Yesterday a friend e-mailed a short story he’d written for a college course. Could I look over the story and make grammar and word suggestions? he asked. It was no problem, I said, and I’d be glad to do it.<\/p>\n
I read through the story last night, making a few notes as I went. The story, truthfully, wasn’t the sort of fiction I read, but it was interesting to me in that it took a look at something with which I have zero<\/i> familiarity. The writing itself was generally good–sentence structure worked, phrasing was good, an evocative sense of place. The narrative, though, was weak, and I saw two changes that, if executed well, would make all the difference.<\/p>\n
So I sat down this afternoon and began marking up the document using Word’s comment feature. It’s a nice feature–you can leave little word balloons in a document–even if I think the implementation could be better, such as the use of pop-up balloons. After about two hours, I thought I had done something useful with the commentary, and I wrote up an e-mail that explained the ideas I had for fixing the story’s narrative.<\/p>\n
This was no tough-love treatment of the story. It didn’t need that. I’ve read stories that have. I’ve delivered the tough-love message when necessary. What I think I did, though, was to point out some structural flaws that, if fixed, would result in a better story with a better sense of drama and character development. I posed some solutions to the story’s flaws, but they weren’t gospel–ultimately, the decision on what to use, and what not<\/i> to use, remains with the writer. They were just ideas I had–he may have better ideas.<\/p>\n
In the end, I felt productive today. I felt as though I’d done some good, for someone who could have used it. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday a friend e-mailed a short story he’d written for a college course. Could I look over the story and make grammar and word suggestions? he asked. It was no problem, I said, and I’d be glad to do it. I read through the story last night, making a few notes as I went. TheContinue reading “On Editing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[4149,4102],"class_list":["post-847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-editing","tag-writing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}