Editorial Notes = clarifying information, additional insight, annotations

Hiya Reader,

It's that time of year when I have the urge to do a deep clean of everything I own. That's not to say I actually always do said clean, but I definitely want to!

One area I've not really ever cleaned properly is my personal library. Yes, I take them off the shelves, clean the shelves, dust the covers and the exposed edges of the pages...but cleaning the books themselves? Never have I ever!

This article from a book restoration and repair specialist inspires me to put on some opera (for an epic atmosphere) and get to work.

Do you clean your books? Let me know your experience!

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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.

From John Fox's blog, I came across his list of 100 outstanding sentences. (Scroll down a bit to get past the course and service marketing; the heading is "100 Beautiful Sentences".)

For a fun exercise, pick one of these examples that stops you. Then rebuild it from scratch using your own words: swap every noun, swap every verb, etc, but keep the grammar exactly as it is.

What you learn is the mechanics and architecture of how the author structured a sentence. This is similar to art students who copy master artworks into their notebooks, not plagiarism but a learning model for technique and craft.

A sentence is a machine, and the best ones have elegant mechanics worth reverse-engineering.

Actionable Tip of the Week

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

If you've ever spent twenty minutes scrolling Netflix without choosing anything, you've felt the quiet trap of personalization: a system that knows you so well it can only show you more of yourself. Writers fall into the same trap, except the algorithm isn't running on a server somewhere. It's running in your head.

Every writer develops habits — of both process and perception. You reach for the same sentence structures. You default to the same emotional register. You resolve scenes the way you've always resolved scenes, because that's what has worked before, and the brain, ever efficient, files "what worked before" under "what will work again." Over time, your creative choices begin to look suspiciously like a Spotify playlist that's decided you only want indie folk forever.

The problem isn't that these patterns exist. The problem is that they become invisible. You write predictably. And you can't revise what you can't see.

A structural inventory can help.

Go through a draft and briefly note, for each distinct unit — a scene, a stanza, a section, a paragraph block — two things: what the emotional temperature is (tense, warm, melancholy, comic) and how it ends (resolved, interrupted, faded out, punched). Then look at the list as a whole. Most writers, when they do this for the first time, discover they've been composing in one key. Every unit ends on a quiet exhale, or every emotional peak gets undercut with irony, reflexively, as a kind of nervous tic. The inventory makes the pattern visible in a way that reading straight through never does, because reading pulls you into each moment, while the list lets you see the shape of all the moments together. Once you can see the pattern, you can decide whether it's working or whether it's just what you do. Then find one unit that could stand to end differently, and try it: break the loop once, deliberately, and see what opens up.

More than merely fixing mistakes, revision puts you back in control so you can make deliberate choices. This is a terrific technique for finding those places you've outsourced to habit.

Reader Question of the Week

Angelica wrote: I reread my draft last night and it just... sat there. The scenes feel real to me when I'm writing them, but on the page they come out flat. What am I missing?

Angelica! This is likely not a tone problem but a detail problem. Specifics are meant to accomplish two jobs at once — they're doing the work of a clue and the work of an echo, and you're leaving both on the table.

As a clue, a specific detail tells the reader something true and particular: not "an old house" but "a house with a cracked gutter and three mismatched shutters." Now the reader is building an inference: neglect, maybe, or a patch job that ran out of money. You haven't explained anything; you've shown evidence.

As an echo, that same detail can come back. Later, one of those shutters bangs open in the wind at exactly the wrong moment, and the reader feels it because they were already holding it.

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Link of the Week

Now that we live in a world in which gambling can take place for the weirdest of reasons, why am I surprised there is a rock/paper/scissors competitive tournament?

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Thanks for reading!

~Helene, your writing sherpa