Quick Editing; April 24 2021

I’ve had my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine and have yet to grow mandibles, have government agents shadow me everywhere I go, or keel over dead. I am, however, queer, so the vaccine probably exacerbated that.

I won’t be getting my second dose until August, but I’m so relieved to have started the process, and I’m lucky(?) to be eligible this early. My area is still only vaxxing the 65 and older crew, as well as those with particular illnesses.

I was also almost – almost! – correctly gendered while they were at it! The intake volunteer addressed me as ‘sir’ until amending, in a very insistent way, that he’d made a mistake by not looking at me properly. So close.

I haven’t known what to blog about for the last little while, this week included. I’ve been feeling pretty negative in general, mostly about my appearance/body, but also in regards to my writing career. I was thrilled to receive the first round of edits on Kanae from my publisher, but they helped me realize how much work was needed on my other manuscripts just to make them viable for consideration. I launched into a full sentence-by-sentence revision of Mr. Wolf and started on The Other Face of Sympathy, and plan on redoing Necroweaver after that.

My biggest critiques have been, of course, about Telling VS Showing. No matter how much I try, I never seem to do enough ‘showing’ in my stories, but I’ve developed a couple of quick-editing tricks to help with that, and I hope you find them useful!

The easiest way to make changes to a document is the beloved Ctrl + F feature. Most writers know the feature well, and many swear by going over a first draft by using the Search function to remove unnecessary uses of filler words: ‘Just’ and ‘that’ are repeat offenders.

This time around, I found it useful to look for the following:

,” – Literally, a comma and quotation mark. That usually precedes a voice tag I can omit to only use the action tag instead, or it shows me an opportunity to add an action.

Relieved, glad, angry, etc – any basic descriptors of emotion. I can expand on these easily; take out the emotion word, turn it into a gesture or physical feeling that gives the reader insight into what the character’s feeling instead.

Do you have any Telling VS Showing editing tricks? Feel free to share them!