Q: I had my novel copy-edited by another editing company, but someone told me it's still not good enough. Why are there still mistakes on my pages? I thought editing would solve everything. Thanks.

A: (Salome) A copy-edit will solve certain kinds of problems. It will get rid of typos, bad grammar, maybe repetitive words. It's basically a final polish. You can't polish away major flaws in the story.

Depending on your level of writing skill, you probably need a line edit and/or a content edit. In a line edit, the editor will look at your book on a sentence and paragraph level, rearranging sentences and pieces of sentences for clarity and power and flow of words. In a content edit, the editor will look at your book as a whole, making sure that everything makes sense on the level of scene and story and giving suggestions for improving it. (In our list of services, this would be covered under either developmental, mentoring, or heavy editing.) Many inexperienced writers believe that a copy-edit will make their novels perfect.

Publishing companies hire different people to do the various levels of editing. A content editor doesn't generally do the final copy-edit. Depending on what service you hired an editor to do, there may be a long way to go. Also, an editor is only an editor. An editor is unlikely to make your book great with editing alone unless it's already very nearly great. There are tools a good editor who is also a good writer and teacher can use to make your book great. Rewriting is one of them. The other is mentoring, helping you learn what the problems are with your writing. Mentoring is more valuable than any book on writing because a good mentor can get to the heart of your particular writing issues very quickly, and then work with you until you understand how to solve them.

As an example, one writer I worked with had almost no change of emotion in her entire manuscript. Stories need ups and downs, not just in what happens, but in the emotions of the characters. In general, people read fiction to be affected by it. Her manuscript also contained numerous errors of logic, depictions of actions that made the characters look like they either had superpowers (because they broke the laws of physics) or were extremely naive. I did a lot of extra work for her beyond the level of a copy-edit or even a light edit, but her book still had problems and there was no way for me to fix them without a lot of rewriting which was well beyond the level of editing she had paid for. Eventually I convinced her to take a course of mentoring with me and with guidance, she rewrote until she had a pretty good book.


A: (Tim) Editing is a catch-all term for several different functions -- generally known in the trade as copy-editing  line editing and structural (or content) editing. It's a bit like a carpenter's toolbox. A saw, a plane and a chisel all allow a carpenter to work on a piece of wood, but you wouldn't want to try to halve the length of a plank with a plane, or cut out a neat groove with a saw. 

Broadly speaking, copy-editing checks that your individual words are correct, nothing else. It doesn't make any judgement on whether your characters are well-developed or your plot makes sense. Most copy-editors will be concentrating so hard on the individual letters that they'll barely notice that there's a plot going on anyway. A lot of people call this function proofreading, but to be strictly accurate, proofreading is when you're comparing the publisher's final version of the manuscript with the printer's first rough output, to make sure that the printer has it all correct.

Line editing doesn't pay as much attention to spelling and grammar. Instead, the editor will be looking to make sure that the sentences read well and do the job that they are supposed to. If there are inconsistencies -- say the teacher was blonde four chapters ago, but here he's a redhead -- then the line editor is supposed to pick that up. Line editors will often notice spelling and grammar mistakes, but it's not strictly part of the job, and they're concentrating on other things. On top of that, line editing often involves a bit of rewriting here and there, and that will inevitably involve the odd typo. Line editing is more commonly known (outside the book trade) as light editing. 

Structural editing is much more fundamental than the other two levels. Here, the editor puts aside any concerns about spelling or word-flow  and instead concentrates on the basics of the book -- whether the plot makes sense, how the structure is, whether the theme is clear, the way the scenes fit together, how the pace flows, character depth and arcs, whether everything is bogged down by exposition, and so on. If line-editing is like a personal trainer, and copy-editing is makeup and nice clothing, then structural editing is open-heart surgery. 

So a novel that's been edited at one level is not necessarily going to be perfect in every respect. A copy-edit is very much on the surface. A further consideration to bear in mind is that the more exposure an editor has had to a piece of writing, the harder it is for them to effectively copy-edit it. The brain quickly marks things as familiar, and slides past them. So if someone has already done some line editing on a piece, they're not really going to be ideal to copy-edit it afterwards. The best copy-edits always come from fresh eyes. 

Q: I wrote a novel and I've been querying agents. So far I've only received rejections. How do I know why they're rejecting it? And what do I do about it?

