Editorial Notes = clarifying information, additional insight, annotations

Hiya Reader,

The following issue is a reader favorite from the Editorial Notes archives, to keep your inbox company while Helene is on sabbatical at her writing fellowship.

On vacation when our children were tweens, my family of four chugged across the Virginia Piedmont in our beloved Volkswagen Westfalia Vanagon. If you aren't aware, these vehicles are huge, box-shaped, and heavy. They're designed for a life in the great outdoors, not for speed in transport. The only time a Westfalia can go faster than ~50mph is on a long downhill stretch. Better check those brakes!

Once we'd reached maximum hangry status (we'd left a packed cooler of sandwiches forlorn on the kitchen counter), the only place to stop on the farmland stretch of highway was Arby's. Each of us shouted our order to my husband, who pulled up to the drive-thru window.

"Welcome to Arby's. May I take your order?"

"I'll have four roast beeves..." A moment of silence. Then, as one voice, hysteria. Belly-clenching screams of laughter that left us breathless, choking, tears running down our cheeks. We had to pull into a parking space to get it together. The poor employee.

Eventually, our order was "four roast beef sandwiches." Proof positive that tricky editing questions can often be resolved with a simple rephrase.

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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.

In Patrick DeWitt's novel The Librarianist, this small, third-person point of view snippet of conversation illustrates the value of spare language.

"Jill says she's worried you're depressed."

"I'm not depressed at all."

"You don't seem depressed. I think Jill is depressed."

"I think Jill is depression." When Bob made Maria laugh, he felt proud. Maria couldn't speak to the others like this, and Bob understood and appreciated he was one apart.

DeWitt didn't tell us that Maria laughed by writing "Maria laughed at Bob's response." Nor did he bore us with "Maria said...Bob said...Maria said...Bob said." Instead, the image of laughter springs organically, as it would if we overhead a real-life conversation, and the speakers are clear from context. As an added bonus, readers gain insight into Bob's emotions and the characters' relationship, all in one fell swoop.

A fantastic model for all of us who overwrite, like the author of this gas pump sign:

As opposed to prepaying afterwards?

Edit out the obvious. Trust your reader to think.

Actionable Tip of the Week

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

Quality dramatic scripts—I'm NOT looking at you, Law & Order—are excellent models for crafting realistic and meaningful dialogue. Writers of any genre who want to improve their skills in making page-people sound real will find loads of insight by reading scripts.

If you're serious about this challenge, choose a play you're familiar with and a single character from that play. Read the play from beginning to end, out loud if you can, but only the one character's lines, ignoring all other dialogue. Take notes on the ways in which personality and viewpoint are highlighted through skillful dialogue alone.

But there's a genre-crossing takeaway that gets less attention: action. Drama is, well, dramatic. In drama, nearly everything is action. Is tension. Is conflict. Manuscripts that fail to grab a reader often start too soon, with explanation, backstory, a word salad revving of engines.

If you're not sure where something starts—a manuscript, article, chapter—begin in the middle. Pull out the most dramatic moment, open a new Word doc (or whatever you use), start there as your draft beginning, and see what happens.

Reader Question of the Week

C.J. wrote: I know some people say there's no such thing as writer's block, but I don't know what else to call what I'm going through. I'm stuck on a pivotal scene, and I don't know how to finish. I thought it would go away on its own but every time I sit down to write, it's trash.

C.J.! Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, blockage begets blockage. Our internal critics—vital in the editing stages, poison while drafting—show up and start yapping out of turn (i.e.: "it's trash"). Writing and editing both fail when we engage them simultaneously. Remember the old Saturday morning cartoons when a character's angel whispers in one ear and devil whispers in the other?

I don't know what tricks you've tried, but this list contains three proven favorites:

• Walk away. If you have the ability to put your scene in a literal or figurative drawer for a time, do it! A month, a week, even just a day can make a difference. The trick is to really get away. Do no writing on the scene, even in your head. Don't obsess. Forget it exists. When you come back to it, write it fresh, comparing the drafts later. Your brain will have been lulled into believing it's writing a new scene.
• Free write (with a twist). Like the "walk away" suggestion, this one requires the luxury of time. Take 10 minutes every day for 30 days to write whatever comes to mind, focusing on the scene giving you trouble. Write nonstop until the timer goes off. Stop writing immediately. Do not review anything you've written until the 30 days are up; then, review the free writing all at once. You'll discover nuggets and threads that interest you, while pushing through writing paralysis. (You can work on other sections in the meantime outside those 10 daily minutes.)
• Sneak up. Go stealth mode. Approach the scene from a different character's point of view, or in another verb tense, or within an unusual setting, or using the style of a writer you admire, or or or. Remember, the change needn't be (and probably won't be) permanent. It's just a tool. Even if you keep the scene with the original choices intact, this exercise often solves problems by opening up avenues past the blockage.​

(This kinda sorta little bit turned into another Actionable Tip of the Week, but I hope it's useful.)

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Link of the Week

I didn't need my 90's grad school Psychology of Education class to show me where I land in Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences—I'm visual all the way. I was probably more into the I Spy, Where's Waldo, and David Macauley books than my kids.

So how can I not love the MOBA Museum website? The "world's only museum dedicated to the collection, exhibition, and celebration of bad art in all its forms," MOBA is a physical museum in a Boston brewery. If you, like me, are not in the area, check out the online collections of "art too bad to be ignored." The curator's notes are as stunning as the art.

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Thanks for Reading!

~Helene, your writing sherpa

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