Recently, we heard a radio show about the way the current candidates for president and their wives dress and what this says about them. For instance, Robin Givan of The Daily Beast suggested that vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan is routinely dressed in large suits because he works out a lot and anything more form […]
Lately, we have been telling both fiction and nonfiction clients over and over again not to lecture or explain to the reader. Instead, make the point by telling a story. It is so much more interesting to read and so much more likely to attract a publisher. Jesus did it in the New Testament of […]
A couple of cautions about using PP’s: They should refer clearly to a noun or pronoun in the sentence. And they should not be placed too far away from the words they modify. This can be awkward and confusing. See the difference in the sentences below. Inspired by the beautiful spring day, I walked to […]
Where have all the participial phrases gone? Almost nobody uses them anymore. When we edit books, we marvel at how much waste and clumsiness could be avoided with a simple PP. We are forever shortening and streamlining material by employing them ourselves. A participle is a verb that is used as an adjective or adverb; […]
Before we went on vacation some time ago, we wrote a blog on last lines in books. Today, we have the origins of those lines for anyone who is interested. But as we were thinking about this blog, we wondered what the relationship is between last lines and first lines of books. So we looked […]
Much is made about the first lines of books, but we get more pleasure out of last lines because, if they are good, they evoke the whole experience of reading the book. Good last lines give us a warm feeling like we have been somewhere, changed in the process of going or coming, and arrived […]
Lately we’ve been reading a lot of conversations in clients’ books that seem to be floating in space. These disembodied voices leave us with an odd feeling like we have landed in the midst of some fantasy novel in which the characters simply don’t have bodies, but float around indistinguishably in space as pure consciousness […]
Recently, a prospective client told us she had received a rejection letter from an agent in which the agent said she had been on the fence about the book and after much debate within herself, had decided to pass on it. Well, we were impressed. That kind of “good” rejection is hard to come by. […]
One of our authors, the writer of a darling children’s book about a hedgehog and his special larch tree, is just beginning the process of trying to sell her book TANNI. In the meantime, she has already become famous in a way as one of the 238. Sandra Assmann, our author, submitted some of her […]
After reviewing hundreds of client manuscripts, we can say with some certainty that everybody has her or his favorite punctuation. Some people are fond of ellipses which make them look as if they are perpetually drifting off… Maybe trying to get off the page… Lately there have been a lot of semi-colon users; they write […]