A: (Salome) This is a complicated question. There are many different reasons queries get rejected. It could be because of the query letter itself. If you want to see some of the great query letters that are out there (and so what you're competing against) take a look at Kristin Nelson's blog. She's a literary agent. Here's a query letter she liked. Poke around on her site to find more. It's a great resource in itself.

If it's not the query letter, it's got something to do with the manuscript. Perhaps some aspect of your set up doesn't seem like something that agent can sell. Maybe your first five pages are full of typos. Someone I know had their work looked at by Irene Goodman. Unfortunately, he made some last minute changes to his manuscript and there were two typos on the first page. She pointed them out as a sign that he wasn't committed enough. Yikes.

I think anyone who looks at a lot of manuscripts and reads a lot of books, who has experience with this sort of thing, can look at a manuscripts first few pages and know right away whether it interests them. The most common mistakes I see that tell me it will never sell are a bland opening and a flat voice. A flat voice is also the hardest thing to fix -- and to explain to someone. There are many other ways a manuscript can present itself as unsellable, as well.  The agent needs to feel she can sell this book to someone on her list of publishing contacts.

You can ask yourself these checklist questions: Is my manuscript properly formatted? Is the opening compelling? Is it timely? (This is a bit harder to know, but basically is it like every other sparkly vampire book that's out there? Or is it something so different and strange that it sets fire to the agent's eyeballs? Neither of these are timely.) Have I followed the agent's specific instructions? Have I not made some mistake like spelling the agent's name wrong or incorrectly naming a character in a book I'm comparing mine to? Does this agent represent the genre I'm writing?

The best way to figure out what's wrong is to have someone who has mastered this stuff look at your manuscript. The best way to solve it is to have someone point out where it's weak. It's the difference between learning to cook from a recipe and learning to cook from a master chef. You can do it on your own, but you'll have to spend a lot of time experimenting and some luck is involved.

An important thing to know is that it's not abnormal to query 25 or more agents over a period of several months to a year. If you've done that and gotten nothing but solid rejections, you probably need to reevaluate.

A: (Tim) Agents are busy. Really, really busy. Much of their time goes on looking after existing clients -- selling books, helping with problems, meetings upon meetings upon meetings. They need new books to sell in order to keep in business, and they know that very well, but they're seriously harried. On top of that, they get heaps of submissions. Fifty new ones every day. A hundred. More. If they find a submission good enough to warrant actually reading, that usually means it's work they'll have to do after they get home -- which may well not be until 8pm or 9pm. 

I've worked as an agent, and as a publisher. If one submission in 100 is of publishable quality, that's a good find. It's heart-breaking, but the vast majority of novels are unpublishable. Don't worry too much; if you're aware enough to be reading this, you're already in the top 15% or so.

Agents love books, and stories, and helping bring new writers onto the shelves. If they didn't, they wouldn't put up with the hideous hours, the massive stress, or the unreliable pay. So they really are genuinely excited to find a great new voice hiding out there. It's not just a chance of another sale; it's being part of the Great Game. However, at the moment when they open your pitch email, they're not aware that you're the rightful Next Huge Thing. You're just one of the daily dump. They're looking for an excuse to move on to the next email, so they can get through them all quickly -- without more homework. Any excuse, in fact. 

Any deviation from their submission instructions? NEXT.
Said "Dear Agent"? NEXT.
Typo? NEXT.
Premise isn't crystal-clear? NEXT.
Vampires? NEXT.
... etc., etc., etc.

Now, there's some stuff you can't factor in -- what the agent actually likes, what the editors s/he knows are after at the moment, tropes s/he happens to be totally sick of today, and so on. The rest of it however is down to you. Make sure your manuscript is great (and complete). Then prepare a kick-ass pitch letter which follows all your target agent's rules, is totally intriguing (without being annoying), and is absolutely free of typos. There are plenty of resources to tell you how to do it, and there are also lots of agent pitch doctors out there, so if necessary, make use of one of us. Then brace yourself, and get sending! You'll still get rejections, because of the stuff you can't factor in. But if your letter is stunning and your manuscript is great, those rejections will be reluctant -- and sooner rather than later you'll find the person who realizes that yes, you actually are the Next Huge Thing.

by Tim Dedopulos


Writing isn’t easy. As soon as you pick up your keyboard (so to speak), the demons come slamming down. “How dare you?” “What’s the point?” “It won’t be perfect!” “Why bother?”

Why bother writing? Well, the thing is that perfection is not the goal.

Perfection is the enemy.

