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"How can I be more productive?" We all ask ourselves this question, especially when it comes to writing. Writing is a skill that many people want to improve on, but there are so many distractions in the world. How can someone get anything done with emails coming in every few minutes and social media notifications popping up? Luckily for us, there are numerous tools out there that allow you to focus on your work while still being able to communicate with others. In this blog post, we will explore how you can eliminate distractions so you can become an even better writer.
Read more: How to Eliminate Distractions so You Can Improve Your Writing Productivity
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A love scene or a scene where characters get hot and heavy with each other can be a daunting sequence to write, especially for budding writers. Writers are concerned about being too vulgar or indecent. When it comes to sexual desire, humans are private animals, and even the most experienced writers can get uncomfortable when depicting an intimate sequence. An excellent way to get over the fear of depicting intimate scenes when writing is by practicing restraint. Since love is an essential part of human nature, an emotionally driven love scene can create a powerful story for any novel. Here are a few tips you can use to get over your fear of writing intimate plots.
Read more: How can writers get over their fear of writing intimate scenes?
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What is developmental editing
Most writers can’t afford their hiring so many rounds of editors or don’t have the proper budget to pay for each. Thus, how do you know which kind of editing to get for your novel? And what on earth is developmental editing? A developmental edit also referred to as a structural edit, conceptual editing, and manuscript appraisal is a careful and in-depth edit of your entire manuscript. Developmental editing analyzes all aspects of your writing, ranging from separate words to the overall configuration and style of your sentences. A developmental editor will most likely be very perceptive and very experienced to be able to find those structural errors of a novel.
How do you know you should hire a developmental editor?
You should probably look into a developmental editing budget if you notice you have a lot of structural errors. Structural errors are any kinds of sentence fragments, comma splices, run-on sentences, or any missing areas or gaps in your work. These errors can make your writing hard to read, and your point has the tenancy to get lost. Other signals of structural errors include incomplete plots, plot holes, timing errors, or areas where there is too much or not enough description. When hiring a developmental editor, they have to check all of that in-depth, along with examining the tone of your novel and general writing style. Developmental editing is so thorough because it dives deep into line editing and most editors will offer rewrite suggestions. Some like to consider hiring a developmental editor is the first step before sending your manuscript to a proofreader, copyeditor, or beta reader and if you’re on a budget, it could be your only step. Hiring a developmental editor is most beneficial in fiction because this edit will highlight any issues to plot or characterization. A thorough developmental editing session will keep your target audience in mind and evaluate your work in correlation to industry criteria and anticipations. Authors should go into this process prepared to rewrite as it is common for a developmental editor to come and change a lot about the groundwork of your manuscript.
How to decide on an editor, and when do you begin searching for one?
When choosing an editor to get this hefty job done, do your research. Try looking up the editor to some of your favorite books or choosing a few editors and reading the books they have on their portfolio. Commonly, some authors aren’t willing to make the changes that come along with a thorough developmental edit, and this is a good way to avoid thinking your editor doesn’t get your vision. Knowing the work of the person you want to hire, and then crafting the budget and things you want them to focus on could make this bumpy ride a bit smoother for both parties. This step of hiring a developmental editor should be done when the author feels like the manuscript is the best it can be. If you hand your editor a swept manuscript, it can leave them to focus more on big ideas. Developmental editing is less affordable because it is very time-consuming and may be one of the most worthwhile edits you’ll pay for.
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Many authors consider copyediting to be an important component of their business model, and for good reason. Copyediting allows an author to present their best work to publishers and helps to increase the chances of their works being a success. If you're an author that's never hired a copyeditor, then now's a good time to consider just how your work would benefit from this service. Let's take a look at what copyediting is, how to tell if you need a copyeditor, and why it's so useful.
What is Copyediting?
As its name implies, copyediting is the editing of copy. However, there are many ways to edit copy such as simple proofreading, formatting, fact-checking, and line editing. Copyediting is a little different from these, and in some cases, may have some overlap with them, especially proof-reading.
Copyediting is going over a work and not only checking for grammatical and spelling errors, but also other factors such as flow, tone, sentence structure, paragraph structure, and sometimes even fact-checking if the copyeditor is knowledgeable enough on the subject matter. Most of the time this will drastically improve the work.
In some cases a copyeditor may also make suggestions that could improve the work that fall outside of their scope. For example, if a copyeditor is editing a work of fiction and notices a plot hole or some other inconsistency, they may bring it to the author's attention. Likewise, in works of nonfiction copyeditors can spot contradictions or anything else that could undermine the work.
Do You Actually Need a Copyeditor?
As an author, you likely go over your own work many times to get everything just right, and in doing so you basically function as your own copyeditor. However, an author being their own editor is not optimal for several reasons including the fact that since you're so familiar your own writing your brain tends to read it less carefully, almost like you're on autopilot. This can lead to missing both errors, and opportunities for improvement.
On the other hand, a professional copyeditor is a brand new set of eyes, allowing for a fresh look at your work. And since two brains are better than one, they will in most cases pick up on things that you would miss if you were to copyedit your work yourself. On top of this is the fact that copyeditors specialize in edition, not writing. This means that they look at a work much differently than you the author would, and bring a more analytical approach to editing your drafts.
So, to answer the initial question, copyediting is not mandatory, but highly encouraged if you want your work to be the absolute best that it can be. Don't underestimate just how much a copyeditor can improve the quality of your work.
When Should You Hire a Copyeditor?
In most cases an author should hire a copyeditor when they've gone over their work and feel that they've done all they can to make it the very best that it can possibly be. While this may make hiring a copyeditor feel redundant to those who have never done so before, there is still a ton of value in hiring one. That said, there may be exceptions to this rule in some cases.
For example, if your publisher has given you a very tight deadline, and the work you're writing is relatively lengthy, you may be better off hiring a copyeditor early so that they can go over your work as you complete it. While this strategy can save time, it does have the disadvantage of your copyeditor not being able to review the work as a whole. This can lead to them missing some inconsistencies that might be present across chapters.
Copyediting is an Investment
Authors who have never hired a copyeditor before may balk when considering whether or not the investment is worth it. The thing is, a document that has been copyedited by someone other than the author is almost certain to be of much higher quality than one that isn't. If an author isn't concerned about the quality of their work, then hiring a copyeditor may not be something they'd want to bother with. However, if an author does want their work to be of the highest quality to impress publishers and readers alike, then hiring a copyeditor is one of the smartest decisions they can make for their business.
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Do you write too much description in your fiction? While adding description can help give your reader a clearer picture of the events and everything in the particular scenes, it’s important not to add too much description. In this article, we’ll look at the drawbacks of adding too much description in your work.
Read more: 7 Drawbacks of Writing Too Much Description in Your Fiction Book
