County, Texas,I can provide that second eye.

Avoid placing ‘used furniture’ in your story

One of the most common mistakes novice genre writers make is failing to be creative enough with their new universe. Many have developed a great plot and intriguing characters, but their setting is uninteresting – despite that they’ve taken great pains to describe the landscape and appeal to multiple senses.

The problem is that haven’t really created a unique universe. Instead, they’ve set the story in an all ready established universe have merely changed the names to give it semblance of originality. After all, how many science fiction stories boast a spacecraft armed with quantum torpedoes and that represents a great interstellar alliance that is exploring the galaxy? The crew is largely human, except the alien first officer, who hails from Alpha Centauri. If the universe sounds like the USS Enterprise of “Star Trek” fame, it is, albeit with a couple of not so subtle variations.

When writers set a story in another author’s universe – whether it be science fiction, a western, or a mystery sent in a cozy cottage town – and then changes the names to conceal it, they are guilty of using used furniture. It’s a term from screenwriting in which furniture and props from other productions are reused in a new episode or show.

Readers generally feel cheated when a writer borrows another universe, especially in the science fiction genre. Think of it this way: Science fiction can take the reader to utterly new worlds and vistas; it’s one of the appeals to readers of the genre. Reading a story set a universe one has already experienced often is like getting the same meal for dinner that you had for lunch. Sometimes a sequel works, but more often than not it’s a lot like eating leftovers.

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Tucson, Arizona, or a small town like Zap, North Dakota, I can provide that second eye.

Destage dramatic action that slows your story

If your story seems to be moving slowly, you may need to destage some of the action.

A term borrowed from theater and coined by CSFW’s Steve Popkes, destaging occurs when the author moves what has been shown onstage to offstage. Onstage action consists of dramatic passages that are presented with great detail for the reader. In contrast, offstage action is that which occurs behind the curtains and so in a story isn’t shown but merely inferred or quickly noted.

The following is an example of onstage action:

Getting into the car, Pliny buckled his seat belt then turned the ignition. Checking over his shoulder, he saw no vehicles coming and so pulled onto the highway. The sun shined brightly through the windows as he drove to the conference center.

However, this could be presented as offstage action by distilling it to the most basic description of what happened:

After driving to the conference center, Pliny…

The above example of onstage action certainly merits destaging. The details of how Pliny started his car and drove to the conference center are simply not dramatic enough to bear so much attention. Because of that, those details slow the story by reducing suspense and tension.

Often even including a quick reference is unnecessary. In the above example, an empty line or set of centered asterisks probably is sufficient between the scene in which Pliny is at the conference center and the previous scene. Hence, the new scene might simply start, At the conference center, Pliny… Exactly how Pliny reached the conference center is irrelevant to the story; it is sufficient to infer that he used a typical, uninteresting mode of transportation for reaching that location.

Of course, sometimes the writer has to do the opposite of destaging. Action that was shown offstage may need to be moved onstage. That requires fleshing out all of the beat-by-beat details of what was simply inferred or quickly noted.

This decision to destage or to move action onstage usually occurs during rewriting.

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Detroit, Michigan, or a small town like Carefree, Arizona, I can provide that second eye.

Minneapolis paper mentions editors’ book

Today’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune briefly mentions my latest book, Hittin’ the Trail: Day Hiking the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway in its “Bedside Table” feature. Written by readers, the feature tells what titles Twin Cities book lovers are enjoying and why. If you’re a Strib subscriber, the article can be found on page E12; if not, it’s available online.

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like San Diego, California, or a small town like Eek, Arkansas, I can provide that second eye.

What makes a person a ‘writer’?

Though  what you’ve read may feel magical, the author was no magician. Rather than wave a wand leading to instant words on a page, the writer worked hard when constructing that short story, essay or book. Most often, that hard work was pleasurable, too, akin to the feeling members of a sports team get when winning. The sweat yielded its own reward.

Authors find pleasure in their work – and so do readers – when living like a writer. No, that doesn’t mean having an open booze bottle next to one’s tablet or spending days in a coffee shop toiling at a laptop. To be a writer doesn’t mean to take on the affectations of famous authors who’ve come before.

No, being a writer generally means possessing five key qualities or personality traits:

Curiosity
Writers find people, our world, and the self interesting and want to know more. They explore their surroundings and themselves in any number of ways – reading, traveling, experiencing first-hand, and more. Writers examine their personal beliefs and boundaries and ask questions that others might never even think to raise.

Observant
Writers notice details that define a person or place. They discover behaviors that suggest something more is below the surface and make connections that the average person would not otherwise see.

Love of words
Writers revel in the sounds and meanings of words and sentences and passages; they delight in the poetry of language, feel the fire and ice of words. Anyone can be curious and observant, but writers don’t express what they’ve seen or experienced via a painting, song, dance or sculpture but through words on a page. Words are their passion.

Imaginative
Whether writing nonfiction or fiction, prose or poetry, or novels or screenplays, writers are creative. They not only discover intriguing relationships in people’s lives and the universe but can weave words about those associations into gripping sentences and passages.

Write all the time
Most important of all, a writer must write. Writers possess not just the courage to share their observations and personal feelings but a fervor for doing so. They feel empty when they do not write, whether it be to inform, to entertain or to persuade.

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Tampa, Florida, or a small town like Deadhorse, Alaska, I can provide that second eye.

Editing client pubishes second novel in trilogy

A recent editing client of mine, D.R. Bell, has published his second novel, the action-adventure thriller “The Metronome.” The story tells the tale of Pavel Rostin, who as trying to solve the mystery of his father’s death find himself drawn deeper and deeper into his family’s past – and his country’s future. From starving 1941 Leningrad to free-wheeling Moscow of the mid-1990s to bubbly 2006 Wall Street, Pavel uncovers a web of money, murder, revenge and evidence of a plot involving the world’s superpowers. The choices of right and wrong don’t look as clear cut as in newspaper headlines. But is he just a pawn in someone else’s game? “The Metronome” is the first book in “The Counterpoint” trilogy and a prequel to the already published “The Great Game.” The novel can be purchased online.

Need an editor? Having your book, business document or academic paper proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. Whether you come from a big city like Tampa, Florida, or a small town like Deadhorse, Alaska, I can provide that second eye.