How can I protect my work before sending it for editing?

Sometimes writers ask how they can protect their intellectual property before sending it to an editor. Register the copyright? Write a contract? Here’s what I tell them.

Choose an editor you trust

The most important thing is to choose an editor you trust and feel comfortable with. Your editor is bound by professional ethics to respect your privacy and your ownership of the manuscript. Make sure the person you’re thinking of hiring is a legitimate practitioner. Do an online search for their name and contact information and make sure their information checks out. Make sure their communications with you sound reasonable. You can also discuss the work on the phone, ask for references, see if the editor’s LinkedIn connections look believable, and find out if they belong to a professional organization.

Put your expectations in writing

Although a good editor will respect your ownership rights, there’s no harm in writing a simple letter of agreement or contract that states that the editor cannot share the manuscript with any third party without your explicit permission and that you retain full rights. Editors Canada has a sample editing contract that you could add this to.

Use good computer security

As well as taking precautions to make sure you don’t lose your work to a computer crash, you should also consider computer security. If you are very concerned about security, consider encrypting your manuscript before you store it in a cloud storage service or send it via email.

Understand that you already have copyright protection

It’s important to understand that under Canadian and U.S. law,* you automatically have copyright on your manuscript as soon as your work is written down. Although you can register your work with the Copyright Board of Canada, you don’t need to do that to secure your rights. (If you do decide to register your work, it probably makes more sense to register at the time that you publish, when the manuscript is in its final form and you are releasing it into the wild.)
*In all countries that are members of the Berne Convention, copyright comes into being automatically, without the creator having to register their work.

“When to use bad English” with James Harbeck (Editors Canada Conference 2015)

James Harbeck gave a great talk on when to use “bad” English. Bad English in this case means nonstandard English: ungrammatical constructions, jargon, slang, and vulgarity. And the first lesson for editors is that you should use bad English when it’s not bad. Some of the rules taught in the past never had much basis in logic, grammar, or common usage, and are now widely dismissed as superstitions. So go ahead: split infinitives and end your sentences with prepositions.

James has posted a writeup of his talk on his blog Sesquiotica.

The Craft of Writing Science Fiction That Sells by Ben Bova

Craftsmanship can be taught, and it is the one area where new writers consistently fall short. In most cases it is simple lack of craftsmanship that prevents a writer from leaving the slushpile. Like a carpenter who has never learned to drive nails straight, writers who have not learned craftsmanship will get nothing but pain for their efforts. That is why I have written this book: to help new writers learn a few things about the craftsmanship that goes into successful stories.

Not only does Ben Bova have a long list of book credits to his name, he was the editor of Analog and Omni, and he used to read all the manuscript submissions. The whole slush pile. As he says above, most of those manuscripts failed, not because of deficient ideas or bad artistly, but through faults in their basic mechanics.

The Craft of Writing Science Fiction That Sells is a short, to-the-point book that lays out the basics of crafting a good science fiction story. After a short introduction, the book has four sections: character, background, conflict, and plot. Each section has a chapter on theory, a full short story, and a chapter on practical considerations, with reference to the sample story. A final section discusses special considerations for novels.

Is research the key to good science fiction?

The book has some good points about research. How can you write what you know when you’re writing speculative fiction? Research. You find an astronaut and get them to coauthor the book. You move to New Mexico for a while. You spend serious time at the library. Bova suggests you keep a book of notes on plot, character sketches, background and setting, and everything else you have to keep straight.

That’s so much work on research alone, but maybe that’s what it takes. Dune is a great book because Frank Herbert built a detailed background of ecology,* politics, economics, and religion for his story. But books with poorly thought-out backgrounds are flat and uninteresting; their stories don’t ring true. Maybe, to make something great, you have to take the approach of doing as much work as possible.

* Although Dune is perhaps not the best example of good speculative science. For starters, it’s hard to think of a plausible way for sandworms to travel through sand.

Update: See also Christina Vasilevski’s review.

Reviewed from a library copy of the book.

Better than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives by Arthur Plotnik

Oh, that word amazing—enforced by dropping one’s mandible on the second syllable and stretching out the MAYYY sound until a listener seems convinced. “I just ate the most aMAYYYzing cupcake.”

The purpose of this book is to help people praise things more effectively, so it seems ironic that when I try to describe it, I’m struck with acute performance anxiety. It’s like being faced with the final exam, right now.

