While Kathryn continues her Art of Falling blog tour elsewhere, we'd like to welcome special guest Janice Gable Bashman—published nonfiction author, soon-to-be published fiction author, and editor—to the Blood-Red Pencil. Fiction and non-fiction are two different beasts when it comes to editing. I’m the Bram Stoker nominated author of Wanted Undead or Alive, and I’ve published articles in Writer’s Digest, Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, The Writer, and many other publications. I’m also managing editor of the International Thriller Writer’s The Big Thrill , so I edit a lot. But when it comes to editing fiction, I have to wear a different hat. In editing my own short stories (published in various anthologies), my young adult science thriller Predator (coming October 2014; Month9Books), and the middle grade novel I’m wrapping up now, I’ve had to look beyond copy editing, fact-checking, sentence structure, etc. and check other items. I’m not talking about big develop...

In any writing—non-fiction as well as fiction—try to use all five senses in telling your story. It will help to put your reader right THERE. Those five senses are: • Sight • Sound • Smell • Taste • Touch Sight is probably the easiest and most commonly used of the senses. And it is great to use colors and word pictures to make us “see” a scene. Use specifics: instead of saying “colorful flowers,” use “the delphinium’s bursts of magenta and blue” OR “the show-stopping red hollyhock blossoms.” But close your eyes and try to describe the scene with one or more of your other senses. Smell is perhaps the strongest sense of them all and certainly evokes the deepest memories and feelings. “My first boyfriend smelled like sawdust and Necco wafers.” Or “the potent brew of flowers, cigarettes and something musty I couldn’t identify.” Sound : How can you put the reader into this scene? Birds chirping, flowing water in a creek, the rustle of wind in the trees. What picture does t...

This post was first published here on September 12, 2008. ~~~~~~~ 1. Mark repetitive words and phrases for rewrites or substitutions. As is a particularly overused phrase beginning. 2. Mark all lazy verbs such as were, was, had, and substitute active verbs or restructure sentence. In most cases take out just, now, very, only. There is no now in the past tense except within the dialogue or thoughts of the character. An editor once told me that tiny is the most overused word in manuscripts. 3. Once those basic mistakes are corrected, read aloud and listen for: A. Hard to read passages that make you stumble. Fix them. B. If you stop to breathe in the middle of a sentence, it’s probably too long. C. Unpleasant cadence, too many sentences with the same rhythm, too many long or too many short sentences within a scene. As a general rule, short sentences are used for fast paced action, longer are to calm down a scene. D. Sibilance (repetition of S or SH sounds) or iteration (r...

By Bob Sanchez My first foray into fiction began out of my experiences with the Cambodian community in Lowell, Massachusetts. The idea was to tell the tale of a young Cambodian woman’s odyssey, with emphasis on the Khmer Rouge atrocities and the Thai refugee camps. I read almost a dozen gripping memoirs and talked to a few of the refugees, although the language barrier created a serious problem. Overall, I’d accumulated enough detail to flesh out a decent mainstream novel. Or so it seemed. What were the sights and smells like? The bugs, the plants, the animals? What was it like to have your feet in the rice paddy or to pedal a bicycle barefoot on a bumpy road? What did the inside of a home look like? I could pick up some of these details from books, but my novel may have suffered most of all because I’d never been to Cambodia or Thailand and could never convey the rich detail the story deserved. So what to do with my ton of research? Write a mystery about the Cambodian community in ...