Category Archives: Editing

Website Launch

Today, RathallaReview.org – the website for Rosemont College’s literary magazine – launched, hosting a number of interesting resources for writers and those interested in submitting their work.  According to our website,

Rathalla Review is a non-profit literary magazine that publishes fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry and art. Our mission is to develop a community of writers, artists and readers through our online and print publications, monthly podcasts of original craft talks with established writers and weekly featured podcasts collected from a variety of external sources.

As the Production Manager, my job is to maintain the website and keep it updated.  I designed the site, as well, and selected the graphic for the header.

Rathalla Review

I first learned web design (HTML and CSS) when I was in junior high, though I went several years without using it until I took Visual Communication at the University of Toledo last semester.  I was thankful that I’d brushed up on my HTML and CSS in that class when I learned designing the site would be part of my assistantship.

Rathalla Review will start accepting submissions soon – our form is already live – and you can find us both on Facebook and Twitter.  The Review accepts submissions of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art.

Update: Job Change

Hello friends, just sending you an update on what I’ve been up to lately.  I have something pretty cool in the works.

Starting today, I am officially a student in Rosemont College’s MA in Publishing program, where I’m studying on the marketing & sales track.  Rosemont’s program has something of a focus in young adult and children’s publishing, something I’m very interested in.

I am also this year’s Production Manager graduate assistant at Rosemont’s literary magazine, The Rathalla Review.  As Production Manager, I manage and update the Review’s website, assist the Associate Managing Editor with social media and internet marketing, and design the print and online publication.

This week, I’m working on designing the Review’s website, which will launch within the next few weeks.  Look forward to posts about the Review, which will start popping up soon!

Painfully Honest Critiques

Generally, I do not take criticism well.  It’s just something about being told I’m wrong that rubs against my grain, especially something I’ve been trained to do or something I’ve done out of habit for a long time.

The one exception to this is criticism of my writing during workshopping.  I handle criticism pretty well in workshops – usually because whoever is criticizing me is right.  My boyfriend, for example, is also a writer and does an extremely thorough job obliterating my work into smithereens.

Not that I mind, of course.  When your work gets blasted to smithereens, you have the chance to go in and make extreme changes to radically improve your work.  Here are a few hints on giving painfully honest and incredibly helpful techniques.

  • If the piece doesn’t make sense, do not hesitate to tell the writer.  It’s extremely important, though, that you tell them precisely why it doesn’t make sense.  “I don’t understand” is not as good as “Stanzas X and Y mention this element, but then it doesn’t show up again until five stanzas after that at stanza Q.”  It would also be important to explain “I don’t see how element T connects to element Z in this poem.”
  • In a poetry critique, nit-picking over word meanings or word choice can make or break a poem.  An example: there is a huge difference between “click” and “tick” when referring to the sound a clock makes, and it’s important to tell the difference based on what you mean.
  • Always, always, always make sure you are providing a fair and kind critique.  Each criticism should be accompanied by either a suggestion for improvement or an explanation of what you like about the piece.  You should never tell a writer “I don’t like X” or “Z is not working” without also saying “…but I like Y” or “…and Q is my favorite part/line/word.”  Knowing what does work will help the writer – both by knowing what to change and knowing what not to change.  Fair and kind critiques also help ease the pain of a critique as well.
  • Remember: a strong critique should ultimately help the writer and the pain will only be temporary.  While it’s a bit disappointing to be told your narrator is flat and the least interesting person in the story, that’s a very important thing for the writer to know: nobody wants to read a story with a boring narrator.  Your purpose as a critiquer – or critter, as they’re sometimes called – is to help your friends and colleagues build on their foundation to develop a better piece.

Critiques should be different according to preferences.  If you’re not sure what is appropriate, ask the person receiving the critique how in-depth they want you to go.

When my work is being critiqued, I prefer to have the harshest, most painfully honest, and most in-depth critique possible because that’s how I learn and improve.  What do you prefer when you’re being critiqued?  When you’re receiving critiques?  Are painfully honest critiques important to you?  Share your thoughts on critiquing in the comments below.

[Guest Post] Writing Utter Crap

We writers tend to tie ourselves up in knots. We know that the first draft doesn’t need to be perfect, but we still manage to act like it does. We have a hard time giving ourselves permission to write utter crap. We forget how freeing it is to not be perfect. An icon I found on LiveJournal years ago sums this up succinctly: Writing was so much easier when I sucked at it.

I don’t know about you, but when I was young and unaware of all the rules about writing and what makes good writing, it came easy. There was no stifling self-criticism. There was no paralyzing need for perfection. There was nothing but me and the words. I could immerse myself in story for hours at a time, without a single thought about grammar, plot, characterization, or any of the other trappings of good writing. I’ve looked back at some of the stories I had written back in my school years, and the poems — oh, the dreadful poems! It is all utterly unpublishable crap.

