16 Questions to Ask When Line Editing

[@TimothyNiederriter]

Very thought-provoking. I haven't spent much time 'thinking' while editing several of my novels and this video has given me a bunch to consider. One point I'd add to the voice side of things, from sci-fi author Terry Mixon, is that editing from in your character's head or narrative voice can make the process easier as well as more effective.

[@dariakey5318]

Thanks for the video! I like that you didn't mention filter words and stuff. They are mentioned by everyone all the time while your advice looks unique, creative and thought-provoking.

[@gamewriteeye769]

Use filter words to add a lens to the scope of what is going on, remove it for immediacy.

[@sarahumlaut]

literally line editing a strory rn... ur timing is always right

[@d-pinside]

Thank you very much Shaelin. You wonderfully described the beauty of language.

[@ahabbota3876]

High quality stuff, as always.

[@iosyntropy]

every comment on here is a real person not a bot or spam account selling an idea. you should be proud to be involved in something that AI stuff cant profit from. book tube is the polar opposite of crypto tube. thanks for all these videos and great stuff :)

[@SDHuston]

A very detailed and thorough explanation! Thank you for all of the great tips!

[@ffstopP]

Terrific. One of these days I'm going to see you on TED talks and you're going to bowl us over with your insights into Why Human Beings Tell Stories and How To Tell a Good One.

[@autimantis4213]

Love your editing videos!! So much good info in 12 minutes!!!

[@JohnVella1968]

I'm going to apologise in advance for this comment, but I started watching the video and I'm going to have to start it again... One minute and thirty seconds in, when you say "for meeee" made me laugh far more than you probably intended. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love your videos, and they are so helpful but that "for meeee" is the funniest thing I have seen and heard in a long time. 😀

[@jackhaggerty1066]

Miss Shaelin attended the classes of a brilliant voice coach in order to lose her Austro-Hungarian accent and sound like a home grown Vancouverite. Some say her Viennese English gave her public readings a certain Mitteleuropian charm. I could not possibly comment.

[@qormi1000]

Great video. Thank you.

[@lesliemoiseauthor]

Excellent advice, and not something usually considered.

[@o_o-lj1ym]

This video is seriously so helpful

[@arienrhod1]

Great video. Personally, I have to pay special attention to the ends of sentences - that's where the punch lands. It's especially impotant with sentences which are supposed to convey critical imformation. I always need to make sure those don't end in weak, forgettable words like "it", "too", "something", or a silly little adverb. It's astonishing how much differencea such little word shuffling can have.

[@jackhaggerty1066]

Regarding your point on punctuation, I am reminded of Somerset Maugham giving the MS of The Razor's Edge to a grammarian who then, to Maugham's dismay, annotated almost every sentence with corrections & improvements. You can see Maugham interviewed on KZbin. Orhan Pamuk said we read Tolstoy, Proust, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf because they convey a sense that the world has a centre and meaning, a sense that may be illusory. Pamuk believes there is a secret centre to novels, the centre of *Moby-Dick* is the cosmos itself. *The Naive and Sentimental Novelist* by Orhan Pamuk. My favourite Maugham is *Cakes and Ale* which has the wit & precision of Jane Austen.

[@greatperhaps7224]

YESSSS I NEEDED THIS SO BAD

[@GenLiu]

Voice consistency is something I'm really looking out for when I'm writing. I hate when I read something and the characters I started with are not the same at the end of the story. One thing that I personally do to prevent that (apart from revising, obviously) is that I toss a few words on the character sheets that describe their personality and even a few words that they're commonly using (I call that character sheet as if it was an RPG...I'm sure it has another name but you know what I mean). For the most important characters, I even go a step further and try to shape their psyche to match someone I know (a friend, a family member...) so I stay consistent with their behavior and feelings. Btw, punctuation is my worst enemy and, by far, my bigger weakness. I don't understand anything about punctuation and don't see them on the page. To me, a book is a succession of words that my brain orders as it wishes lolol

[@rachelthompson9324]

Here is one for you: Showing and telling. I see this a lot. The writer tells us what is about to happen or tells us what just happened or what is happening when it was already shown. Be it shown or told first, it happens twice in quick succession and sometimes in the same paragraph or sentence if not page.

