Jim Dempsey

About Jim Dempsey

Jim Dempsey has worked as an editor for more than 20 years. In 2012, he set up his own book editing company, Novel Gazing, and offers proofreading, copy-editing and developmental editing services. The company works with publishers and self-publishing authors. Jim has a master’s degree in creative writing, and uses his passion for stories – all kinds of stories, fiction and nonfiction – to coach authors, helping them to develop their writing skills. When Jim isn’t editing, he’s still reading, and reviewing books for Bookmunch. Jim is a professional member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders.

Discover Your Characters’ Goals

April 9, 2019 By Jim Dempsey 3 Comments

Working out what your characters’ goals are will help you plan your plotline and develop engaging, motivated characters your readers will love to follow.

Your characters need goals to get them to the next page, and then the next, and on until the end. They need to be going somewhere, trying to achieve something. That will make them the kinds of characters readers will want to spend time with, maybe even for a few hundred pages.

Readers will want to know if your characters achieve those goals, and if they will overcome the inevitable obstacles (you put) in their way. Sometimes they will, sometimes they won’t. They will have small goals that they can achieve (or not) within a couple of pages, and they will have those overarching goals that will take your heroes right through to the end.

Even Oblomov, the man who stayed in bed for most of the story, had a goal: he wanted to stay in bed. And he worked hard to do it. That was pretty much his story.

Your characters’ goals are therefore essential for determining your plot. Work out the goals and you’ll go a long way to having a plot. And, if you already have a basic plot, you can develop it in greater detail by working out what your characters’ goals will be along the way. [Read more…]

How to Find Inspiration—Fiction Therapy

March 12, 2019 By Jim Dempsey 10 Comments

Whether you’re wondering what happens next in your story, want to write your first novel, or are about to start on the next instalment of your long-running series, there are always times when you’ll need inspiration. And it is often surprisingly close by.

‘Be observant,’ said the dramatist, Lajos Egri, ‘and you will be forced to admit that the world is an inexhaustible pastry shop and you are permitted to choose from the delicacies the tastiest bits for yourself.’

It’s that easy.

Except it’s not.

It’s difficult to suddenly ‘be observant.’ You don’t have time to sit around looking at things. You have to pick up the kids, get to the supermarket, make dinner, finish off that last game of solitaire. And you have to write!

Hemingway noted that it was difficult to be observant, but he also recognized its importance for writers. Being observant, he said in his 1935 Esquire article, Monologue to the Maestro, takes practice. ‘You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice.’

You don’t have to memorize every object in a room. There are simpler ways to get inspiration for your writing from observing the world around you. It can start with your morning shower. [Read more…]

Fiction Therapy—What’s Your Story’s Problem?

February 12, 2019 By Jim Dempsey 5 Comments

Every month, I examine some aspect of fiction—character development, plot, story structure, etc.—and offer advice and tips to help you work through the problems in your novel.

I have adapted many of the concepts you’ll see here from proven techniques used in modern psychotherapy. Hence: Fiction Therapy.

If you have a specific concern about your novel, send an email to jim [at] thefictiontherapist.com and I’ll do my best to help.

I recently reviewed a debut novel, The Valley at the Centre of the World. In it, the author, Malachy Tallack, describes life in a rural village on the island of Shetland. And he tries to do that in an accurate and honest way.

The problem is that not a whole lot happens in a remote village. The inhabitants go about their daily, seasonal and yearly rhythm. Strangers might arrive, but they’re usually looking for peace and quiet. Others might leave, but villagers are used to that too as people, mostly the younger generation, go off to pursue opportunities in the city. Even deaths in these aging communities happen regularly enough that there’s a certain routine to them too.

When nothing happens, nothing changes. And novels—stories in general—are all about change. There is (nearly) always a moment of self-realization for the (usually) main character.

And yet Tallack makes his story work.

How? [Read more…]

The Different Types of Editing Explained

January 8, 2019 By Jim Dempsey 15 Comments

My last article, on the pitfalls of self-editing, provoked some discussion about the different types of editing. There’s certainly a lot of confusion around, and it’s not surprising.

There’s line editing, copy-editing, developmental editing, structural editing, substantive editing, and then proofreading. Editors can hardly agree on exactly what’s involved in each type, and that’s because it can be difficult to draw definite lines between each one.