In Better than Great, the always-entertaining Arthur Plotnik (see also Spunk & Bite and The Elements of Editing) turns his attention to the problem of what to say when you’ve said “great”—or “perfect,” or “amazing”—too many times already. Faced with the challenge, I tend to wimp out, myself—to go the understatement route. “It was pretty good,” I mutter. What a missed opportunity!

Plotnik lays out the main categories of superlatives, separating the great from the sublime, the large from the intense, exploring the contradictions of baditude, and offers the reader a list of words to try out for each. Thus we have tyrannosaurian cockroaches and Niagaras of tears, and people who are so stellar they could carry water in a sieve. Your signature dish is pie-hole heaven, it’s so scarfable. That woman? A stoater; I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up gorgeous. And who wouldn’t want to try a racy but quaffable red?

The appendices offer a few bonuses: a handy list for eponymous acclaim from Austenian to Zorroesque, with instructions for forming your own (is it Plotnikian or Plotnikesque?) and finally, to get you going, there’s the starter set of habit-breakers. It’s grea— wait, raveworthy!

So read this book and learn to blow the un-ignorable vuvuzela of praise.


Reviewed from an advance reading copy kindly sent to me by Viva Editions.

The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself by Susan Bell

Be your own editor

You won’t always get the perfect editor for your book, and you can’t rely on editors having time to do all the work they’d like to. Be your own editor as much as you can.

Susan Bell’s The Artful Edit is a guide for writers to help them edit their own work and to get the most out of their collaboration with an editor. Bell considers different strategies for editing during the writing process and suggests ideas for getting a fresh view of your draft. She then deals with the nuts and bolts of what to look for when editing. Later in the book, she steps back to look at the role of editing in art by interviewing non-print artists about how editing has improved their work and looking at some famous writer–editor relationships.

The book contains a lot of practical advice and examples. There are checklists and exercises to help you focus on specifics. Bell quotes from letters between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his editor, Max Perkins, to show how they worked on The Great Gatsby and quotes passages from different drafts of the manuscript to show the changes they made.

Although the book has some concrete stylistic advice (remove excessive “be” verbs, watch out for redundancy), this is not a style guide. Read it if you’re interested in larger issues (intention, structure, theme) and if you’re interested in thoughts about the role of the editor in creative writing.

Be a mechanic, not a judge. When you edit, do not ask yourself: Do I like this? Ask instead: Does this compel me and can I follow it? If the answer is no, figure out why.

—Susan Bell, The Artful Edit

Tips for getting distance from your draft

From The Artful Edit

• Read it aloud, with or without an audience
• Print it in a different font
• Read it in different surroundings
• Take a long break: don’t look at the manuscript at all for a few weeks
• Go through the manuscript with someone else
• Hang the pages on a line or lay them out on the floor to help you visualize the flow and layout
• Send it away: giving your manuscript to someone else can make you see it with new eyes

Reviewed from a library copy of the book.

(In)elegant variation

In a recent BBC News article about a company’s way of rewarding its salesmen, I ran across the following: “The prostitutes had worn colour-coded arm-bands . . . and the women had their arms stamped.” Gosh, I thought, were the prostitutes all men? No—I had been suckered by an elegant variation.

Henry Fowler coined the term “elegant variation” to describe the unnecessary use of different words for the same thing. You see it a lot in journalism: “Jane Smith is an avid cyclist,” continues as, “The mother of four also enjoys fishing, knitting and swimming.” We often see “blaze” for fire, “blast” for explosion, “slay” for kill, and sometimes “temblor” for earthquake. Vancouver Magazine is fond of referring to restaurants as “rooms,” although this is probably due to hipness as much as to fear of repetition. Writers pull out the thesaurus to keep from repeating themselves: Fowler’s Modern English Usage gives an example where “have” becomes “possess,” and then “own” as the sentence progresses. This technique can really call attention to itself and make a sentence anything but elegant.

But elegant variation isn’t just annoying; it makes your writing less clear. When I come across “mother of four,” it takes me an extra fraction of a second to think back to “Jane Smith” and connect the two. In most contexts, readers make the connection without any trouble, but sometimes they will think you used two different words because you are talking about two different things—as I did when I read the BBC article quoted above—and that can cause serious confusion.

Other ways to avoid repetition

Bryan Garner suggests that the rule of thumb is to avoid repeating a word in the same sentence if it can be done felicitously. What’s a felicitous fix? I suggest:

• Use a pronoun: “Jane Smith is an avid cyclist. She also enjoys . . .”
• Leave the word out: “Jane Smith is an avid cyclist and also enjoys . . .” Or after “A fire broke out in Oak Hills last night,” instead of saying “Three people were killed in the blaze,” consider “Three people were killed.”

