Sharon Honeycutt, Editor

You write. I edit. You shine.

Category: editing (Page 6 of 8)

My Clients Like the Way I Edit Their Writing: In Their Own Words

May 13, 2016 /

Have you been thinking about hiring an editor, but you’re unsure what it would be like to work with one–to work with me? Are you nervous, scared even, to share your writing? Take a look at what two of my current clients and one very recent one had to say to me after reviewing my edits on their books. They’re still revising–I’m still editing sections of Kasey’s and Lynn’s–so their books aren’t available yet. But as you can see, they’ve found a lot of value in working with me.

Kasey, YA sci-fi:

“I’d like to start by saying, wow. Honestly, your comments and edits are marvelous. You take my jumbled words and transform them into fluid sentences. What a difference your enhancements make, I am just over the moon. …I truly can’t thank you enough for being so diligent and patient with my writing and with me. It means so much, so thank you.” Continue reading

Editing Question: How well do you know your main character?

May 2, 2016 /

If I asked you to describe your best friend to me, what would you say? Would you describe their physical appearance? Maybe their personality? Would you tell me what they did for a living? Would you share what you know about their family (and their family life)? What about their hopes and dreams–and the flip side of that, their losses and disappointments?

Would you be able to tell me what their home looks like and why they chose not only that particular place to live, but why they chose to decorate it–or chose not to decorate it–the way they did? Could you tell me what kind of car they drive, or if they’re afraid to drive, or if they’re environmentally conscious and so only ride a bike or the bus in an effort to shrink their carbon footprint?

Would you share with me how they dress–when they go to work, go out with you, go out with their significant other–or on a first date? How do they spend their downtime? Do they have downtime? How’s their health?

I hope that you know your best friend well enough that you can answer all of these questions and then some.

As your friendly neighborhood editor, I hope that you can also answer every single one of these questions about your main character–and most, if not all, your supporting characters–in your work in progress. If you don’t know your MC and their cast this well, you need to get your rear back to the drawing table.

Continue reading

Editing Your Manuscript: Free Sample Edit

April 13, 2016 /

Now that you’ve had a chance to watch me begin the editing process on my first novel, it’s time to turn the tables. I hope that you learned a little from what I shared with you of that self-editing process. I intended to go longer with it, but the same mistakes kept cropping up, and I didn’t have much new to share.

So I thought, why not ask my readers to submit samples of their writing for a free edit–with the stipulations that I’ll do them as I have time and that I can share it all right here on my blog with the rest of the world so that we can all continue to learn together. Writing and editing are skills that evolve, so it never gets old and I never stop learning.

Here’s what I’m offering:

Send me an email with no more than your first 2,000 words INCLUDED IN THE BODY OF YOUR EMAIL. NO ATTACHMENTS. (You’ll benefit most from this if you send the FIRST 2,000 words–that’s what readers see when they crack open your book to decide if they want to buy it, and it’s what an agent sees when they are deciding whether or not to ask for additional pages.) Continue reading

Editing My First Novel: Learn from My Mistakes, Part 3

March 22, 2016 /

If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’ve started the (painful) process of publicly editing a novel I finished in 2007. If you missed the first two parts, you can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here. In Part 3, I’m going to talk about authenticity.

When I wrote this particular book, I was calling on my personal experience of working as a newspaper reporter for a small daily. I held the job for a little over three years, and I loved it. I worked several different beats, and I think I did a pretty good job of it. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons I made my main character a reporter. I could relate to her that way. (Write what you know and all …)

The problem was that I got lazy. Continue reading

Editing My First Novel: Learn from My Mistakes, Part 2

March 8, 2016 /

Last week I invited you to go along with me as I rip apart the first novel I wrote, which I finished way back in 2007. I’ve become a professional editor in the meantime, and I’ve finished three other novels since then too. I’ve learned a lot and have a lot to offer my clients, so I thought it would be interesting to shine the light on my own first effort. If you missed last week’s introduction to this, click here.

In my previous post, I talked about the perils of a backstory dump. On the third page–the THIRD page–of my book, I throw in a big one:

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