[@gamewriteeye769]

It depends though. Sometimes, I find it's necessary to remind the reader from a different frame of mind to bring a previous plot point into a unique or expanded perspective on things.

[@CauldronCutie]

Hi, Shaelin. So I have a question. What do you do when you can't find the motivation to write? Do you step away or focus on writing something different? For me personally, I'm afraid if I step back, it'll hard to start up again. I know this isn't related to the video's topic, but I thought I'd ask since you give great writing advice.

[@Nate1975]

Look through her other videos. She spoke about this in other videos a lot, mainly about writing something else

[@ShaelinWrites]

I think it depends on the case! Ask yourself why you're lacking motivation--if you can trace the root, you can identify the best solution. Breaks can definitely be healthy, but if I'm feeling low-motivation for the project, I find switching to another project really works for me. I have a personal project I don't intend to publish that I use for cases like that where I just need something fun/easy to write.

[@brycesonflowers8758]

I wish I knew those questions before going into fifth grade back in August of 2016.

[@KeychildProductions]

I struggle with this, the part about balancing unique parts and cliches that have been said... because I try to think of my characters as normal people too who would reference this or that, establishing some kind of connection to an audience who would do the same. Like, everyday. But... maybe it can be achieved, or defended, if the characters add their own twists and interpretations to the quotes or cliches

[@elneia_art]

Your insides are just gold! But if you ever happen to run out of content, could you maybe make a video on writing stories for younger audience, like under 10 years old? I believe a lot of general creative writing advice doesn't apply there, but I just cannot find anything helpful about it anywhere :/

[@MrYesman43]

I've heard you use the term 'beat' a few times, but I don't think I've heard you explain it. Could you possibly explain a bit about what that term means?

[@ShaelinWrites]

It's kind of a screenwriting term I picked up from there haha - it basically is just 'a thing that happens' but it depends on the scale. So you can have large plot beats (defined events), but within each scene you also have beats that are the smaller action points within a scene.

[@MrYesman43]

@@ShaelinWrites Cool, thanks for your response

[@writethepath8354]

Ma'am...ma'am...I revise by pen and paper, and I've been binging your channel all day as bg while I type in the changes. I have 5 pages left. I dunno, this feels timely, wonder if I'm about to have some headdesk moments

[@jeremyhennessee6604]

I like your videos. You're smart, and much of your advice is relevant. I'm writing a novella about the Targeted Individuals Phenomena that you may have heard of. My greatest (personal) downfall is trying to find that happy medium between being too descriptive, and not descriptive enough. I have a tendency to hyper-focus on unnecessary details that don't really do much to propel the story along. I'm still fairly new to your video corpus ma'am, and was wondering if you have ever read Joseph Campbell's Hero With 1,000 Faces? and if so, did you find any value in his insights? (Just wondering.) Also. Do you write poetry?

[@mickeyzeckendorf3886]

i just finished How to Slaughter, and not to expose myself, but I would die for August

[@jackhaggerty1066]

Now there's a novel title I would take off the shelf in my local bookshop: *I Would Die For August*. I just looked up the names of famous people whose first name was August : Strindberg topped the list.

[@billyalarie929]

“Can we see faces and bodies?” But how do we write about these things in an interesting and unique way that also makes sense? I can’t walk so idk how to write this, but I don’t feel like that’s the biggest reason why.

[@ShaelinWrites]

Writing about faces/bodies isn't inherently uninteresting, dull, or won't make sense, so I don't think this needs to be a problem. Picture the scene and ask yourself what characters are doing, and convey it in a clear, compelling way - just like any descriptive writing.

[@jackhaggerty1066]

Faces/bodies are not so hard to write about; study Dickens, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Chekhov, Gogol, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Colette, Nabokov, Truman Capote, R.K. Narayan, V.S. Naipaul, Updike, Alice Munro. Paul Theroux's travel books are marvellous on people. The hard thing is to describe the dynamic interflow between people : Read *Howard's End* and *The Longest Journey* by E.M. Forster.

