Develop

Part two of our three-part philosophy is: Develop. Develop the piece. With this, our aim to help the writer bring their piece from a draft to a publishable manuscript. This can take many forms. It can be anywhere from a simple spelling and grammar check right through a complex edit and assessment.

Before we attempt any edit, assessment or spelling and grammar check, we first need to understand the writer and the boundaries which they have applied to their piece. This can affect how the piece is viewed. if the piece is likely to have very colloquial characters, then they will speak and act a certain way. The genre really does determine the way in which a piece is assessed.

A spelling and grammar check, as the name implies, looks at those specifics of writing. With due acknowledgement to a writer’s peculiarities with the speech of their characters, spelling and grammar should be as correct as possible. A piece that has obvious errors is very disconcerting to read. However, it is rare to get a piece 100% correct. I’ve seen professionally produced reproductions of one of my favourite authors with errors. Not many, but they were still there. Grammar is another tricky one as there are so many rules, especially in the English language, regardless of the country in which it is spoken.

I remember the first class I had to take when I began to study professional writing and editing was grammar. I thought I knew what it was all about, but no, my brain turned to jelly within weeks of the start of the course. I still have the text book used for that class and I have referred back to it a few times. The fact that I had gone back to study for the first time in over twenty years probably didn’t help either.

Sometimes we are asked to edit and assess a piece. That itself can take many forms. Some of the things we look for when assessing a piece of writing are continuity, characterisation, and setting.

Stories need to flow. Readability is important. Events that happen early in a story need to correlate with events that happen later. Events can be written out of order, but they must be explained as to why they’re out of order.

Characterisation is also important. The characters must remain consistent throughout the story. If a character changes, then there must be something within the story to explain why. Yes, characters do take on a life of their own and will even dictate how they are written, as odd as that sounds. That doesn’t forgive the writer from changing their eye colour from blue to green for no reason.

Setting needs to be established as soon as it is necessary. It’s all well and good to grab the readers attention with action or wonder or a sudden intake of breath over what’s happening, but you will lose them just as quickly if they can’t paint the picture in their head of where it is the event is taking place. It can be little things, or a series of little things, but they need to ground everything somewhere.

Every reader is different, but every reader knows what they’re reading. They can tell if writing is off. Whether that’s spelling, grammar, continuity, characterisation or setting. They do know. Never underestimate the reader. Developing the piece to be the best possible is important. You want readers to share their experience of your piece and encourage others to read it as well.