Five Tips for Writers, from an Editor

Things I suggest that you do, and don’t do, while rewriting your MS

We hear often that “writing is rewriting” but how does one go about it? Since I am writing a book about editing—based on my 27-plus years on the job—it occurred to me that a list of some common challenges I encounter when I am content-editing manuscripts might be useful to the writers out there.

Rather than writing them in order of importance, I’ve written them in the order that you might take them on in your rewriting, with the easiest ones that mostly involve cutting big chunks of text coming first, and the most time-consuming one coming last—cut with an axe before you trim with a scalpel. You can use this list as you self-edit your manuscript, before turning it over to your writer’s group or Beta readers, and definitely before you hire a professional editor.

1. Don’t start with backstory. Start with some sort of action, no matter how small (definitely don’t start with the cliche of your Main Character waking up and getting ready for work though). Telling us everything you know about your MC starting on page 1 is fun for you, but not for us. It’s too much too soon. When you’re rewriting, select one or two key facts to share and sprinkle the rest in the following pages, like spices—as needed. Simply showing us a character going about their life for a chapter or two in order to show what their life is like won’t hook us. Rather than writing pages about how long your MC has worked at Acme Widgets and how she’s finally going to ask for a raise, start with her walking into her boss’s office. Use their dialogue to reveal how long she’s been there, why she deserves a raise, and then let us find out why she is or isn’t getting one. That makes it a crucial day by changing her situation—especially if she does not get the raise—and gives readers a whole lot of info without boring us with her thoughts, preparations, and worries.

2. This one goes hand-in-hand with limiting expository: Don’t use a lot of names or place names early on—or anywhere in the book or story, for that matter. I can’t tell what’s important if everything’s named, because then it all feels equally important. For example: “Ann Dale walked out of Consolidated Tool and Die of Richmond, California, with the company’s handsome new CEO, Franklin Smith—late of New Haven, Connecticut—while his fresh-faced young secretary Alice Jones scurried to open the door of his new Mercedes SUV, fresh off the lot at Richmond Luxury Automobiles.” Give us the summary “Ann Dale walked out of work with the company’s handsome new CEO while his fresh-faced young secretary scurried to open his gleaming luxury SUV,” and tell us the rest (if it is key, naturally) in subsequent sentences or pages or chapters where it comfortably fits in. (If it’s a romance, definitely keep the name of the handsome new boss, or give it to us very quickly.) A final thought about this one: even if you had four friends in school, your MC doesn’t need four friends—that’s too many names to keep straight. One is plenty, unless you need her to be torn between two friends in some way.

3. Reveal what is at stake for your Main Character as quickly as you can. Why is today the most important day in their life—and yes, it should be, though the next day (in the timeline of book) may quickly top the list of important days if you’re doing your job right. If you’re writing literary fiction, the fact that your MC is about to confront their authoritarian father (or mother or spouse or sibling) for the first time in their life can come late in chapter one. If you’re writing a thriller, the MC’s fear of losing her life might be shown on page one. Taking too long before you decide to share with us just what the MC has to lose—or gain—risks losing our attention. Now, some settings might be enough in themselves to show the MC’s situation dramatically enough—a mental hospital, an orphanage, a prison cell—but if the MC is just standing in their kitchen smilingly testing the butcher knife’s edge as they stare at the clock, we need a clue as to whether we should fear suicide or homicide, or are they just wondering what they should prepare for dinner?

4. Describe people and things visually, not intellectually. Describing people by what they do doesn’t help us to visualize them. Writing that someone is a student, or a doctor, or a writer doesn’t mean anything without some context and plenty of visualization. A crabby neighbor or a sexy waitress or a superior professor is an idea rather than a living, breathing person with true interiority. A woman in her twenties with a crying baby on her hip who steps onto a bus wearing studded black motorcycle leathers and Doc Martens is interesting—especially if the baby is dressed in a three piece suit and a bow tie—but a “young mother with a baby” is two-dimensional set decoration (this can be fine if your MC is in a crowd, of course). The same thing is true and equally important when it comes to settings; give us just enough specific description to intrigue us, but leave out the long laundry list of details. “An old house” is too generic, but “a 1950s clapboard cottage with peeling paint,” gives us enough of an image to start with. You can add more details as you go on, preferably showing us something new each time your characters visit that location; don’t forget to use the season or the weather to make the setting come to life.

5. Try to limit the use of thought verbs and filter words. Thought verbs are words like think/thought, know/knew, understand, realize, want, need and remember. If it happens from the neck up, it is a thought verb. And, because these things happen in our heads, they tend to be unclear, when seen from the outside. Wanting, needing, and remembering all look pretty much the same from the outside, but they can lead to very different reactions, whether verbal or physical. Instead, let your readers in on the inner life of your characters by showing their reactions to these mental processes in dialogue—or, better yet, in character-revealing action. Filter words are the words we use to filter the world through our characters senses. Words like look/looked, see/saw, watch/watched, hear/heard, touch/touched, and felt/feel. When you use a filter word, it reminds the reader that someone else looked, saw, watched, heard, touched or felt. If we remove the filter, then readers do that. Instead of writing: “I looked across the street to see if the man in the trench coat was still looking at me, and saw that he was staring back at me. It gave me the feeling of being watched,” I’d write: “The man in the trench coat still stared from across the street. I was being watched.”

These are just a few examples of the kinds of things a content editor like myself might flag in your novel or short story. Though #5 sounds like a copyediting problem, it really isn’t, because if the use of thought verbs and filter words is a global issue (a bad habit that occurs throughout the manuscript) then I need to flag it in the first pass, so that you have time to search out each one of these in your rewrite, finding ways to turn many of them into more specific words or actions that will help you to create active visual scenes.

Any questions? Please ask in the comments below (click on the heart to jump through to my Substack page if you are reading this in your inbox, and then click on comment). As always, I welcome likes and shares and restacks because that helps more people find us here on Substack, because, let’s face it, there are a lot of new ‘stacks every week now, and mine doesn’t have any hot sex in it, so of course, I need a bit more help promoting it!

I’ll post images from our recent anchorage up here on the Sunshine Coast of B.C. Click on my previous weeks’ posts for more Canadian travels.

An affordable beachfront home.

We all need a place where “Eveyone” is welcome (see the sign on the beach fort pic above). I hope to see you all here next week.

hasta pronto!