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About Dave King

Dave King is the co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, a best-seller among writing books. An independent editor since 1987, he is also a former contributing editor at Writer's Digest. Many of his magazine pieces on the art of writing have been anthologized in The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing and in The Writer's Digest Writing Clinic. You can check out several of his articles and get other writing tips on his website.

Recent Posts by this author:

  • The Editor’s Clinic: Problem Child
  • The Editor’s Clinic: Good Talk
  • The Editor’s Clinic: A Writer, a Shoe Salesman, and a Corpse Walk into a Bar…
  • The Lessons of Genre
  • The Editor’s Clinic: Brave New World
  • The Editor’s Clinic: The Limits of Editing
  • A Hook that Breaks the Rules
  • Catching the Train of Thought
  • The Editor’s Clinic: Yonder lies the castle of my father.
  • Wait, What?
  • The Editor’s Clinic: Balancing Character and Situation in your Hook
  • The Editor’s Clinic: Focus on what’s important.

    • The Editor’s Clinic: Problem Child

    By 9 Comments

      Child narrators can be a problem.

    Children don’t yet have the experience or self-awareness to understand what’s going on around them.  So if you write intimately from their point of view, using only language and concepts that they would have available to them, it’s sometimes hard to convey what’s really happening.  Granted, you can describe events in enough detail so that your readers may understand things that the child narrator might not.  There are times that approach can come in handy – if, say, you want to filter harsh realities through an innocent consciousness.  But it’s tricky to do this without having your child pay more attention than is plausible.  We tend not to pay a lot of attention to events that are going over our heads.

    Children aren’t fully aware of what’s going on inside of them, either.  If the child’s state of mind is important to the story, you can sometimes use a more sophisticated language than your child narrator has available to them to capture exactly how they feel.  This approach works best if you keep the narrative voice consistent — if you use the more sophisticated voice from the beginning of the story and stick with it throughout.  This gives your readers a chance to adjust to what you’re doing.  But, again, working in a narrative voice that’s separate from your character’s voice requires considerable skill.

    Splitting the difference between these two approaches, as this morning’s sample does – writing most of the narrative in the child’s voice, but slipping into a more mature language from time to time — almost never works.  Readers adjust to a child’s view of the world, and suddenly that view turns more adult. The shifts jar readers, who aren’t confident they can settle into the child’s view of the world.

    So I’ve edited this to keep Malcom’s voice more solidly his own.  I’ve tended toward shorter paragraphs and kept the language simple.  And the power of the piece comes through.  Even though Malcom isn’t aware of the dynamic between his older sister and his mother, readers can see it.  And Malcom’s situation is certainly dramatic.  Even more so since he doesn’t understand what’s going on.

     

    Twitch Chapter One, Surrey, England, 1833-34

    Secrets

     

    The others were right.  It was  – the devil made him blink and scrunch his face.  Aand it was getting worse. [Read more…]

    The Editor’s Clinic: Good Talk

    By 7 Comments

    In the comments on a recent Editor’s Clinic, the question came up as to when you should treat a language colloquially – contractions, a relaxed, familiar syntax — and when you should use a bit of formality to create a sense of otherness.  The example then was of a conversation between two characters living a […]

    The Editor’s Clinic: A Writer, a Shoe Salesman, and a Corpse Walk into a Bar…

    By 13 Comments

    Mark Twain once said that analyzing a joke is like dissecting a frog. You can learn a lot, but the frog tends to die in the process.  Still, we’re going to ignore the warning this morning and take a look at what does and what doesn’t work in this passage. The writer prefaced this submission […]

    The Editor’s Clinic: Brave New World

    By 14 Comments

    One reason writers fail when setting their stories in a different world –  in the past, in the present with a different metaphysics, in another galaxy — is by not digging deeply enough into what makes their world distinct.  Any writer knows to change the technology their characters use, and the better ones manage to […]

    The Editor’s Clinic: The Limits of Editing

    By 14 Comments

        One of the comments in last month’s Editor’s Clinic suggested that the piece I worked on should have been rewritten once or twice before the editing commenced.  (Incidentally, I’d encourage you to go back to that discussion.  At the time it went up, I was working to get ready for Christmas – a […]

    A Hook that Breaks the Rules

    By 15 Comments

                   It’s a given in most writing circles that you should never open your novel with a scene in which little happens, especially if that scene involves a flashback.  This is normally good advice, but this morning’s passage is an example of when good advice should be ignored. As always, it’s hard to […]

    Catching the Train of Thought

    By 8 Comments

    The single piece of advice I repeat most often is to get into your characters’ heads — to write with a more intimate point of view. Let’s take a closer look at just what that means. Most writers go wrong by losing track of how everything on the page needs to flow out of a […]

    The Editor’s Clinic: Yonder lies the castle of my father.

    By 1 Comment

    Yes, I know, Tony Curtis never actually said the line.  But does sum up one of the problems this morning’s editing is trying to address – language that is meant to create a mood of fantasy and wonder and instead simply comes across as formal and forced. First, a caveat.  This passage is taken from […]

    Wait, What?

    By 16 Comments

    Last May, the opening scene I edited raised a lot of questions – about the characters, their relationships, their backstory – without answering them right away. Of course, no opening scene can tell you everything at once, but this one put questions out there and then moved on, leaving readers hanging.  This led one commentator […]

    The Editor’s Clinic: Balancing Character and Situation in your Hook

    By 6 Comments

    Once again this morning, we’re looking at how best to draw your readers into the story.  Broadly speaking, there are two ways to do it.  You can give your readers a gripping situation with dramatic possibilities.  Or you can give your readers a character they want to get to know better.  And as usual in […]

    The Editor’s Clinic: Focus on what’s important.

    By 23 Comments

    This month we’re once again looking at an opening passage.  The situation certainly tense enough – a woman with two small children facing up to her need to escape from a physically abusive husband.  And the author makes skillful use of her techniques to create that tension – note how the narrator, Nikki, is sensitive […]

     

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