Ahh what am I supposed to put here?

time to start planning kinktober fandom works! (its a lil early i kno)

What I’m talking about is proof of life outside your characters in your world. Not in the sense of ‘talking to the cashier at the checkout’, but things like:

Graffiti etched into a desk your character sits in during an exam

Realising that someone has come along and arranged the cans on the shelf so the labels say something stupid

Dirty vans that have ‘wash me’ written in the dried mud

A coin that has been stuck into a piece of gum on a handrail

Little things that show the world still goes on despite whatever is happening to the characters. 

Over twenty-five years ago I began editing professionally. I began by doing volunteer work as an editor for literary magazines, but my first job was for Brigham Young University, where I helped professors raise their work to publishable levels. Many of the people I worked with were scholars with tremendous expertise in their field of study but often they were not practiced writers. Some of them weren’t even native English speakers. So I helped edit articles, textbooks, history books, self-help books, novels, short stories, pamphlets and funding proposals.

Later I went on to editing technical manuals, and from there moved into fiction editing—both short stories and novels. Even when I’m not editing professionally, a day doesn’t go by that I don’t exercise my skills in one way or another.

Here are some key points that I want writers to know:

In most writing groups, authors get a lot of feedback on the errors in their work, but don’t get much feedback on how to actually improve it. As a result, new authors focus on eradicating errors. So what they end up with is a novel that is pretty much unobjectionable. But that’s rather damning. You don’t want to be “okay,” you want your work to be great.

So in your rewrites, take the opportunity to add as many virtues to your work as possible.

Does your novel suffer from weak descriptions? In your first pass, put those descriptions in.

Would your work benefit by having stronger hooks at the opening to each chapter? Make a pass and put in some great hooks.

Could your novel be better if your character had a more distinctive voice, or if you showed more internal dialog? You can make your novel better in each pass.

Do you need to make your characters more decisive, or show their internal pain? Those can be handled in editing passes.

The truth is that there is so much to do to write a good novel, that many novelists find that it is better to focus on it in several passes, in just the same way that a painter creates a masterpiece by laying down the paint in a dozen layers, letting each one dry before working on it again.

Sure, you might find some weaknesses when you’re editing, but you should be more concerned with adding virtues.

Some authors naturally do one or two things really well. For example, Shannon Hale has a gift for creating gorgeous metaphors, and her use of language is lyrical and beautiful. Tolkien had a gift for world creation that was pretty much unequaled at his time. Orson Scott Card is fantastic at creating gripping arguments, showing penetrating insights into his characters’ conflicts. I love George R. R. Martin’s excellence at creating resonance, or Patrick Rothfus’s command of voice, or Dan Well’s control of tone and his gift for finding fascinating ideas.

But in order to become a bestseller, you normally have to develop a number of skills. On a scale of one to ten, you might look at yourself and ask, where am I? Am I at a five when it comes to creating character voices? Am I only at a one when it comes to world creation? Does my work completely lack hooks or foreshadowing?