Editorial Notes = clarifying information, additional insight, annotations

Hiya Reader,

Like many of you, I read a lot about writing. So often, pieces seem to be exactly the same, not because of AI (although of course there's that, too) but because writers want to be positive in public. So this piece from The Dial about the "seven literary sins" really struck a chord for me. I hope you enjoy it as well.

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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 Arundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me is this wonderfully descriptive sentence. It's relatively brief given the clarity of place the language evokes:

"Soon after he graduated, he found a job on a remote tea estate in Wayanad, in the exquisite, misty, violent north of Kerala, where landlords were beheaded, where wild elephants roam free, where there is a whole dictionary of words for different kinds of rain, and people are said to measure the distance home by counting bolts of lightning."

Look at how much information is conveyed here! Are your descriptive sentences doing as much work as these?

Actionable Tip of the Week

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

When you're ready to edit, look for the places where you reached for backup. Not typos, not clunky sentences. The spots where one word wasn't doing the job, so you sent in reinforcements. "So incredibly tired." "Kind of a huge deal, honestly." An italicized word that didn't strictly need italics, except you weren't sure the sentence would land without the visual nudge. A rhetorical question dropped in mid-paragraph purely to manufacture a little urgency, the writerly equivalent of clearing your throat before saying something you're not sure is interesting enough on its own.

None of this is a character flaw. It's just what happens when you're trying to hold someone's attention in real time, which is a genuinely hard thing to do, and your brain reaches for whatever tool is closest. The trouble is that reinforcements are expensive. Every backup word you call in is a small, quiet confession to the reader: I wasn't sure this next part would work without help. Stack up enough of those confessions and the reader starts to feel it, even if they couldn't tell you exactly why the paragraph feels a little breathless, a little over-managed.

So here's a different editing pass to try, instead of the usual "cut the adverbs" sweep, which treats the symptom and ignores the diagnosis. Go through a page and circle every place you added emphasis — an intensifier, an italic, a stacked adjective, a "just," a "so," an exclamation point doing double duty. Don't delete anything yet. Just ask, out loud if you have to: what was I worried this word or sentence couldn't do by itself? Sometimes the honest answer is nothing — you'll cut it and feel nothing but relief. But sometimes the answer points you somewhere useful. Maybe the sentence you're propping up is vague, and the fix isn't removing the crutch, it's giving the sentence a leg to stand on — a sharper verb, a more specific noun, an image instead of an assertion.

This is, I think, the real difference between editing on autopilot and editing with your eyes open. Autopilot editing treats every intensifier as guilty and strips them all out, which sometimes just leaves you with a flatter version of the same uncertain sentence. Editing with your eyes open uses the intensifier as a diagnostic tool — a little sensor your first-draft brain planted for you, marking exactly where it didn't trust the prose to carry itself. That's genuinely useful information. Most editing advice tells you to cut. I'd rather you get curious first, and cut second.

Your sentence doesn't need the extra italics, the double adverb, or the rhetorical throat-clear. It needs one true, specific thing said plainly — the kind of sentence that never had to ask twice for anyone's attention.

Reader Question of the Week

Selena wrote: How do I cut 10,000 words from my manuscript?

Selena! Cutting 10,000 words might feel like being asked to amputate a limb, but most manuscripts have more fat than you'd think.

Start with the obvious targets: adverbs (kill 90% of them — see this week's Actionable Tip!), dialogue tags fancier than "said," and any scene where characters greet each other, make tea, or drive somewhere without anything happening. Those "getting from A to B" scenes are usually invisible to writers and glaringly skippable to readers.

Next, hunt for throat-clearing — the sentence or paragraph before the sentence that actually starts the scene. Writers often need a running start; readers don't need to see the runway.

Then look for redundancy: are you showing AND telling the same emotion? Explaining a joke that already landed? Repeating backstory the reader already absorbed? Pick one instance and cut the rest.

Do a pass for each category separately rather than all at once; it's less overwhelming and you'll cut more per pass. Ten thousand words is roughly 40 pages, which is very doable in pieces, like the proverbial eating an elephant one bite at a time.

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Link of the Week

For those of who who love thrillers, here's the New York Times list of the best of the century "as voted on by 291 crime novelists, editors, booksellers, librarians and other book lovers."

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Thanks for reading!

~Helene, your writing sherpa