[@billyalarie929]

@@ShaelinWrites that’s a very interesting point, thank you for that. Also I thought about this all day, but I really hope I didn’t come off as argumentative, or mistrustful, in my initial question. I apologize if I did.

[@billyalarie929]

@@jackhaggerty1066 thank you for the suggestions and support.

[@jackhaggerty1066]

@@billyalarie929 My pleasure. Read Nabokov's lectures on Russian & European writers, wonderful, and the 2 volume biography by Brian Boyd, surprising. There is nothing like hearing the writer read from her/ his own work which we can do thanks to KZbin and the Poetry Archive. *William Styron Reading from Lie Down in Darkness.* KZbin *Truman Capote Reads From Breakfast At Tiffany's April 7, 1963.* KZbin. The online Poetry Archive has 4 poems by P.J. Kavanagh (not to be confused with Patrick Kavanagh) an English poet who lived near Cirencester in the Cotswolds whom I had the good fortune to meet twice. Kavanagh was an actor with the Old Vic theatre company; his voice has a subtlety which conveys more meaning than one can grasp. I was particularly struck by *Something About* and *Perfection Isn't Like A Perfect Story* : there is mystery here, pathos & wit. Kavanagh's first wife Sally died suddenly in Indonesia and he wrote a book about her, *The Perfect Stranger* a classic. Sally's mother, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann wrote a book about her daughter's death, *The Swan in the Evening*.

[@skywa7183]

Shaelin the audio is kinda bad. Badder than prev videos. Maybe check? Great video though. Thank u❤️

[@nononouh]

7 11

[@rachelthompson9324]

17: stop convincing yourself that bad prose is your style. I see this a lot with new writers, they don't want to edit or cut the fat. "It's my style". No, that ain't style. The first thing one types is not a writer's best voice.

[@ovenbakedtwink]

First 🕺

[@SeanDuranMusic]

Looks like you got a hair cut... You need to turn up the volume of your mic 🎤

[@EarthenDemon126]

Unrelated question: Do you get misgendered often, being an androgynous looking person?

[@ShaelinWrites]

I can confidently say that at this point, strangers usually have no idea what gender I am, and I have no complaints about that lol. I think online people usually assume I'm a woman, but that might be because in my older videos I looked a lot more femme, but in person I get called 'sir' or 'him' by strangers fairly often, especially if I'm wearing a mask. I don't mind though, as a non-binary person it's validating!

[@jackhaggerty1066]

Miss Gender? Say : Miss Shaelin. Don't say : Boy Bishop. (Footnote. There were Boy Bishops in medieval England, there has to be a novel in it.) Liv Ullmann made a film *Pope Joan* (1972) about the legend of a misgendered pontiff. Franco Nero was cast as Pope Joan's boyfriend. Later Nero played Saint Augustine in a film *Restless Heart* (KZbin). *Hadrian VII : A Romance* by Frederick Rolfe has to be the strangest genderqueer novel about the papacy imaginable. A.J.A. Symons wrote a haunting biography of Rolfe, *The Quest for Corvo* which moves from England to Venice & Rome. Rolfe was quite dotty but his unsettling masterpiece won him a place in English Literature.

[@jackhaggerty1066]

@@Alpha1_Isolde *maaaam im a lamb* & *In the military it is earnt. Yes sir.* Wonderful ! This is like a character who has drunk too much port in Thackeray or Robert Smith Surtees (1805-1864). Dickens assigns a speech pattern to his characters: Joe Gargerry, Pumblechook, Magwitch, Sam Weller, Alfred Jingle. If you feel faint at the thought of reading Thackeray (Surtees is easy and amusing) watch Kubrick's film of *Barry Lyndon*.

[@sergeyiu2301]

Thank you so much for another amazing writing video, Shaelin! Do you have a discord or something like that? I would love to be apart of your community and read more tips and opinions. Also i think that might be good for viewers so we can share our thoughts and give tips to each other. Love you and your content!

[@michaelhunter2136]

You can get Kaplan's essay here without needing a credit card (It's outstanding): eternal-dannation.tumblr.com/post/24049918429/revising-your-prose-for-power-and-punch

[@jackhaggerty1066]

Outstanding, indeed.