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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:

  • Into the Woods
  • The Practice Novel
  • Do it Again, Do it Again
  • The Web of Writing
  • To Absent Friends
  • The Story Beyond the Story
  • And . . . Scene!
  • Gatekeepers
  • Displeasure Reading
  • The Editor’s Clinic: Take a Break
  • The Editor’s Clinic: Problem Child
  • The Editor’s Clinic: Good Talk

    • Into the Woods

    By 18 Comments

    Say that you’ve created a main character or two that you love and then start to follow their story.  That story leads you to new characters you love every bit as much, and you delight in watching them start to interact with the main characters. Then the story takes an unexpected turn that you can’t resist, leading into new settings and new drama that absolutely excite you.

    And then you realize you haven’t written anything about your main character for sixty pages, and your story is now focused on a character your readers didn’t meet until 100 pages in.  So you try to pull it all together into a single storyline, and the only way to do that is through some serious deus ex machina manipulation.  Then you realize that following your story has led you right off into the middle of the woods.

    If you look around and find yourself lost, how do you find the breadcrumbs to lead you back out?

    The first step is understanding how you got there.  Every writer approaches their novel differently, and there’s no such thing as a wrong approach.  But if you are the kind of writer who prefers to launch into a story with no idea how it will end, then getting lost in the woods is an occupational hazard.  I know because I’ve had several clients come to me to help them find their way home. [Read more…]

    9+

    The Practice Novel

    By 32 Comments

    For the first time, you’ve been caught up in a plot, or a character, or a world of your own making.  You give in to it, give our heart to it, maybe you even start dreaming your next scenes.  You find yourself dwelling on it when you should be thinking about other things. You work […]

    Do it Again, Do it Again

    By 28 Comments

    When I first started reading books more complex than Green Eggs and Ham, I fell in love with series novels.  I raced through the school library’s collection of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.  A friend loaned me the complete John Carter of Mars series – great fun when you’re twelve, though they don’t hold […]

    The Web of Writing

    By 15 Comments

    Two months ago, in the article on expanding your world beyond the confines of your story, a commenter asked how much backstory she should include.  I pointed out that your readers will assume that the history you’re giving them will play some role in the plot.  The questioner had never thought about the link between […]

    To Absent Friends

    By 15 Comments

    Within the last week, I’ve had two clients with the same problem, a sign that I’ve found a good topic for an article.  (They’ve given me permission to use them as examples – thanks, guys.)  What was tripping them up was that they both had to keep the focus on a key character when there […]

    The Story Beyond the Story

    By 25 Comments

    A commercial airline pilot recently described how his job gave him a sense of how large the world really is. He would leave his home in London and drive to the airport among hundreds of other motorists and pedestrians going about their daily business.  At the end of the day, he would land in New […]

    And . . . Scene!

    By 10 Comments

    Dan Brown has mastered the art of writing books that are hard to put down.  This is remarkable because, in the course of most of his novels, he also introduces a wealth of background information.  Just The da Vinci Code alone – to take his most popular example – educated readers on everything from Gnostic […]

    Gatekeepers

    By 38 Comments

    In a recent interview for a writing blog, I was asked how publishing has changed since I’ve been an editor.  The obvious answer is the rise of self-publishing and e-publishing.  But these are only symptoms of something deeper. Most publishing houses used to offer more support for midlist writers – writers who weren’t celebrities but […]

    Displeasure Reading

    By 68 Comments

    Not long ago, a friend who has been reading literary novels for years recommended one to me – Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami – and gave me the Kindle version.  Murakami is award-winning and well-reviewed, so I launched into the book with considerable hope. I immediately met a protagonist who didn’t care much about his […]

    The Editor’s Clinic: Take a Break

    By 9 Comments

    Lots of writing books, including Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, will tell you that you can use your paragraphing to emphasize key points.  Want something to stand out?  Put it in its own paragraph. Picking which parts of your narrative you want to emphasize is trickier.  As a rule of thumb, it’s a good idea to […]

    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 […]

    The Editor’s Clinic: Good Talk

    By

    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 […]