But authors, since they are often the ones paying for the service, need to be aware of what kind of editing their manuscripts need and what is involved in each type.

And it’s all not so complicated. There are really only three types of editing. Everything else is another name for the same thing or an overlap of two. Fortunately, there can be no confusion about proofreading, so let’s start there. [Read more…]

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The Pitfalls of Self-Editing

November 23, 2018 By Jim Dempsey 25 Comments

Let’s get this out of the way right at the start. I’m an editor. I’m going to be biased, but I’ve seen this scenario so many times over the years.

As an author, you spend months, sometimes years, perfecting your novel, carefully considering each word, crafting every sentence, and polishing every paragraph.

When you’re finished you read through it only to find tons of typos and a multitude of grammatical blunders.

You edit as you go. You get rid of all those errors, and you rewrite and you rewrite. You sit at your computer and, to paraphrase Hemingway, you bleed. And you perfect.

You send your manuscript to some friends and beta readers, and they come back with a few issues and a few more spelling mistakes. And you edit and rewrite some more till you get your manuscript into the best shape you can possibly make it.

At this point, all the best advice says you should you send your manuscript to an editor. Let’s assume here that you do. And not just any editor. You’re diligent. You’ve searched the web, asked for recommendations, and found a well-qualified professional. Maybe you send a sample first. That’s always a good idea.

When the revision comes back, you read the body of the editor’s email first. It’s usually full of positive feedback and general encouragement. “Not too bad,” you think, “it could certainly have been worse.”

And then you open the document, and all you see is red—literally and figuratively. [Read more…]

All the King’s Editors—Jim Dempsey

October 26, 2018 By Jim Dempsey 10 Comments

Jim’s post is part of the “All the King’s Editors” series, where an editor from the Writer Unboxed contributor team edits manuscript pages submitted by a member of the WU community.

Each participating editor approaches a submission in a unique way, and speaks only for him or herself.

Remember, editing is as much art as science, and your take on the passage may differ. If so, feel free to join in the discussion at the end, but above all, be kind.

If you’re interested in submitting a sample for consideration, click HERE for instructions.

This is a short piece, and doesn’t need much of an introduction since it’s a prologue.

A prologue should give a sense of the story and hook the readers. As an editor, I have to ask if the prologue achieves at least one of those goals. As a reader, I ask: why start the story here and not with chapter one? In other words: do we really need the prologue? Let’s see … [Read more…]

Who’s Going to Help Your Hero?

August 24, 2018 By Jim Dempsey 10 Comments

I just had my in-laws staying. For seven weeks! Don’t get me wrong, they’re nice, easy-going people (at least, they kept telling me so), but I reckon Ghandi could test your patience after seven weeks in your spare room.

There was no one thing they did to annoy me (OK, there was one thing: “The car had an accident,” said Pops. It wasn’t him. It was the car.) It was all the little irks and ticks that built up over the time. And it was a long time. Seven weeks. Did I mention that already?

By the final week, I was frazzled. And my wife was away on business, leaving me to deal with them on my own. It came to a head one evening when I had to ask Mom, again, not to snap the spine of my paperbacks when reading them (“But it’s so much easier to hold in one hand.”)

I had to talk to someone. I had to get it all off my chest. But it was 11pm, who could I call? My wife’s days were full with meetings and preparing for meetings and, anyway, I’d just be moaning again if I called her. Who else then? Who could I call at that time of night to sound off?

It’s at these moments you realize the kind of support network you have. It’s a special kind of someone who’ll take that kind of call at that time of night and still give the level of sympathy you’re looking for.

There will be times in your story, too, when your protagonist needs support. And it’s not always obvious where that support will come from. Sometimes you have to dig deep to find that secondary character who will step in to save your hero just at the right time. [Read more…]

All the King’s Editors—Jim Dempsey

July 27, 2018 By Jim Dempsey 5 Comments

Jim’s post is part of the “All the King’s Editors” series where an editor from the Writer Unboxed contributor team edits manuscript pages submitted by a member of the WU community.

Each participating editor will approach a submission in a unique way, and speaks only for him or herself.

Remember, editing is as much art as science, and your take on the passage may differ. If so, feel free to join in the discussion at the end, but above all, be kind.

If you’re interested in submitting a sample for consideration, click HERE for instructions.

