editing

Here's a great roundup of free writing courses from around the web, focussing on several types of creative writing, including poetry, essay writing and fiction writing. There's also a section on proofreading / editing, and some ideas on generating income from writing.

A recently published compendium of Robert Frost’s personal notebooks has two critics up in arms. Each is separately claiming that hundreds of Frost’s words have been mis-transcribed in the volume. The editor maintains that the mistakes are a faithful rendering of Frost’s own errors.

“Presumably motivated by the fear of "corrupting" young minds and offending readers, publishers have edited and elided passages and pictures with a politically correct zeal resembling Soviet agitprop.” I have always maintained that children are more intelligent than we give them credit for. Why the insistence on sanitizing everything they read? Ridiculous.

"I've read and re-read the entire thing while copy-editing and editing. I've read every chapter while writing, I've gone over and over, cutting down and refining, until I know it like God Save our Gracious Queen.

I mean, Before They Are Hanged, it's a brilliant, brilliant book. Of course it is. But please, just for a year or two...

Can I not read it again?"

From Nancy Kress, award winning author of S.F. and a writing teacher: "Some of the stories I see in class seem to me better than some of the ones I see in the magazines. You have to be better at the beginning of your career than you do later on."

Eliminate unnecessary modifiers. Eliminate repeated words and phrases. Search for extraneous thats and hads. And more...

I just read a book where every character giggled instead of laughed. I think that author probably didn't realize he was repeating the word so often.

Writer Joe Abercrombie (The Blade Itself) blogs about the editing process for his latest book and ends by coming to the defense of editors, who he feels get blamed for overlong books or what may feel like rushed edits.

They are not editing them, they are butchering them! Stripping them down to %30-%40