(1) Perfection is impossible. There is no perfect. Writing is not a thing of absolutes; there are no hard rules to meet. Nothing will ever be perfect. Nothing can ever be perfect. Try to release the feel that you need to reach for it; as well try to write your way to the sun.

(2) Perfection is incremental. Much though it feels like it, the words you write are not carved into your flesh. No good piece of writing ever came out onto the page fully-formed. Words can be honed and polished time after time if that’s what you want. There’s no limit. After two rewrites, the Revision Police are not going to kick down the door and shoot your monitor. Give yourself permission to be rough around the edges.

(3) Perfection is meaningless. Even internally, the definition of what might be perfect varies moment to moment. The idea of anything being perfect to more than one person (or for longer than an instant) is just self-delusion. It’s the voice of authority telling the little child that they have to be ‘good’, as if that had some sort of objective definition.

I know these things are fairly obvious, intellectually. But it can take a bit of effort to make yourself believe it. Say it with me: “There is no perfect. There is no perfect.”

I’ve been writing books for twenty years. The answer to “Why bother?” is that writing is fun. Dreaming up people, places, worlds, histories, situations, relationships… that’s great fun. Wrestling with words to get sentences that do what you need and sound half-good too. Watching situations play out. Being surprised by characters who don’t do what you expect. Getting the gunk out of your head and onto the page. It’s all glorious.

Is it going to make you a gazillionaire? Almost certainly not. Is it going to make your life feel magical? Oh hells, yes.

So really, please, try not to worry about perfect. Every word makes you a better writer, and there’s no text that can’t be improved by a good editing. Every piece will have an audience of some sort — even the worst possible shades of crap. Maybe it won’t earn you money. But what it will do is make your soul sing.

Q: Do you think people can learn to write well enough to have their books published by one of the big publishers, or is writing that well more of an innate talent?

A: (Salome)  Well, people do learn to write that well. I mean, every writer who has been published has learned to write well enough. Maybe only Harlan Ellison got his first attempt at a novel published on his first try. (I don't actually know if that's true. It might have been William Gibson.)

But is there something innate about the ability to write well? Yes. Just like some people are good at math, some people have facility with language. That's a definite bonus. Some people seems to easily access their creativity. Also a bonus. Some people are able to generate sequential ideas logically. This can be very helpful.

I do think that not everyone can learn to write that well. But people can and do. It takes a lot of work. Just sitting down and putting the right number of words on the page and roughly simulating a novel is unlikely to produce the desired result. It's like saying, I want to be a ballerina, putting on the costume and turning on the music. Will you instantly be a ballerina when you hop around in time to it? Will you be one if you imitate the dancing you've seen at the ballet? Clearly not. But it's the first step. With dedication and learning, you'll get closer. Actually F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife became a ballerina as an adult, though she was warned that it was impossible. So yes, it can be learned, with more or less difficulty, depending on your natural abilities, your commitment, and your willingness to learn technique.

A: (Tim) Yes, writing is a skill that can be learned. Some people have an innate facility, of course. But that's not the only way. The more inherent talent you have, the easier it is to improve, but it is possible to get better. Like every other skill, it requires dedication, study and practice to become good. Going from good to great is harder, and requires talent as well, but fortunately for the vast bulk of us mortals, truly great writers are extremely rare. There are things that make good writing less trying. Reading voraciously. Having a mind that makes lateral jumps. Self-discipline. Bravery. A good memory. But plenty of writers have made it into print with the Big 6 with nothing more than a whole heap of hard work and determination.

It's important to remember that there are no guarantees, and if you're after a Magic Pot of Gold, the odds of a lottery win aren't much worse. There's a lot of genuinely good writers who don't get published. Mostly, that's for reasons internal to them, but you never know how you'll do until you step up to that plate, and luck plays a savage part as well. So ask yourself why you want to be a good writer. If it's for fame, sex and/or money, well... Heh. There are far quicker, more reliable ways. 

Writing is an incredible activity. It's nourishment for the soul, your own little portal into true wonder. You don't need a Big 6 book deal for that. Just pick up your keyboard and write. But if you need to be good, because the fire in your mind will accept nothing less, and you're prepared to drive yourself relentlessly... then yes, you can do it.

by Salome Jones

Your job as a writer is to overcome the various hurdles to getting readers' minds to switch over from reading and comprehending words at the conscious level to transforming those words into an active imaginary adventure.  The fictive dream, it's called. There are all sorts of things you can do that will derail the fictive dream. They fall broadly into these three categories: boredom, confusion, and cheating. The kind of lack of coherency and consistency that usually comes from writing about things you know little or nothing about can fall into any of these categories, but it's most likely to fall under the category of confusion.