These pages are from the second chapter of this novel, and for me they set the tone and place of the story perfectly—a light, funny paranormal tale set in California.

Two things struck me about this text. One was how the author gets in the description of the first person narrator and then how you can gain—or lose—the readers’ trust through breaks in story logic. Look out for these as you read, and I’ll explain more in my numbered notes at the end.

I made very few changes to the text as these pages looked pretty polished. Most of my revision suggestions would need more input from the author, but it wouldn’t take much to get these pages into great shape. [Read more…]

Create Drama with Your Character’s Desire

June 22, 2018 By Jim Dempsey 5 Comments

All characters have desires. Desire is the engine that drives your story, it’s what gives the hero a goal—find the killer, fall in love, destroy the death star.

If your characters get what they want on page one, there’s no story left. It’s your job, as an author, to give your characters what they want at exactly the right time. Or not at all.

Until then, you have to play with that desire, use it to develop the drama that will push the story along and pull your readers with it.

There are a few straightforward ways to use your characters’ desires to inject drama into your story, to fuel that engine that will keep your readers engaged.

These techniques are useful for when you’re stuck, when you’re not quite sure what’s going to happen next. They can also help to get back control of your characters when they run off and do their own thing, when they stray away from your carefully plotted plan.

Hold back

The most obvious way is to keep your character wanting.

As I said, the story (usually) ends when your characters get what they want. Keep that goal just out of reach until you’re ready, until it’s time to give your characters—and the readers—what they want.

Too much, too little, too late

Sometimes you can give your characters what they want and still keep the story going.

If you give them too much of what they want, that will also create conflict. You can even give them too much right at the start and use that as a story premise. Reality shows like The Bachelor use this to drive a full season. He wants a bride and now he has to choose from 25 potential partners.

Giving too much can even be like giving someone dying of thirst a whole bottle of water: if they drink it all in one go, they’ll be sick. Your characters will have to be careful when they get more than they need. Will they have the kind of self control necessary to handle it?

Similarly, if you give your characters just a taste of what they really want, that can lift their desires even higher and increase their motivation to get more.

Money is the obvious example here, but you can use time too. Give them enough to get within reach of their goals, but not quite enough. They will then desperately need that last little bit.

And then there’s when your characters get exactly what they want, but it’s too late. They don’t need it any more.

This works especially well with smaller desires throughout the plot, in scenes or in individual chapters. They find the combination for the bank vault, but they’ve already blown the doors off and now the cops are on their way.

This can be useful to reveal the characters’ frustrations and emphasize how great their desires are, and it can be used to add to humor too, to lighten the mood a little.

And now for something different [Read more…]

Keep your Characters Consistent

April 27, 2018 By Jim Dempsey 7 Comments

Ensuring consistency is a big part of my work as an editor. As I work through a book I make sure there are no variations in how words are spelled: it should be either while or whilst, never both in the same text. The same with words like among/amongst, towards/toward, and O.K./OK/ok/okay. Numbers below 10 are either written out or not. Or all numbers are written out. Or not. Or only when accompanied by a measurement, e.g. all six competitors were over 6 feet tall.

Chapter titles should all be the same: centered or not, same typeface throughout. Any lists should have the same punctuation each time they appear: a period, semicolon or nothing at the end of each line. Always one or two spaces after a period, never sometimes one and sometimes two (but let’s not get too deep into that discussion).

Editors use a style guide to keep all this consistent, sometimes following an established one, like the Chicago Manual of Style, as well as keeping an individual style guide for each new book to make sure the particularities of that book, or series, are always the same, such as character names and place names. Does the character have blonde hair (or even blond hair)? How many children does the character have, if any, along with their age, size, occupation and so on.

These are all easy to keep track of and easy enough for an editor to change. It’s part of the job. What’s more difficult to revise is when characters don’t behave consistently. And that can happen very easily.

Avoid a major rewrite

Maybe your hero has always been a good friend but chooses to go watch a movie rather than bail his best buddy out of jail. If the buddy gets out of prison the next day and they argue about the bail before the story continues, then there’s not much of a problem. If the buddy dies in jail and that’s what sends the hero to investigate the death, it could look contrived, a touch too convenient that the hero was at a movie that night.

Such inconsistencies can lead to major revisions, a bigger rewrite than you were hoping for. And it’s better to catch these things before you send your manuscript to an editor—and definitely before submitting it for publication—because a major rewrite is likely to mean at least one more round of copy-editing.