If there’s no good way to remove the repetition, leave it in. It’s better to repeat the occasional word than to bend your sentences out of shape with clichés or confusing changes of name.

More about elegant variation

• Garner’s Modern American Usage by Bryan Garner: “Inelegant Variation.” He quotes a famous example, where someone used “elongated yellow fruit” as the second reference to a banana. Editor Charles Morton made up a few more elegant variations, including “hen-fruit safari” for an Easter-egg hunt.
• Oxford Pocket Fowler’s Modern English Usage, s.v. “elegant variation.” See also “Elegant Variation” from Fowler’s The King’s English.
• The Economist, “‘Elegant variation,’ the good and the bad”

Google searches as a quick and dirty way to answer style questions

Google’s full-text search provides not only a highly efficient way to find information, it’s also a very easy way to search through a giant corpus of writing. Some people use Google as a spell-checker: just try both spellings of the word and let the number of results decide. The problem with this approach is that you don’t always want to use the spelling or usage that appears most often—after all, the web is not known for being the home of the most careful and polished writing. You’ll get more useful results by narrowing your search to a specific part of the web.

Limit your search to one specific domain

Certain magazines, like the New York Times and the Economist are often used as style standards. When I run into an expression that I’m not sure is standard, or a capitalization or hyphenation question that doesn’t quite match any rules in the style I’m using, I’ll often search the New York Times or Economist websites to see how they handle it.

To get results from a specific site, use “site:” and then the name of the domain, followed by a space and then your search term. For example:

site:nytimes.com "raise his game"

If you forget this syntax (“site:”), you can get the same search by clicking on “advanced search” from the main Google site, and then entering the site under “Search within a site or domain.”

How to use Google Scholar to help you with scientific and academic writing and editing

Google Scholar is extremely useful for editing scientific and academic documents because you can limit your search not only within the academic literature, but within a particular area like biology, chemistry, physics, or medicine.

Let’s say you’re editing a chemistry paper and you come across an unfamiliar use of the term “headspace.” If you just do a regular Google search for headspace, you’ll get references to meditation. Not helpful.

Instead, try the search in Google Scholar and get much more relevant results. You can even search within a specific journal (click “Advanced Search” in the options menu at left.

If you’re writing, you can check your phrasing this way. Maybe it’s late at night, you’re getting tired, and you’re not sure whether to say that the samples were “relatively dilute” or “relatively diluted.” If you plug each phrase into Google Scholar (put quotation marks around them so that you’re searching for that exact phrase, not the two words separately), you’ll see that “relatively dilute” clearly had more hits than “relatively diluted.” That gives you a quick answer to go on with.

Subtleties of Scientific Style by Matthew Stevens

One of the fundamental features of science is the furtherance of knowledge. Poor writing is an impediment to this. A good illustration of this point is a paper by Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty published in 1944 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, which established that DNA was the substance that transmitted genetic information. Although it paved the way for James Watson and Francis Crick’s milestone paper in 1953 in Nature (171: 737–738) establishing the structure of DNA, it was not widely read or appreciated. Author Randy Moore has argued that the way it was written was the main reason for this (Journal of College Science Teaching 1994 November: 114–121). In comparison with Watson and Crick’s paper, it is (as Moore wrote) hesitant, extremely dense, verbose, highly detailed, abstract, impersonal and dull. We’ve all heard of Watson and Crick. Who has heard of Avery, MacLeod and McCarty?

—Matthew Stevens, Subtleties of Scientific Style, p. 46

I always took it for granted that academic papers had to be hard to read. (The reason usually cited is that the authors have to pack an enormous amount of information into the shortest space possible.) The introduction could conceivably be a work of art, but the methods and materials section with its centrifuging at 20,000 g and resuspending, that pretty much has to be a slog, right? Well, after seeing Stevens’s examples of how text can be improved by using the appropriate voice, putting steps in logical order, disentangling parallelism and rearranging sentences (to put subject and verb at the front of a long sentence, for example), I have new hope.

Subtleties of Scientific Style is a fairly short (85 pages), very readable book that doesn’t try to be a comprehensive style guide. Instead, Stevens assumes that his readers know the basics of editing, and he focuses on specific considerations for science writing. He starts with a discussion of substantive editing, and describes how to do a truly thorough editing job (involving seven passes). He then goes on to address various common errors in usage and content, and describes ways to improve expression and visual presentation. Finally, the appendices contain useful notes on Unicode and special characters.