The same kind of process that happens to a reader who's fully immersed in a book must happen to the writer, only in reverse. Writing is a kind of reverse engineering of the fictive dream. Just like performance artists - actors, ballet dancers, musicians - in the moment of creation, a writer must be able to internalize, assimilate, and reproduce information in a personalized expression of the creative workings of her or his mind.

A piece of general advice ​​I can give you now is to take a look at your favorite book. Find a scene that you really like and take it apart. Figure out what makes it work. What do you like about it? Is it at the level of language? Is there some surprise revealed there? What makes it a surprise? The essence of being a good writer can be distilled down from learning to read like a writer. As if taking apart plumbing to figure out how to be a plumber, look at the mechanics of a book.

I'll talk about some specific techniques you can use to accomplish this reverse engineering process in future posts.

by Salome Jones

There are a number of obvious and often talked about things that inexperienced writers do that out them. The most commonly discussed one is called by various names: telling, exposition, summary narration, sometimes excess backstory or too much description.  This badger deserves its own post because it's a complicated thing that takes many writers a while to understand even when they know about it. More about that another time.

The other things I notice as an editor are more subtle, and also much easier to fix. Here are a few of them.

The use of the word 'then'

New writers often use 'then' as a segue for the actions of their characters.

'He loaded his bags into the car. He made sure the tires were full of air. He then got in his car and drove away.'

This is a perfectly grammatical set of sentences, but I'd be willing to bet if this use of 'then' is in one place, the entire book will be speckled with 'he then' sentences. The thing about 'then' is that it's an adverb. It obviously relates to the time of things. As a general rule you want to avoid overuse of adverbs, But more specifically, the time sequence of a series of events should be clear from the writing. If it is, you don't need 'then.' It's redundant clutter. If it's not, you need to rework your sentences. Adding 'then' is a weak way to resolve the issue.

A rare 'just then' or 'then' used in dialog can work fine. But using 'he then' the way you would 'and' is distracting and unnecessary.

Also, 'he then' is for some reason often used by novice writers instead of 'then he' which works a lot better as a time sequencer if you need one. (Though only occasionally, not left and right.)

'Once again'

The phrase 'once again', like 'he then,' doesn't add any additional meaning. It seems intended to avoid repeating 'again.' It doesn't. It only adds another word that isn't necessary. What can you use instead of 'once again'? For example:

'He studied the lock for a moment and this time he turned the key upside down before attempting to insert it into the slot.'

'After several minutes, he picked up the hammer and began beating the doorknob with it, if anything, even harder than before.'

In other words, write about what happened. Add something to the story with this action. Otherwise, why have the character repeat it?

Non-parallel sentences

Sentences must be parallel. What does this mean? It means that when you use conjunctions, you have to join constructions together that are similar. Here's an example of a parallel sentence:

'She doesn't like washing dishes or doing housework.

You can see that the two sections of the sentence joined together by the conjunction have a similar structure.

Here is the same sentence written without the parallel structure:

'She doesn't like to wash dishes or doing housework.'

Sentences in which the subject does a secret switch

Here's something I see I fair bit of:

'John picked up the ax and headed for the door. Swinging the ax back, Amanda stepped in front of him.'

Now the subject of the second sentence begins as John, but then a new subject is introduced. The first part of the sentence doesn't have a stated subject so the assumed subject of this sentence would be Amanda as she's the only stated subject. But we know that it's John because, well, he's the person with the ax.

This is an example of the dreaded dangling participle. 'Swinging' is the participle here. It's dangling because the subject to which it refers has stood it up.

How to fix this:

'John picked up the ax and headed for the door. As he swung the ax back, Amanda stepped in front of him.'

If you're going to change subject mid-sentence, you have to clearly state who the subject of the first part of the sentence is.

Sticking unrelated actions together  with 'and,' 'but,' or a semicolon

'He walked to the door and there was a boy standing across the street.'

These two sentences have been stuck together with 'and.'

'And' is only a word. It's not magic glue. It doesn't create a relationship between two unrelated sentences. Sentences connected by 'and' should be related by subject, or joint activity.

'He leaned in and she kissed him'

You see that one of these is the result of the other. They're connected in time. They depict an interaction.