But I enjoyed every minute of writing it. I never entertained a single critical thought about any of it. And the words flowed with abandon.

That is what we need. Permission to write with the abandon of youth. Permission to suck. Permission to write utter crap.

Break the Rules

If you’re feeling stuck with your NaNoWriMo novel, or with anything else you’re writing, don’t just give yourself permission to write crap — demand it.

Sit down and write the most imperfect prose you can imagine. Break every rule in the Turkey City Lexicon. Fill your word count with adverbs and Tom Swifties. Don’t bother plotting or organizing your thoughts. While you’re busy telling (and not showing) your story, something amazing can happen. You may find the story suddenly coming to life in wonderful and unexpected ways.

Keep Moving Forward

The trick to winning NaNoWriMo all comes down to this: Keep writing forward. Don’t stop for anything. Here are a few tricks to help you keep the momentum moving forward if you feel stuck:

1) Summarize. Summarzing my get you through a rough spot, or a boring spot, or a creative block. After a few hundred words of summary, you may be surprised to find yourself struck with inspiration again. Keep the pen moving across the paper. Keep your fingers moving across the keyboard. Don’t wait for inspiration — make yourself an environment conducive for inspiration instead.

2) Complain. If you can’t even come up with a summary, write anyway. Even if the first words you write are “I don’t know what to write.” Be careful not to focus on that thought too much though. Think your way around the problem on paper or on-screen. The act of writing itself while you’re thinking about the problem may shake some inspiration loose for you.

3) Skip around. If you feel stuck on what comes next, skip it. If you know what the final battle needs to look like, but you don’t know how to get there, write the final battle anyway. Take Jonathan Lethem‘s advice and skip the transitions. Don’t even bother with writing a linear story. Write what inspires and excites you. The act of writing those scenes may even jostle out some ideas for how to get there. I wrote an entire short story consisting only of the good parts. No transitions. No summary. Nothing but the scenes that inspired me. It inspired an editor enough that she paid me for it and published it.

4) Shoot it all. Wakefield Mahon said it perfectly on Twitter: Shoot it all, edit later. Ignore Jonathan Lethem’s advice and write every opening door and every cup of tea if that’s what it takes to keep the creative momentum moving.

5) Make notes. If you decide that something needs to be changed do not go back and edit. I learned this trick from Holly Lisle. Any time you feel the urge to go back and edit, make a note instead, then keep moving forward as if you had already made the changes. I make notes in my writing by using brackets [like this]. Don’t waste time looking for the perfect word or going back to change anything you’ve already written. Note it, then move forward. You can go back and edit when you’re done.

Once you get the steam going — don’t stop. Don’t look back. Don’t become the literary equivalent of Lot’s Wife. If you look back, you risk turning your creative momentum into a self-critical pillar of salt. Keep your creative momentum moving forward.

Kimberly lives in a rural village near Madison, Wisconsin with her husband, two daughters, and a cat. She is a freelance copyeditor and proofreader and enjoys making money by reading books. Every now and then she even reads one just for fun. Her NaNoWriMo novel is The Hunter’s Daughters, a story about mothers, daughters, magic, rebellion, lovers, lost dreams, and … zombies.

[Guest Post] Eradicating Excuses and Silencing the Inner Critic

I hear a lot of excuses for not participating in National Novel Writing Month, more commonly known as NaNoWriMo. That sounds like something a tired novelist says at the end of a month-long, novel-writing marathon: “Naaah, no wri’ mo’…” just before conking out over the keyboard.

The only valid excuses, really, are “I have no desire to write a novel right now,” and being quadriplegic. With today’s assistive technologies, even the latter is questionable in its validity, provided you really want to write a novel.

In fact, this year marks my tenth NaNoWriMo. I’ve only “won” once, and that’s fine by me. I had something to prove – to myself. Until then, the longest story I’d ever written fell just short of 6000 words. I was still making excuses – “I’m busy” being one of the big ones. It was true, too. I had a full-time job, and the company I work for had just gone through a major merger. My kids were thirteen and five, and though loathe to admit in public, needed me. My mom was critically ill, in the hospital, a thousand miles from her home or mine. I traveled a lot that year. And then, there was September. 9/11. Need I say more?

They tell us, “Write what you know.” And we have to live, to experience, to get out into the world to have things to write about. But sometimes, it all seems too too real and somehow taboo to write about our own experiences or to say out loud the things we know.

