I've always found participation in a local writing (critique) group to be extremely beneficial.
Thanks for following The Immortal Jukebox. I hope you will enjoy some entertaining music and writing and perhaps make some discoveries. I usually post once a week and welcome your comments. Good luck with your blog. Regards Thom.
I like reading my writing out loud to myself. I focus on what is typed because I am reading aloud and I am able to catch most things. Besides, it only costs me a cup of coffee! Happy writings to you!
I feel the pain! It seems like everyone else looking for the help they need is able to get it but when you are the person looking for the same help you either don't get any interest or get screwed in the process. Having the same type of problems and it is driving me insane.
You do need someone else to read your story, but I'm not sure that person should be an editor. The word appears to me to have evolved into several disparate translations, the least desirable of which is someone who wants to re-write your work in order to enhance their own limited understanding. A good editor looks at dots and commas, not at characters and plots. The problem is, though, in this day and age we play a lot more freely upon the strings of language and derivation, so even there an interpretation can be wrong.
Worth saying that, aside from glaring faults, your reader does not edit. A persistent error may become annoying, but the occasional typo is not punishable by use of the dustbin.
I think what you need is a critique partner. There are many sites where you can post a free ad and find a match-up with someone who has a manuscript similar to yours, who is also looking for editing help. For instance, if they want critique on character development but are great at grammar, and maybe you feel secure with your character development skills but want someone to look at your grammar & punctuation. Post what you're great at and what you need, and you can make a match-up based on your strengths and weaknesses.
Critique partnering works because you do the same amount of work you expect your partner to do. Neither one is doing it "for free". And don't worry if you don't find the right match the first time around (my first CP insisted I only use one comma per sentence — something she'd learned in an on-line creative writing class!). Find someone whose skill set seems to complement yours and exchange 30 or 50 pages with them. You'll know when you get their feedback whether the partnership is going to work. If it doesn't, renew your search — there's someone out there looking for you!
I have 2 great CPs now that I found on LadiesWhoCritique.com, but there are other sites out there, like Critique Circle. I believe there's also a critique partner forum on AgentQueryConnect.
Visit local coffee shops and performance venues with community events boards. There is probably a writing group in your area that takes new-comers. Otherwise, if you have friends who are writers who aren't motivated to help, blackmail them. Blackmail aside, I think it's better to have one person reading your work whose opinion you trust than several strangers who have a mild adversarial relationship to you.
The only writing group in my area only meets once a month, and they always meet on a thursday. The other writing groups are on the other end of the city, which is a bit too much of a commute for me to deal with.
Have you looked at scribophile? Basic is free.
Oops. NOW I see someone had the same idea.
Sometimes you can find a University professor in the literary department who would love to help and will accept a simple mention in the book once published.
I think the responses you've received above look very helpful. I think I'll try some of those myself.
Hope that helps. I'll try them out too.
Have you considered the OWW http://sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com/ ? The Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror has been in operation for many years and has been the starting point for the careers of such persons as Elizabeth Bear, Jim Butcher, Nalo Hopkinson. It boasts editors of the caliber ofJeanne Cavelos, Ellen Datlow and Charles Coleman Finlay. It's free for the first month as a tryout and costs either $6 a month or $49 a year. Without it, I know I would not have have found the beta critters who helped me put together a book that was eventually published by a publisher who first read me on the site.
The resources they have are great, but it's the people who are best. You can find others willing to help writers at any level, and you choose who (and when) you wish to review in return (hint: you get more out of reviewing than being reviewed). When you're ready to publish, you will have a great network of people to lean on, many of whom operate at the highest levels of genre publishing and the site has listed resources that tell you how to format a manuscript, or exactly where to go to find editors, agents, graphic designers etc who can help you put the book together.
Better yet, you'll have book that's been vetted and will have learned a thing or two about writing along the way.
There are some great tools online too if you want to look into them. Most of them are free and they help you at least see your story in a different way. I would suggest a google search of editing websites and the like. I use one for my final polish to make sure things are as close to perfect as possible. Also if you look hard enough there are line editors who don't charge a fortune. Good luck!
