Editorial Notes = clarifying information, additional insight, annotations

Hiya Reader,

Looking at my massive TBR pile is alternately exciting and depressing. This article found me at exactly the right time (thanks Maddie!) Apparently, the pile is doing exactly what it should...and it's a great lead in to this week's Actionable Tip below.

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Example of the Week

Sometimes this is a good example—or a great one. Sometimes this is a bad example—or just a funny blooper. Sometimes a combination. You never know.

This week, a coworker commented that "instant" and "instantly" are interchangeable because they're exactly the same thing so it doesn't matter which one we use.

Well, no. One is an adjective and one is an adverb and they have different grammatical functions, so...

Actionable Tip of the Week

A trick to add to your self-editing toolbox right now!

So apparently David Bowie, whose music provided the soundtrack to most of my life, kept a running list of 100 favorite books, and the man's tastes were, to put it mildly, all over the map. Homer next to a Beano comic. Dante's Inferno rubbing shoulders with a satirical magazine from the '60s. Lolita hanging out near a book about Francis Bacon interviews. If you squint, it looks less like a reading list and more like the contents of someone's brain that got knocked over and spilled onto a shelf. And honestly? Given who we're talking about, that eclectic taste makes total sense to me.

Those of us who aren't David Bowie can learn an applicable lesson here — for our reading habits, sure, but also our writing. Our internal editor needs raw material to work with. Self-editing isn't a switch we flip on by sheer willpower or by reading enough craft books that tell you to "kill your darlings" or "show don't tell." Bowie wasn't stacking his shelves with a hundred versions of the same book. He had Faulkner next to pulp comics next to Orwell next to a book about symbols in art, and that range is exactly what trains a brain to notice rhythm, voice, pacing, and the difference between a sentence that earns its keep and one that's just taking up space.

There's also something sneaky happening when you read outside your own genre, which is precisely what makes it so useful for editing. If you only ever read and write in the same genres, you start absorbing its habits uncritically, the good and the bad, and you lose the ability to see your own manuscript with any distance. But throw yourself into a genre you don't usually touch, and suddenly you're reading like a tourist instead of a resident. You notice things. You notice how a thriller writer manages to keep every single paragraph moving forward, how a poet earns a single perfect word instead of three mediocre ones, how a literary novelist can let a scene breathe without ever feeling slow.

It's the art of reading your own work like a stranger would — remember my mantra about getting distance?— and reading different stuff is how you practice being a stranger.

Before you sit down to revise, open a new book first. Don't read for plot but for craft. Ten to 15 pages is great; more than that is avoidance. When your brain warms up on something outside your comfort zone, you'll notice things you never would have otherwise.

Reader Question of the Week

Claire wrote: How do I make something accessible without dumbing it down?

Claire! Accessible writing is writing with fewer unnecessary obstacles. Complexity lives in the ideas, not in your sentence structure. You can explain a genuinely difficult concept in short, clear sentences and it's still difficult — the reader just isn't fighting your prose on top of fighting the idea.

Give readers the scaffolding before the specifics. Define terms before you lean on them. Build from something familiar toward something new, one step at a time, instead of dropping readers into the deep end and trusting them to swim toward your point. You can keep the necessary technical vocabulary if you just define it in plain language the first time it appears.

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Link of the Week

Ready for a quiz that psychoanalyzes your bookshelf habits by making you rate a stack of book blurbs and vibe-check some statements, then slaps a "reading color" label on your soul in about five minutes? I got you covered! Basically a personality test cosplaying as a way to finally figure out why your to-be-read pile keeps judging you from the nightstand.​

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Thanks for reading!

~Helene, your writing sherpa