This week’s questions is:

What writing or editing software do you use?

Find out more about our guest Lisa Lepki and ProWritingAid software:

https://twitter.com/ProWritingAid

https://www.facebook.com/ProWritingAid

https://www.instagram.com/prowritingaid.insta/

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GET A 25% discount using the code REBEL25

Don’t forget The Anatomy of Prose is now live, you can get it in ebook, paperback or hardback now.

Click the link here.

Order the Workbook here. 

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Book recommendation of the week is: 9 Things Career Authors Don’t Do: Rebel Mindset by Sacha Black and J Thorn

SERIES LINK: http://getbook.at/9thingsseries 

Amazon UK:  https://amzn.to/3asVhRs 

Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3kLN7YP

Listener Rebel of the Week is ROSAIRE BUSHEY

If you’d like to be a Rebel of the week please do send in your story, it can be any kind of rebellion. You can email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com or tweet me @rebelauthorpod

No new patrons this week but a huge thank you to all my current patrons for the ongoing support. If you’d like to support the show, and get access to all the bonus essays, posts and content, you can from as little as $2 a month by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack

The post 045 How to Edit Your Manuscript with Lisa Lepki and ProWritingAid appeared first on Sacha Black.

There are these awful words that plague me. I call them crutch words.

‘Crutches’ are pesky critters that appear when I’ve lost myself ‘in the zone’ of writing a draft.

They creep like spindly monsters into my work…over and over and over again they fill my stories with irritants. They are a PLAGUE on my prose!

The most frustrating thing about crutches is that they are ‘go to’ words. By that, I mean, I don’t even realise I am using them, they’re just salient in my mind so they repeated throw themselves at my metaphorical stage like school girls at a Take That concert.

But how do you fix them?

Until recently I spent hours trawling through my work to ensure there weren’t dozens of repeats littered through my text.

I’ll be brave and confess my crutch words. Although, they do change depending on what I’m writing. But a recent piece included things like: Look, eyes, so and deep.

Do you have crutch words? Do you know what they are? If so, what are they? Tell me in the comments below.

I discovered my crutches when I was using a nifty little tool called wordle.

You paste any text you like into Wordle and it counts all the times you repeat particular words. It then creates a visual image depicting all of the most repeated words.

In the picture the words that are repeated most often are the most prominent. So, the larger the word, the more repetitions there are.

And in true Blue Peter style, here’s one I made earlier:

I used a character exploration exercise I did a few weeks ago for this wordle.

Why use this tool?

1. It highlights your repetitive crutch words and therefore repetitive description
2. It highlights NEW crutch words
3. It shows you your text visually – which demonstrates whether you are getting your message across – it’s a visual of your texts meaning
4. They look neat, and you can mess about with the colour schemes and layouts
5. Once you have done a wordle and can see all the repetitions you can go back to your word processor and use the find and delete mechanism to remove those pesky words

Here’s a wordle of this post:

Try it out, let me know what you think.

If you liked this post, why not get even more awesome writing tips in the book 13 Steps To Evil – How to Craft Superbad Villains. Click this link and just tap the logo of your device or regular bookshop and it will take you to the right page. You can also get a FREE villains cheatsheet and a villain’s short course by joining my mailing list just click here.

Read Keepers, the first book in my Young Adult fantasy series now. Or to hear more about the release of the sequels as well as get regular CogMail updates you can do so here.

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The post The Secret To The Quickest Edit You Can Do appeared first on Sacha Black.

HELP…

I have a wonderfully rare gift tomorrow. A day off from work, almost entirely child free that I intend to dedicate to writing. Whilst I am acutely aware I now have an overdue assignment, tomorrow is dedicated to my novel. But I have a problem.

I have 50 something thousand words written – that need a heavy edit, I have some major character development needed too, and probably before I carry on. I have also lost a bit of confidence due to the mis-timed feedback and I’m not sure how to get it back. But it has knocked me significantly off track, and now I feel like I need to go back and edit major storylines, sub-stories and character lines.

But here is my question, Should I go back and spend the time I have between life admin editing the 50K? Or do I spend a couple of hours on character development and then soldier on with the story and edit at the end?

Now – before you all charge in and tell me to plough on (because thats what everyone has said without exception)

There are a few caveats –

I need to either raise my confidence with what words I already have down on the page or I am not going to be able to continue, OR someone needs to provide me with an extremely rational logical argument as to why I should continue.

Listen to me. I already know the answer, I am inviting you to tell me to continue, but I am stuck. Stuck wanting to edit, to critique and perfect what I have before carrying on… the urge to edit is overwhelming.

Also now I haven’t looked at my novel since the 26th Nov when I completed NaNo, the usual ‘carry on to keep the flow going’ doesn’t really apply, as I am a bit out of the flow now anyway.

So what do I do???

Answers on a blogpostcard!

The post To Edit or Not to Edit? That is the Question appeared first on Sacha Black.