Category Archives: editing

Revision for Consistency

Revising, revision

Even the best laid plans often go awry. It’s true. No matter how much planning or plotting you might do for your work in progress (WIP), the characters soon develop minds of their own and take you to places you never thought you’d go. So you let them go wherever they want and say whatever they want to say, and your book is better for it, but the moment you let them go off-book, you are opening yourself up to a host of plot holes. This is where your first revision comes in.

Last week, I typed “The End” on my latest WIP, Phoenix Station. But it wasn’t the end. Last week only marked the beginning of my first editing pass: Revision.

I’m an editor, and I’m really good at finding inconsistencies in my clients’ plots. Now is the time to put away my author’s cap and don my developmental editor’s one for my own book. In keeping with that spirit, today’s post is all about revision.

Milanote for Outlining

I’m usually more of a pantser than a plotter, but at some point, I always wind up plotting the rest of the book out. Given its plot, I started writing Phoenix Station as a planner. I started out with handmade notes and ramblings, refined that into a word processed chapter summary, and broke that down even further when I stumbled upon Milanote.

revising, revision
Milanote column with notes

In the months since discovering Milanote, it’s become one of my staple tools for developmental editing. Milanote is similar to an endless bulletin board on which you can stick “columns” and add “notes” to layout your book. I like that everything is on the desktop in front of me. It becomes a living document of the progress of my writing.

Finding Plot holes

My first pass is to tie up all loose ends I might have created along the way, aka plot holes. As I revise, I catalogue each chapter in a separate “column.” I list plot events in a bulletted list and reserve a “notes” section for questions that need to be answered on my next pass through the document. I highlight terms, character names, and the names of places so I will be sure to use the same terminology throughout. Text messages are important in my story, so I also highlight each of the strategically placed cryptic messages my character received. This makes it easier to locate later, though Milanote’s search function helps.

Revise for Consistency

When revising your document, I recommend making several passes. The first pass should be devoted to consistency. This applies to descriptions of characters and places as well as the internal structure of the world you have built (especially important for sci-fi and fantasy). I also edit for grammar and word choice as I go. Each pass through polishes my work even more. Creating a separate document that functions as a “story bible” for your work will help. I’m using Milanote, but you could use Word if you prefer.

Next Steps

What happens next depends on what I find in my first pass. I might need another revision dedicated to plugging the holes in my first (and second) draft. I might need to look at diction, imagery, symbolism, foreshadowing or something else. The important thing to note is that I won’t know where to go next until I complete this draft.

Stay tuned to follow my journey as I take Phoenix Station from first draft through to published (fingers crossed) bestseller!

Artificial Intelligence—does it live up to the hype?

The above definition was “written” by the ChatGPT interface, an artificial intelligence.

I had the idea to use AI after reading a book on how to generate passive income. I played with it a bit and decided to see if I could do what the book suggested, let AI generate a year’s worth of blog posts in a week to free up some of my time. I soon learned that this was easier said than done.

There is a pattern to the way AI—and ChatGPT in particular—formulates its blog posts. For example, the structure of most posts it generates is the same, beginning with an introduction, providing a list of three to five items complete with subtitles, and ending with a conclusion that says virtually the same thing as the introduction. If you don’t like what the AI produces for you, it can be regenerated, but there is no guarantee the new content will be significantly different.

It took me close to two weeks to generate enough content for 52 blog posts for my sister site, largely because I had to rewrite, revise, and pad most of the blog posts. Rumour has it that Google won’t index blogs it thinks use AI, so I had to do some heavy editing to make the text sound more like me than directly copied and pasted from the AI interface. I did, however, do a few plagiarism checks using Grammarly, but there was no indication that the AI had written anything that might be considered plagiarized.

From generating blog posts, I switched focus to having the AI generate an entire book for me. I decided to create a writing journal-type book with 365 writing prompts. I call it 365-Day Writing Challenge: A Year of Writing Prompts. This took me three weeks to generate enough unique and doable prompts. I learned that AI likes fantasy. Both ChatGPT and Boo.ai sites seemed to default to prompts about people time travelling, losing their memories, inheriting haunted places, travelling to alternate realities, or writing from the point of inanimate objects, which was frustrating. I witnessed the machine learning aspect of AI firsthand when, after more than a week and getting prompts close to what I was looking for, I cleared the list of questions I had asked ChatGPT, and it stopped giving me answers I liked. It took a few days to re-train it to give me get good results again.

As for the question of whether AI lives up to the hype? The jury is hung on this one. It is a great tool for writing blog posts and outlines or getting ideas when you have writer’s block (it can outline whole novels for you if you ask it to and work with it long enough). It’s also good for writing advertising copy after a good revision and edit.

Could students use AI to outline their essays for them? Probably. Will they be good enough to pass teacher scrutiny? Not likely. AI writing tends to be superficial at best. For example, when I asked it to write advertising copy for this website, it took keywords I used in my last few posts and extrapolated that to write the blurb. According to it, I have written all sorts of books in genres I have never attempted (like romance). It also lists book titles I have never written and states that one of my books is a series when it is a standalone book.

In my opinion, the kind of text written by AI is limited. It cannot generate unique ideas, but it can repackage old ones. If you use AI to assist you in outlining your book, it might help you to get started on your writing journey, but if you plan to use it to flesh out your book in its entirety? I will let ChatGPT answer that question for you:

AI-generated writing is typically based on patterns and algorithms that the machine has learned from a large amount of input data. This means that the output is often formulaic and lacks the creativity and originality of human writing. Additionally, AI may not be able to capture the nuances and complexities of human emotions and experiences that are often the hallmark of great fiction.

Moreover, using AI to write an entire fiction novel raises ethical questions around intellectual property and authorship. It is unclear who would own the rights to an AI-generated novel, and whether it would be considered original work or plagiarism.

Happy writing!

4 Tips for Showing the Possessive Form of a Proper Noun

Apostrophe word or phrase in a dictionary

One of the things I see in my editing is that many authors are unsure as to how to show the possessive of a proper noun ending in S. Here are some things to remember to clear up this confusion.

Tip 1: When you have a name that ends in an S, add an apostrophe to show belonging, but only if the apostrophe S is not pronounced.

The ball belongs to Sanders.

It’s Sanders’ ball.

NOT: It’s Sander’s ball. [the S is a part of the name and cannot be separated to add the comma]

Tip 2: If you would pronounce the S to show the possessive, you must add an apostrophe S at the end of the name.

The ball belongs to Cyrus.

It’s Cyrus’s ball.

Tip 3: If a family name ends in S and you want to show the possessive for the whole family, add es’ to the end of the name.

The ball belongs to the Sanderses. [the whole of the Sanders family]

It’s the Sanderses’ ball.

Tip 4: Limit the apostrophes to one per name (or word).

It’s Cyrus’s ball.

NOT: It’s Cyrus’s’ ball.

Keeping these tips in mind as you write is sure to help you avoid these mistakes in the future. It has been said that, on average, it takes about a month to build a habit, so the more you practice applying these tips, the quicker these rules will become second nature.

If you are still unsure of whether you are using apostrophes to show the possessive form of proper nouns, be sure to use a grammar-checker like the ones built into Microsoft Word or Google Docs or an AI grammar-checker like Grammarly to help you with this.