Offthebookshelf.com

Posted May 12, 2010 23:38

I'd like to avoid them. Is there a top 5 errors you see all the time?

Posted May 14, 2010 18:08

Hello F.B. Murno,

You know that's a trick question and impossible to answer, ha ha. But let me try to provide a generic reply that will be honest and make sense, because I'm confident you aren't interested in reading about issues related to punctuation, POV shifts, tense, voice, and misplaced modifiers. So here's my perspective of what would prevent a manuscript from being considered prose that only a friend or family member would pay to read.

If I parsed 100 drafts and totaled what I deemed to be the 5 most common major flaws that writers must avoid, the list would likely be topped by inadequate conflict, followed by poor pacing, unengaging characters, elliptical transitioning, and weak developmental arcing.

If a writer can design conflict and present it quickly, this will motivate the reader to keep going. But if the story flags or the characters are uninteresting, no amount of conflict is going to maintain a reader's attention. And if the writing from scene to scene is choppy, or the entrance and exit of characters should be too abrupt, this spells doom for a story. Additionally, if the characters and/or characterizations aren't adequately fleshed out, this will foul a narrative.

I hope this provides at least some perspective on the excellent, very complicated question you posed.

Posted May 18, 2010 01:22

A very interesting answer to a very interesting question!

Robert, do you think can characters be too fleshed out? I've read books before where the detail was so minute that I was bored to death. The writer left me no room to use my own imagination!

Posted May 18, 2010 11:20

Hi Kay,

Sure, just like you wrote, things can get down to the capillaries. But many people love detail, regardless of its extent. Some writers are simply better at it than others. Jody Picoult, for example, seems to be one of the few authors who can write incredible depth into characters and not turn off a legion of fans, of which I am one. Tom Clancy writes extremely detailed explanations on very complicated subjects, yet a mass of technophiles worship him, as do military types. I think it gets down to what certain readers are looking for--and the genre.

Posted June 30, 2010 20:45

Are some genres more difficult to edit than others then?

Posted July 05, 2010 12:00

Hi Kay,

As always, a great question. As far as editing in different genres is concerned, I think there's a legitimate case for horses for courses, but the type of editing is also an important consideration.

To the first part of my answer, someone who works in Romance will allow much more leeway with, for example, adverb attributes, than say someone who his experienced with Dramatic Literature. They are simply different tracks. Just as Children's-genre material has different rhetorical requirements from Young Adult, and so forth.

But for straight line editing, which encompasses typos, missing words, punctuation, misplaced modifiers, etc., competent editors could demonstrate proficiency in most any genre. However, for developmental editing, an editor with a history in Literary Fiction material might not be well suited for Children's material, or vice versa.

Then there's the issue of nonfiction, which often can require entirely different editorial treatment, even from the perspective of line editing. For example, academic material enables an expansion of content, and word redundancies, that is seldom tolerated in fiction. And in many instances, overwriting (and even flamboyant rhetoric) can be an asset and not a liability.

So as far as one genre being harder to edit than the other, I think it's fair to state that it gets down to the background and experience of an editor with a specific genre. This more than anything will dictate how the level of difficulty is perceived, and why most of us work in what we know best.