Writing Journey - Spring into writing tips!
Monthly presentations, Camp NaNoWriMo, and Editing Tips
April is about…
This month, our monthly General meeting is exploring writing a series and keeping your writing organized as well as tapping into your strengths! Interested in learning more? Meeting information is sent to our members in a private message. Not a member? Join the Writing Journey here. Our next General Meeting is April 8th starting at 12pm CST.
Camp NaNoWriMo is underway!
While the Writing Journey / NaperWrimo does not have a lot of events like during November, but there’s a few of us looking to finish some projects. So, this month, NaNoWriMo ML Jenn is hosting additional write-ins. Some are lunch time during the week and some are on the weekends.
Do you need to be a part of Camp NaNo to join? Heck no! Drop in on any of them to get some quiet writing time in. Zoom links are available to the Writing Journey members or on our NaNoWriMo Naperville IL forum.
Editing Tips
During our last general body meeting, we had an expert panel discuss how they edit their works. It was fantastic hearing all the different ways people edit. Some of the tips included:
Change your perspective - whether you change the font of your manuscript, programs, or even have software read the text aloud, getting a new perspective on your writing will help you find errors
Critique/Beta partners: an invaluable resource is finding someone (or ideally multiple someones) to read your manuscript and give notes. Starting out you may not know what you help with (is it structural notes you’re looking for or grammar or both or neither?). But the more often you reach out and have others read your work, you may find patterns that help you grow as a writer.
Go through more than once - probably: Different kinds of writing require different amounts of editing. Maybe if you’re publishing a novel you’ll want to go through several rounds of editing, first structure (does the story flow and make sense) then more the nitty gritty (grammar and style format). But maybe you wrote a poem, that requires different kinds of editing mindset and probably different amounts of editing. Or fanfic. Some people edit those a lot (similar to a novel) and some write and post with only the most basic of changes. But the likelihood is that most editing will come in rounds. You’ll spend more time editing than on the first draft. And for a new writer, that can be daunting so…
Last tip: Take in chunks. A 50,000 (or likely 70,000 or more) word manuscript is daunting. Throw that ENTIRE manuscript into Grammarly and you might have irregular heart palpitations with the number of edits needed. So, maybe for some, taking it a chapter at a time, bite sized chunks, makes the entire task less daunting. It’s easier to say you edited chapter 1 than you made 200 changes out of 5,000.
Journey Member Corner
For those in the Journey that would like to submit a flash fiction, poem, or short article for the next issue, let us know! We’d be excited to share! Also, Journey Members that have new publications, let us know as well! We’ll post them here!