You can do the same thing with clauses.

'He walked to the door and saw a boy standing across the street.'

Now there's a relationship between these two things. The relationship is the 'he' subject is the one doing both the walking and the seeing. He's doing them in relation to each other. You assume that he sees the boy through the door.

This would be acceptable, and possibly even better:

'He walked to the door and looked out. There was a boy standing across the street.'

Some writers will try to splice these two sentences together with a comma. It looks better than 'and' stuck in there willy nilly, but it's still wrong. You need a full stop or the sentence needs to be altered. You can't stick two complete sentences together with a comma. (Unless they're part of a series. Like this: 'He walked to the door, the dog ran up to him, the policeman turned on the siren, and - boom - he passed out.)

Well, you can, but it will set you up for a visit from the grammar police.

by Tim Dedopulos

Forgive me, I’m pushed for time today. Some last bits of writerly advice for specific fields from assorted masters…

Elmore Leonard on thrillers:

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Ronald Knox on crime:

1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.
8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

Andrew Motion on Poetry:

1. Decide when in the day (or night) it best suits you to write, and organise your life accordingly.
2. Think with your senses as well as your brain.
3. Honour the miraculousness of the ordinary.
4. Lock different characters/elements in a room and tell them to get on.
5. Remember there is no such thing as nonsense.
6. Bear in mind Wilde’s dictum that “only mediocrities develop”— and challenge it.
7. Let your work stand before deciding whether or not to serve.
8. Think big and stay particular.
9. Write for tomorrow, not for today.
10. Work hard.

Kurt Vonnegut on Sci-fi and black satire:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

by Tim Dedopulos


In addition to his speed-writing thoughts, Michael Moorcock has also offered some writing tips that are more geared to writing in general. It seems only fair to share those, as well. I wouldn’t want to give a bad impression of the poor chap…

There’s some overlap with the speed information, which I’ll crop out for brevity’s sake. So. Michael Moorcock”s Rules of Writing:

1. My first rule was given to me by TH White, author of The Sword in the Stone and other Arthurian fantasies: Read. Read everything you can lay hands on. I always advise people who want to write a fantasy or science fiction or romance to stop reading everything in those genres and start reading everything else from, Bunyan to Byatt.
2. Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.
3. Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel.
4. If possible have something going on while you have your characters delivering exposition or philosophising. This helps retain dramatic tension.
5. Carrot and stick – have protagonists pursued (by an obsession or a villain) and pursuing (idea, object, person, mystery).
6. Ignore all rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say!

As a little bonus something, you might be interested in Jack Kerouac’s list of 30 hints and tips for writers. Some of them are a little, um… Kerouac. You’ll see what I mean…

Salome did a Q & A with Bees Make Honey Creative Cooperative yesterday. You can read the article here.

by Tim Dedopulos

Fiction requires conflict and adversity, positivity and negativity. It’s less immediately obvious perhaps, but so does the everyday world.

While the ultimate poles of good and evil may be unhelpful abstractions, the struggle between them is played out in the storyverse through intermediaries. The side of good is typically positive, and that of evil negative, but the lines can blur, or even invert. The important thing is that the conflict endures. It is the engine of growth and development. The world is formed in the dance of creation and destruction.

Negative experiences are required for growth and development. Without them, there is no stimulus to act, no chance to learn the difference between right and wrong, and certainly no opportunity to stretch your abilities. What hero could ever come into her own without a foe to push her to her limits? Conflict drives technology, social change, personal maturation, even evolution itself. To live, in the end, is to struggle – permanent euphoria is as counter-productive as permanent anguish.

There have actually been real-world tests of this principle. In experiments pioneered by neurobiologist Jim Olds more than 40 years ago, rats were wired to give them the ability to directly stimulate the pleasure centres in their own brains. After a short period of adjustment to the sensation, each rat quickly turned all its attention to triggering bliss. Food, sex, physical pain and even exhaustion were ignored; the rats just kept on firing their pleasure stimulators until they passed out, or died. Similar factors are thought to be the primary issue in the biology and psychology of human addiction. We’re just not designed to be able to successfully exist in a perfect world.

Good and evil cannot meaningfully exist in the world in isolation. Either one would be so destructive to the patterns of life that we know that it would wipe us out. There’s no doubt that ultimate good would be a much more pleasant way to go, but in the end the final result is exactly the same. No more people. And that’s as true of the real world as it is of any story.