AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Hemingway editor vs indesign4/30/2023 So this article is an excellent primer on this central issue in fiction.īoth the story question and the story problem are vital for crafting cohesive stories and strong fiction. In any case, in many unpublished novels I read, it’s the story question that’s missing–or just isn’t compelling. Does finding his best self help Ted find the murderer? Does finding the murderer help Ted find his best self? So a corollary question to ask in working on story questions is whether the two (or more) questions serve each other. But the larger question that drives and even overrides this one is whether, in the process, Ted will become the man he needs to be to respect himself. In Blood Lies, the obvious story question is whether Ted will find out who murdered Alejo. In some ways, I think this article may distill the question down a bit more than I like sometimes there’s a story question embedded in another story question, and both have to be answered. ![]() It’s the one I come back to again and again, hoping I’ve made it work and struggling if I think I haven’t. This article addresses what I find is the most pressing issue in developing a novel. Purple-my VERY BAD HARD TO READ sentence. Green-passive voice (they say I’m okay with only 3, but I take exception to “was scorched’ “scorched” is a predicate adjective in this construction Yellowish-my 4/51 “hard to read” sentences They gave me a Readability grade of 3, only “good.” Crouch says, “The app suggests that anything under Grade 10 is a sign of ‘bold, clear writing.'” Maybe my writing is too simple! See what you think. In any case, here’s my annotated page with the Hemingway comments. The trick is to give yourself some distance from your prose and come back to it with a stranger’s ear, as much as possible. I find that I’ve become more skilled at hearing the ones that need a weed trimmer taken to them. On the other hand, I do find that much of my line editing involves simplifying those sentences that rolled so sonorously through my head when I wrote them. Yes, I know some people think there’s a rule: no semicolons. For example, in the first page of my novel Blood Lies, published by Bantam/Doubleday way back when and republished by me online, the sentence that is tagged as VERY HARD TO READ (bad, bad, really bad) is actually two sentences connected with a semicolon. ![]() In general, I find these editing apps annoying, not least because they miss some really basic stuff. Hemingway the App has a free online editor you can play with. Crouch’s analysis of a passage from The Sun Also Rises also shows how sometimes it’s the broken rules that make a passage work. So it’s interesting to see that Ernest’s scores vary from a bad, bad 15 to an excellent 4-which means a fourth-grader could understand it- depending on which text you choose. Or who claims to want to write like Hemingway (I sometimes do). You probably know somebody who claims to write like Hemingway (I do). Do these apps cut the fog from our writing?
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |