Upskilling

So, as you all know, I have been editing quite a lot lately and my editors will tell you I sometimes just don’t get the right thing happening.

Therefore, I have commenced an editing course (how formal is that? ‘commenced’!). This, I hope, will give me that insight on how I can write better and tweak my writing so that it appeals to most people. It’s a hard thing to do when all you want to do is write new words and sentences but editing is a large chunk of a writer/author’s daily grind. We need to polish our works. We need to make sure they follow their own paths and that their characters are polished and three dimensional. We need to make sure our plots are solid with no holes and come to a natural conclusion. Mind you, those conclusions may take more than one book to pan out but as long as they do, then we’re on the right track.

Oh, and we have to learn not to repeat words or phrases too much unless it’s in dialogue and the speaker is intentionally repeating someone else’s words.

But editing usually picks that up – although I did learn in the first lesson that typos sometimes get missed, so luckily I have a friend with the eye of a hawk who usually does a last minute proof read of my work before I finalise it.

So hopefully by this time next week I will have more skills to share and be able to tell you how I have utilised them in my own work.