Editorial Notes = clarifying information, additional insight, annotations

Hiya Reader,

When I'm doing the creative work of editing, I often need to take breaks. For me, this isn't usually time dependent but more along the lines of segments. For example, I'll take a break after a section or a chapter or even a tricky paragraph description.

Sometimes I'll do something physical, like suffering through a few pushups or peeling vegetables for steaming. But sometimes, I just web surf. Cute animals always get me, but so does striking art of most any type.

Presented here for your enjoyment is a mashup: wildlife photography! If you never thought the distastefully named slime mould could be strangely beautiful, prepare to be surprised.

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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.

Someone at this outdoor book stall catalogued their true crime section as: Gangsters. Serial Killers. Corruption. Bombers. Rapists. and... Fare Evaders?

This is actually a masterclass in what not to do in your own writing — specifically, the list that doesn't know it's gone off the rails. We've all written them: sentences where we pile on details that feel equivalent to us because we've been inside the story too long to notice that one of them is a fare evader.

Read your lists out loud. Every. Single. One. If the last item makes you pause, even slightly, trust that pause. Your reader will pause there too — just without the context to know whether the incongruity was intentional or you lost the thread.

Actionable Tip of the Week

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

At a conference recently, I approached an exhibitor's table with a question about her services. I'd barely gotten the first few words out when she interrupted me — certain she already knew what I was asking — and launched into an answer for a question I hadn't asked and wasn't going to ask. She wasn't willing to listen. I walked away with none of the information I'd come for.

Our drafts do this all the time.

We know our writing so completely — the world we've built, the characters we've lived with — that we read what we meant to put on the page rather than what's actually there. Being too close to our writing is the single biggest hurdle to quality revision. We've been inside the story so long that we hear things that aren't on the page, fill in gaps without noticing, and answer questions no one asked. All the while, we forget to ask those all-important questions of ourselves.

The fix is a specific kind of revision pass, one that forces you into a state of remove where you must objectively note what actually appears on the page. Read your draft from the beginning and annotate every time you address these five items, whether specifically or by implication:

• Where are we? What details of place draw this picture for the reader?
• When are we? The era or moment sets the stage with necessary context.
• Who are they? How do characters connect to the world and each other, and how do they reveal themselves?
• How do things look? Visual details let readers picture the environment as it is or as characters perceive it.
• What's happening? What are the key plot points or conflicts, internal or external?

If you can't identify these five items in a passage, neither can your reader.

That said, their absence isn't automatically a problem. These elements aren't always needed equally in every scene — the question is whether their presence or absence is intentional. Just as we edit what's on the page, we need to consider what's not.

That exhibitor never noticed she'd answered the wrong question. Don't be her.

Reader Question of the Week

Charlie wrote: Should I edit as I go or finish the draft first?

Charlie! The short answer: finish the draft first. But the real answer is more useful than that.

Most writers operate in two modes whether they realize it or not. Drafting mode and revision mode. The mistake isn't editing while you draft — it's treating those two things as the same activity when they require completely different parts of your brain. Drafting mode asks only that the prose be clean enough to stay readable and keep moving. You're not perfecting anything. You're getting the work down. Revision mode is where the heavier decisions live: structural calls, cutting scenes, reshaping sections, figuring out what the piece is actually trying to do.

The danger isn't pausing to fix a broken sentence. The danger is polishing your opening pages before the rest of the work exists. You can spend six weeks making your first chapter radiant and still have no idea if the book holds together, because you haven't written it yet. A gleaming first chapter attached to nothing is not progress. It's procrastination that feels like craft.

Draft messy if you have to. Fix as you go if a rough patch is genuinely slowing you down. But save the real editorial eye for when there's something whole to see.

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Link of the Week

Here's a list of the most mispronounced words of last year. Are you saying them correctly? Find out now so you can feel great about yourself when you smugly correct everyone around you. 😂

I ❤️ Hearing from You!

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Thanks for reading!

~Helene, your writing sherpa