If you’ve done any academic editing, you’re sure to recognize a lot of the problems he discusses: one of my favourites is the discussion of the word “respectively.” I too have had my brain twisted by authors who connected two lists of different length with “respectively.” (“Plants A and B were yellow and green, respectively”: OK. “Plants A, B, and C were yellow and green, respectively”: not OK.) I’ll be going back to this book again to refresh my memory and pick up new points.

Where to get it

The publisher is ScienceScape Editing, Thornleigh, Australia, but their website doesn’t seem to exist anymore. The book is available for download in PDF, and I believe it is the author’s intention to make the electronic copy available for free. Reviewed from the free PDF.

Screenwriters can teach you a lot about fiction editing

I’m not a big movie watcher. When people ask me “Have you seen—,” the answer is usually “no.” Why then the interest in screenwriting? Because I am fascinated by stories, and good screenwriters know how to tell a story. (They also write a pretty good how-to book.) Here are some books on the subject, as well as an introductory note or two on writing screenplays. Thanks to Melva McLean for information about screenplay structure, scriptwriting software, where to find scripts online, and the screenwriting gurus (but any errors are mine!).

The screenplay format

Don’t mess with the format: twelve-point Courier on standard letter-sized paper. Character names and scene headings are in all caps, dialogue and action in upper and lower case.

Screenplay style guide

The Hollywood Standard by Christopher Riley.

Screenplay writing software

Celtx is a commonly used tool. It handles the formatting for you and saves you a lot of typing. A “movie” project will store the script, the novel, and the schedule, and integrates the screenplay with the schedule so that you can see which locations and characters are needed on which days. Best of all, there are a number of sample projects loaded, including the Wonderful Wizard of Oz screenplay and novel. Besides the movie project, there are a number of other project types, including novel and comic book.

I hear Final Draft is good too. Demo version available.

Sample scripts

Unlike novels, which tend to be guarded by their copyright holder, screenplays are often made available online. Fill your boots. I just hope you like monospaced fonts.
Simply Scripts
Script-O-Rama

How to structure a screenplay

This is where the gold is. How long should a screenplay be? What makes a satisfying story arc? Where does the climax go? How soon should the inciting incident come? Following the right structure in developing your story is essential to creating a satisfying experience for the viewer.

Of the authors I list below, Blake Snyder is the one who provides the most step-by-step formula for putting together a movie. Just to give you an idea, here’s a rough outline of a script, mostly based on Snyder’s beat sheet:

• Length: about 90–120 pages. The rule of thumb is that one page of script comes out to about a minute of screen time.
• Three acts: Act 1 introduces the situation; Act 2 complicates the situation; Act 3 resolves the situation.
• Inciting incident (page 12 in a 110-page script): If it’s a murder mystery, a corpse has to be found. If it’s a love story, the lovers have to meet. In a hero’s journey story, the hero is presented with the call to action.
• The transition into Act 2: The hero accepts the call, or something else happens to turn the plot in a new direction.
• Fun and games, first half of Act 2: Action that results from the premise of the story. Most of the stuff that’s in the trailer comes from this part of the movie.
• Second half of Act 2: Complications build until the crisis.
• Transition into Act 3: Hero confronts their demons and turns the situation around using tools and lessons from earlier in the story.
• Act 3: Climax and resolution.

See “Three Acts or What?” for a nice comparison of the Syd Field, Blake Snyder, and hero’s journey story structures.

Books about screenwriting

• Save the Cat!: The Last Book On Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need—Blake Snyder. He has a nice list of genres and screenwriting devices (like the title “save the cat” trick), always with examples, and then discusses in detail his plan on how to set up the three-act structure that he believes is essential to delivering a satisfying experience. I certainly notice the structure he describes jumping out at me in movies like Avatar and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. A very fun book.
• Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting—Robert McKee. Excellent book. McKee is another script guru who consults and runs workshops. He’s also got a good list of screenwriting resources on his website.
• The Definitive Guide to Screenwriting—Syd Field. Interesting, not as fun as Blake Snyder’s book, but it covers some different points, including more on the nuts and bolts of selling scripts.
• Adventures in the Screen Trade—William Goldman. Very entertaining. An analysis of the workings of the movie industry, from what makes a star (it’s someone who will bring people in to see the movie open) to the role of producers (he hasn’t the foggiest, although he knows they’re essential). There’s also plenty of concrete advice on screenwriting: how to write beginnings, how to write endings, how to protect the star—and how to protect your soul.
• The Great Movies—Roger Ebert. He goes through about 100 movies that he thinks are important and talks about why they’re good and what they mean to him.