And it’s easier than you might think to introduce character inconsistencies into your writing. You could have had a long break between writing chapters because, well, that’s how life goes. Or it could be that you don’t yet know the characters well enough to know how they’ll react to each specific situation.

There’s not a lot you can do when life gets in the way. You can try to develop good writing habits, write at particular times every day or week, set goals to write for an hour, two hours or 1,000 words at each sitting. But eventually something will happen to get in your way again.

Discover your characters

There are, however, various ways to help you get to know your characters and make sure they react consistently throughout your manuscript. [Read more…]

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Write Something That Will Change Your Life

March 23, 2018 By Jim Dempsey

It seems like a tall order, to write something that will change your life. And it is. But I think it’s still worth striving for.

By changing your life, I don’t necessarily mean that you have to write something that will earn you lots of money so you can buy an island or even enough money that you can quit your day job. Although, if becoming rich (or rich enough) is important to you, then that’s fine too.

And that’s the point, to write something that is important to you, something that comes from your heart, something that means a lot to you. As I said, money might be important to you, but it might be worth digging deeper to ask why money would be important.

If you want to use the money to buy a house for each of your kids, then it’s not the money that’s so important but your family’s long-term security. If it is an island you want, then maybe that’s because of your love for nature, quiet and rest.

It’s not always so easy to know what’s truly important to you, but there are—of course—some useful exercises to help determine your deeply held values.

1. Ambitions

We develop many of our most important values at an early age, and one way to find out what matters to you most is to go back and try to remember what your ambitions were as a child.

Think back to when you were young. What did you imagine your future would be like? Did you want a happy life with a family? Did you have a hero, someone you wanted to be like when you grew up? If so, what qualities did that person have that you admired?

Use these questions to write a few lines about your ambitions as a child. From your answers, you should already get a sense of what is most important to you. It could be that family, career, justice, or friendship is what matters most. Other values could be anything from adventure and assertiveness to sexuality and spirituality.

2. The interview

Even if you only write in those few spare moments you have in the week, it’s still useful to think of your work as an author as a career. What, for example, do you want to achieve with your writing? And what special skills do you have to make that happen?

Imagine you’re preparing for a job interview to be an author, your kind of author. Think about some of the following questions and even make short notes if you want. [Read more…]

Give Your Hero a Hard Time

February 23, 2018 By Jim Dempsey

“Be a sadist,” said Kurt Vonnegut. That’s number six on his list of eight creative writing 101 tips. He added, “No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them – in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”

Vonnegut knew what he was talking about. He made awful things happen to Billy Pilgrim, his leading character in his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. It was not enough to send Pilgrim unprepared into the thick of World War II and have him captured by the enemy, Vonnegut then sends him into the worst firestorm of the war—Dresden in February 1945. And that was just the start of poor Pilgrim’s problems.

Vonnegut’s inspiration came from his own life. He’d been a prisoner of war held in a slaughterhouse in Dresden in February ‘45. Fortunately, it’s not essential to go through quite such a trauma to create great leading characters. There are far easier ways to give your hero a hard time.

For Robert Towne, who won an Oscar in 1974 for his screenplay Chinatown (remember what a rough time he gave Jack Nicholson’s character, Jake Gittes?), the best way to get tough on your hero is to ask: What are you afraid of? If you can discover your characters’ fears, then continually confront them with those fears, you’ll create memorable, engaging characters.

This might sound like every story should be a horror, but that’s not the case. In Chinatown, for example, Jake is obsessed with being a detective, to the point that he’s willing to work for free. His weakness is women, and he wants to protect them. His fear is that a(nother) woman will be harmed or even killed while he feels responsible for her. This fear and this need to protect leads him to misinterpret events and miss important clues, getting in the way of his obsession to be a good detective.

Fundamental fears

As the author of your story, you can of course simply assign your character a fear. But the best characters, the ones we remember, have personalities—and therefore fears—that are intrinsic to the story. They make sense in the story’s world. To take an extreme example: if the main character of your romance is afraid of snakes, it will only interrupt the story if you then drop that character into a pit of snakes every few chapters for no other purpose than to invoke some tension (except, maybe, if the love interest is a snake charmer).

Here then is one way to get to the depths of your characters’ fears. [Read more…]

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