If you’ve never hired an editor to help you with a creative writing project, there’s a good chance you don’t even know what types of editing are available to you. If you Google “types of editing”, you’re going to get hit with information like “Developmental Editing. (Also called: conceptual editing or manuscript appraisal)” and “Evaluation…
The first line of your memoir (or essay or novel) might come to you early on, fully formed. Or it might be a line you compose late in your drafting cycles. Either way, at some point you’ll have to evaluate it for the work it’s doing. Your opening sentence is a tone-setter, and you want…
The ability to describe is the key to great storytelling, but when it comes to depicting characters, our first impulse is often to go straight to the basics (height, hair color, clothing) and leave it at that. It’s not that those descriptions are bad, it’s just that they provide surface-level characterization rather than truly characterizing….
I’m a slow reader. I sometimes pluck a book from the shelf based not on whether its subject matter appeals to me, but whether or not it’s skinny or fat. So when I recently read Julia Otsaka’s 144-page When the Emperor Was Divine, I got the pleasure of not only finishing a book in a weekend,…
Your story beginning, as much as the back cover or inside flap, is marketing copy. Your reader will give you wide latitude when it comes to your opening content, but if they’re going to stick around, they expect something enticing on the first page—a promise of things to come. Whether your first paragraphs strap your…