Lynne Stringer – Author & Editor

The modern writer has plenty of hoops to jump through if they want their novel to be successful. Writing it is the easy part. After that there’s editing, both by yourself and by someone else (preferably a professional editor). Then, once your book has been accepted for publication, there’s all the preparations, rewrites, adjustments, etc. Then there’s promotions. Even if your book is being published traditionally (i.e. by a publisher who pays the costs upfront and pays you royalties on sales) it’s a good idea to be actively promoting. These days, that includes activity on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and writing […]

I don’t know if other writers struggle with this, but sometimes I struggle to write in the ‘showing’ style, rather than the ‘telling’ style. For those of you who don’t know, this is ‘telling’: John and Mary were married in a beautiful ceremony. Gary was John’s best man for the day, and everyone thought Mary looked beautiful. This is showing: As John stood at the end of the aisle, he saw a vision of radiance beginning to move towards him. It was Mary. He had never seen her look so amazing. Gary, his best man, gave him a nudge, but […]

It may be a hangover from my journalism days, but I’m no fan of the word ‘very’. No, I don’t think it is a hangover from that. I know other editors who frown on words like ‘very’ as well. While some might have a bugbear about words that end in ‘ly’, ‘very’ is my pet peeve. Admittedly, I still use it sometimes, especially when writing dialogue, because a lot of people use it when they’re talking. However, when I did journalism I was told that if I needed to use the word ‘very’ then the word after it was the […]

Yesterday I spoke to a writers’ group. It was great fun. There were about eight of them, and we sat around chatting for a couple of hours. Well, if I’m honest, I did most of the talking, but that’s why they asked me to go. I talked about how to get a book published. Because I work for a publisher and am a professional editor, I do have a bit of experience in the kind of things that see new writers knocked back. This group seemed to know a lot about that sort of thing already, but they still had […]

Do authors need to write an outline when they are about to write a novel? I’d be interested to know whether or not my author friends do this. As far as my own writing goes, I have never bothered to do an outline, not even when I was at school. I always considered them a boring waste of time. Why write an outline when you can write the story itself? I deliberately steered clear of them, even in exams. I never understood why the teachers pushed the idea of an outline so much. Maybe they needed something that showed there […]

I agree with this. Some writers put in a lot of scientific terms or words from other languages, but I find that it becomes annoying pretty quickly, especially if you need to look it up every time to work out what the author’s talking about. Most people don’t enjoy doing that anyway. Are they going to put down their book (or, to think in modern terms, open a browser on their tablet) when they’re in the middle of reading a story? Maybe if it’s a non-fiction book they might be more prepared to do that, but if I’m in the […]

Last Thursday I went to my first ever book signing as an author. The bookstore where I was scheduled to do the signing was a good 50 minutes’ drive from my home and in an area I wasn’t too familiar with, but with the help of a friendly policeman, I was soon seated in A Lot of Books, a small bookstore in the Ipswich City Mall. They had set up a table and chair for me in the only available space – the doorway! While this certainly had its plus side – everyone who walked in the door couldn’t help […]

Why is this so easy to do when I’m editing but not when I’m writing in the first place? In fact, it can even be difficult to find problem words when editing my own work. It’s amazing how many times I can go through my own novel and still, after read-through 624, I say to myself, ‘Ew! Why did I put it that way?’ or ‘Why did I use that word? That’s dumb!’. I guess that’s why having your book edited by someone else is so important, although they can miss stuff too. An edit of book two in my […]

The book launch for my debut novel, The Heir, was held on Saturday. I had two launches, really: one in person and one on my Facebook author page. I knew if I tried to post on Facebook at the same time I was trying to prepare for the physical book launch I’d probably blow a gasket, so I scheduled most of my posts ahead of time. It was exciting actually, to reflect on all the things that had led up to this point. I went right back to when I first wrote The Heir and my friends who had read […]

Oh, how true this is! People love to read into what we write. They delight in finding the things that we didn’t mean to put in there, but that can be seen through someone else’s filter. And boy, can trouble result! Is it possible to avoid this? I guess extensive proof reading and editing will help, especially when multiple people are involved, as that will make sure it goes through the filters of several different minds as they apply their own perspective to what you wrote. But you’re never going to cover everybody. Can anything be done once you have […]