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During the month of NaNoWriMo, the Captains of Writership will be participating in this great sprint to write a novel in thirty days. In lieu of the news and recent posts we usually share in the Daily Port of Call, we’ll be passing along links to some of our favorite articles and resources on a variety of topics. In our year-long, online writing program, we follow the steps of the writing journey from idea to publication. We’ll mirror that structure here, spending a week exploring each of Writership’s Anchors: Dreamtime, Writing the First Draft, Revision, and Publishing and Marketing.
This week we share resources to help you edit your novel.
If you can’t afford an editor, here are four fun steps to help you achieve a cleaner manuscript.
What is the passive voice, and why are we told to avoid it?
Bad sentence structure makes your writing sound weird. Here are tips to avoid it.
Add variety to your manuscript. “The classic way to find real variety is to imagine more widely and deeply, and to develop the strength and range of the language in which to express that imagining. But if that hasn't happened naturally it's often possible to work quite cold-bloodedly to bump-start your engine by pushing the car.”
You will want to avoid these six embarrassing grammar mistakes.
Here are two cases in which you might consider cutting a paragraph before fighting to make it work. And see this piece about the cutting pain of editing a character out of a novel.
John Green helps you clean up your writing with his guide to common spelling and grammar errors.