I’d suggest that you edit “Write what you know” to “Write from what you know” – draw from the well of reality to craft fiction. You don’t have to know and certainly don’t have to understand  everything. Sometimes, by writing from what you know, a new sort of clarity begins to emerge and it starts to make more sense to you and, if you’re lucky, to your readers. It’s all grist for the mill; the trick to writing entertaining fiction, I think, lies in the ability to lie like a rug and be scrupulously honest, all at the same time.

I’m the first to debunk the notion that artists’ and writers’ creativity demands the infertile soil of hardship and deprivation to thrive. I don’t write well at all when I’m worried about things like paying the bills or feeding my kids. But the truth is, we writers do seem to have two gears: procrastination mode and deadline mode. And at no time is the old adage “If you want something done quickly, ask a busy person to do it” truer than during November and NaNoWriMo.

Besides the artificial deadline pressure, there was another factor driving me: A desperate need to escape reality. Most people would read a book, watch a movie, or veg out in front of the TV. But all of those activities were too passive to still the small, panicked voices in my head. We writers have learned to sublimate our craziness and call those clamoring cranial voices “characters.” It’s both frightening and exhilarating to realize, when you’re really in the writing groove, that you have given up trying to control those characters and have begun to simply take dictation as they tell you their stories.

There are other characters who must be silenced. I’m not talking about the victims in our murder mysteries – I’m talking about our inner critics.

Those insidious demons left over from our insecure, prepubescent years when we began to realize writing was work that involved skills we didn’t yet possess and somehow got the notion that our fantasies weren’t good enough to pass literary muster. The whole premise behind NaNoWriMo is to write so fast those characters can’t get a word in edgewise. But what if they do? What if, somehow, they manage to harangue us into believing their petty-minded nonsense? What else – we torment them on the page for fun and profit. One year, my half-finished NaNoNovel, Eradicating Edna, featured the inner critic as a character. Try it, if you feel your well of inspiration’s all tapped out. It’s wicked fun – and it might just serve as free therapy.

Eradicating Edna (Prologue)

“What was I thinking, to put such expectations on myself at a time like this, when all the  world’s gone mad around me?” I cried, throwing a forearm dramatically over my forehead and letting out a piteous wail. “I’ll do it!” I sprang to my feet, energized. It took less than a NaNoSecond forreality to sink in. “But I’m so far behind. All I have so far is three death scenes and an aborted suicide.”

You can imagine the withering look my Muse gave me. “That’s the spirit.”

My Inner Editor foamed at the mouth. Only, the foam came out her nose, since my Muse had had the foresight to bind up her mouth with duct tape.

“Look, you’re an overachiever, but you’re a burnt-out overachiever seriously in danger of looking like she’s got a bug up her butt. So write this one just for fun. And if you must compete, consider it your entry into the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest next year.” The Muse shrugged.

“That’s just supposed to be one sentence,” I said. I was pouting. I had my heart set on writing great lit-rah-chure.

“So write a novel that gives you nothing but hard choices as to which sentence you should enter.”

“There are multiple categories,” I said, warming to the idea. “I could have ‘em all covered, by the time I’m done.”

“There you go. Enter in every category. Just be sure to win a ‘Dishonorable Mention’ for me.”

“I know that, Dear. It’s pretty pathetic, if you ask me.” She picked up my daughter’s TI-83 calculator and pushed some buttons at random. “Don’t think of it as ‘behind.’ Think of it as an adjustment, from 1667 words a day to 2800 words a day. You can do that, can’t you? I mean…if you’re enjoying yourself.”

“Can I use this conversation?” I asked. I was reluctant to admit it; it seemed so…puerile. But I was beginning to enjoy myself. Guilty pleasures are always the best kind.

“No.”

“Will you take that thing away?” I asked, pointing at the Inner Editor. The IE growled and struggled against the ropes that bound her to her ergonomically-correct office chair. Gleefully, I smacked her over the head with an ergonomic keyboard, breaking the device in two. I dumped it into her lap.

“Absolutely.” My Muse poured two glasses of cheap cream sherry and we raised them in a toast. “To fingering Bulwer-Lytton’s proboscis in April!”

“Here, here.”

“Isn’t that ‘hear, hear’?” squeaked the Inner Editor, who had managed to bite through the duct tape with her jagged fangs.

“Good lord. Does ‘anal-retentive’ have a hyphen?” sneered my Muse. Grabbing She-Who-Inspires-Writers-to-Write-Heinous-Scenes-of-Gruesome-Torture by the neck, my Muse saluted me and disappeared. The Evil One vanished, too, and I could breathe again.

Holly Jahangiri is a technical communicator, social media analyticator, children’s book author, blogger, happy wife and mom living in Houston, Texas. She would really appreciate it if you would read her post, Good Goals Gone Bad, on TheNextGoal.com.