Usage: the AP Style Guide on women, girls, females, and ladies

There’s so much to say about how to write about specific groups of people with respect. I find that the style guide of the Associated Press (AP) has a lot of useful information. Here are some notes, in line with AP style, on writing about women.

Use “woman” as a noun, and “female” as an adjective. Don’t use “lady” unless you’d use “gentleman” for a man in the same context. (“This drug may cause beard growth in women.” “She will be the first female president.” “A lady never tells.”)

Referring to someone as “a female something” is fine, but referring to someone just as a “female” is depersonalizing. In everyday speech it tends to have a derogatory sound: “He arrived with some female or other in tow.” In medical writing it’s not rude, but it has a jargony sound: “Our study showed that 38% of females experienced . . .” In some contexts, perhaps if you’re referring to women of all ages, you might choose to use “females” instead of writing something like “female infants, girls, and women,” but wherever possible, I would stick to “women,” “girls,” etc.

I can’t say that using “woman” as an adjective (“Stress fractures are more common in women runners”) is wrong, because I see good writers doing it all the time, but find it unesthetic. AP style is to use female as the adjective and woman as the noun. Maybe people are aware of the negative connotations of using “female” as a noun, and overcorrect by not using the word at all. Don’t worry, it’s OK to say that someone is female (if they identify as female; see the GLAAD Media Reference Guide and recent editions of the AP stylebook for some notes on writing about transgender people).

“Lady” for “woman” is . . . unnecessary? patronizing? Perhaps AP says it best: “Lady may be used when it is a courtesy title or when a specific reference to fine manners is appropriate without patronizing overtones” (Associated Press Stylebook 2013).

Also worth mentioning is another guideline from AP: use “girl” only up until the eighteenth birthday. For adults, use “woman” or “young woman.”

Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Punchier, More Engaging Language & Style

“I can see dead writing” confesses Arthur Plotnik, and his mission is to teach people to make their writing come alive. To this end he advocates some controversial techniques (dialogue tags! obscure vocabulary! taken from the thesaurus!), but always with sensible advice about how to make them effective. He also goes after a few good, old-fashioned writing flaws, and I found his chapter on eliminating danglers (“Slathered with cream cheese, she brought over the bagels”) very useful.

The chapter on semicolons has a very good example of how the choice of punctuation affects the reader’s experience. Referring to President Kennedy’s famous “Ask not” line, Plotnik discusses how the pause between “Ask not what your country can do for you” and “Ask what you can do for your country” can be punctuated: comma, dash, period, colon, or semicolon? He says:

My own judgment would be based on these considerations:

• The comma seems too hurried, too trivializing, as if one were saying: “Ask not for the large pizza, ask for the small one.”
• The dash is too abrupt. With a dash, one expects an indirection, like, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask how you can get heartburn relief.”
• A period (full stop) allows time to anticipate the locution and to think, “Yeah, yeah, I get it.”
• And a colon warns of some tedious enumeration: “Ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you can do about poverty; ask what you can do about the environment; ask what you can . . .”

For more great writing advice from Arthur Plotnik, see Better than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives (review), and his new edition of The Elements of Expression: Putting Thoughts into Words (review).

Reviewed from a copy borrowed from the library.

The art of the sentence

During the Memory Festival that took place last week at the Roundhouse in Yaletown, I attended a workshop taught by Stephen Osborne, columnist and publisher of Geist Magazine, on “The Art of the Sentence,” because I thought if I could get better at creating and understanding this essential building block it would make me a better writer and editor.

We discussed a number of common sentence faults, which was certainly useful, but the most interesting ideas in the workshop, for me, were:

1. Long sentences—really long sentences—can be good. For example:
   

   “When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again.” —Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That

   We were all taught in elementary school that “a sentence is a complete thought,” and after many years, apparently that’s a lesson worth revisiting. The sentence should keep going until you’ve completed the thought.
2. The 5-W sentence as the foundation of narrative. The “5-W” sentence contains who, what, when, where, and why. He recommended that you use one of these sentences to begin the story and then whenever the story makes a turn, or when you’re getting stuck and don’t know where to go next. The Geist writer’s toolbox explains that they reject a lot of stories because they contain too much description and not enough story, and I think the 5-W sentence is a way to force you to write narrative instead of description.
3. He also emphasized writing to satisfy your ear, and that you should read your work aloud to test it.

For more on these and other writing techniques, see the excellent Writer’s Toolbox put out by Geist magazine.