Editing Otherwise: Fresh Approaches to Stories and Settings

It's very common for newer fantasy writers to focus heavily on worldbuilding and much less on developing their characters. After all, worldbuilding is the main draw of fantasy and speculative fiction more widely, and novels in all genres have characters. Older fantasy novels often had quite flat, undeveloped characters. The current Anglo-American market for fantasy fiction has moved on, though. The popularity of Romantasy links to the increased importance of strong emotional

This blog post describes developmental editing services and how they are different from manuscript critiques. The second half covers...

This blog post describes what a manuscript critique, as a paid developmental editing service , involves. It covers whether authors can really benefit from them, and what kind of specific story advice they might receive. A manuscript critique is a paid service where authors hire a developmental editor to write a critique / assessment / evaluation of their manuscript. The word critique implies that they will tear it to shreds, but this is not a grad school critique. Instead, th

The marketplace for editorial services can be really confusing, especially to new authors. There’s a lot of bad writing and editing advice out there. Book editors having different views on topics like prologues, chapter titles, acceptable dialogue tags, and adverb use. But fiction developmental editing has a substantial subjective component, too. Proofreaders will agree on whether a typo needs to be corrected, but who’s to say your dual timeline novel should be completely re

This blog post covers: The advantages and disadvantages of using a first-person point of view The two main types of first-person point of view – embedded and retrospective Common problems and how to fix them The use of first-person point of view in ethnography First-person points of view have become increasingly popular in various fiction genres over the past few decades. The reason for this is that they are often highly immersive, and there has been increased appetite for im

Blake Snyder’s book Save the Cat! offers a blueprint for screenwriters on how to draft a successful film script. The book draws on his...

This trope often appears in film, and in popular culture and novels too. It features a woman who has typically experienced some kind of...