Tablo is free, also look for beta readers to help… Usually other authors who need their own work reading in return.
Ok, if one cannot afford to "edit out" then one must use one's own smarts. The story is written – that's the good part. Now all that is needed to be one's own editor is intense discipline. You have to want it so bad you can taste it, and if that means editing with a scalpel, so be it. Compared to my old typewriter days, computers make editing a snap anyway. Who could imagine being able to cut and re-paste a whole paragraph, or a sentence that looks better in a different location? And who could imagine a spell-checker? Hint: when it comes to names and places made up, create a separate dictionary for your novel (MS Word offers that option and probably Libre Office does it too) and use that to spell-check. It will tell you if a name is misspelled. The other trick is to fool your brain by reading the work as if you were a paid editor – not the author and never mind the story, just look for obvious mistakes and jarring or trite passages that need fixing, replacing or deleting. Look out for repetitions – your thesaurus is your life jacket in these waters. Those are my basics. Do they work? I'll find out the day I decide to hit the publishers with my collection – the day I find the time to switch from writing to getting published. So, not being officially "paid published" perhaps my "advice" remains equivocal. Unlike you, I chose a long time ago to "write" without giving any thought to being "paid published" because I wanted to test the waters – whether I could tell a story that would "shake the willows" so to speak. I have done so, but I'm still in no hurry because right now what I have to offer is not popular and may not bring in the bucks publishers expect for their involvement. Maybe I'm being too cautious but then, I'm in no hurry. I write, then edit, then send out to test the waters (and I'm not concerned about copyright or theft so that also makes a difference) and when the verdict is in, I file until further action required. Writing, obviously for me, is a "hobby" rather than a means of supporting myself financially – that I do with my own business and it's a convenient collaboration: the business takes me out in the real world and from that I get stories. I like telling stories. Sorry, off topic.
Regarding fooling your brain, I've read somewhere that reading backwards removes any sort of biases toward the story and helps you edit better. Don't know if that helps. I tried it once but found it awfully boring.
I started translating mine into another language. That is helping immensely with the editing process.
Before I submit my next book, it will be completely translated in at least one language.
That's another great trick – but one has to be at least bi-lingual to do so intelligently, no? I have read computer-translated stuff on the internet and most of it is not good at all. Too much literal translation which makes sentences laughable. Here's one that's actually on the read-view mirror of my van: "The objects reflected by this mirror are closer than they appear" is translated thus in French: "Les objets reflechis par ce mirror sont plus prets qu'ils n'apparaissent" In other words, if you are French, it's quite hilarious: What they wrote is: The objects being thought about by this mirror are… (and etc.) Reflechir means to mull over. The word should have been reflecter.
Peut-etre je devrais traduire un de mes manuscrits ou une de mes histoires en francais, hein?
Who knows? Once when I was studying a particular theory, I got a Spanish version to force myself to look up the meanings of certain phrases. That proved tough but for a while there I had a lot of Spanish at my disposal. Couldn't understand it spoken to save my life, but I could read and understand most of it so I had Spanish-speaking acquaintances of the time write down what they wanted to tell me. We communicated at least. That's how I learned English too, but then English, by comparison, is a very easy language to learn, IMO, hence why it's taken the world by storm. Since many French Canadians speak something called Franglish, I call planetary English "Globelish." A globelish writing person can write English any way they want and as long as it can be understood, it's quite correct!
Agreed. I'm up enough on my Spanish to know the colloquialisms. It is also a good idea to have at least two translators (independent) of one another to read it over. In the software industry, this would be localization. For instance, a red cross would have to be a red-crescent. It's been quite the arduous task, currently on the backburners, but still happening.
I'm like you in the way that it's much easier to write, read, and speak Spanish than it is to understand it readily on the tongues of its native speakers.
I actually picked up French faster when hearing it.
..Thanks for that thoughtful comment.