We’re thrilled to welcome The Write Advice team, Justin Lee Anderson, Stephen Aryan, and Anna Stephens, to the Hive. Throughout June, they have been joining us every week with their expert writing advice.

The Write Advice are a group of seasoned authors that provide support for writers on the path to publication. They focus on mentoring, guidance, editing, and feedback on submission packages. You can find them on their website, Twitter and Instagram.

Articles so far:

Week 1 – 4 Common Mistakes in Query Packages

Week 2 – Types of Edit

Week 3 – Mentoring

This week, Justin Lee Anderson takes us through the example edit.

Example Edit

One of the services we offer at The Write Advice is something we call an Example Edit. We call it that mostly because it seems a bit less scary than what I used to call it – a rip crit!

The idea for this came when I was part of an online critique group and, working as a professional editor, would tell people to brace themselves, because I was going to be completely honest with my feedback. Almost everyone who took me up on the offer of a ‘rip crit’ had the same reaction, which was basically a variation on “I needed a minute to get over it, but after a day or two I realised how helpful it was and it made me a better writer.” I can only remember one writer who took it badly, and it turned out that they weren’t there for constructive criticism to improve their work, they were just looking for people to stroke their ego – which is a really good way to ensure you never improve as a writer!

The way an Example Edit works is that I go through a chapter of up to 5k, editing everything I think could be improved upon and annotate it with explanations and advice so that the writer understands why I made each choice. There are a lot of common mistakes that editors will pick up in any work, fiction or non-fiction, and simply annotate with things like ‘repetition’, ‘redundant’, ‘run-on’ etc. Once you’ve been doing it long enough, you catch them automatically, but they’re the kinds of things new writers, in particular, need to learn in order to make themselves better writers and self-editors. That’s the purpose of an Example Edit. I want to give you the direction and the skills to improve both your first drafts and your edits.

Stephen has already covered a few of the common issues he’s been seeing in his Submission Package edits in his earlier article, and they’re all good examples. One of the big things I tend to focus on is rhythm. You want your writing to flow like a river, carrying your reader along. The minute you write something that breaks that flow – that ‘clunks’ – you’re pulling your reader out of the story to look at the words on the page. 

So I look at things like restructuring sentences, simplifying prose, eliminating redundancies and creating variation. As a guiding rule, I think the prose’s role is to get out of the way of the story, so that the reader isn’t even consciously aware they’re reading. If they’re busy watching the movie in their head, you’ve probably hit that sweet spot.

Here’s a few of the pointers I find myself giving a lot:

• Too many ands: If you have more than one ‘and’ in your sentence, there’s a good chance it’s too long. Reread it to make sure you don’t actually have two sentences crammed together, or if there’s a way to simplify the sentence.

• Consecutive sentences starting with the same structure: “She turned…” “She jumped..” “She walked…” Too many of these in succession becomes repetitive and jarring. Try to vary this by alternating your sentence structures. Instead of “Legolas drew his sword, charging forward.” You can just swap that around to “Charging forward, Legolas drew his sword.” It’s a simple tweak, but if your previous sentence also started with [Person] did [an action], it’s an easy way to add some variety.

• Starting or beginning: Almost any time you write that someone “started” or “began” to do something, it will make for stronger writing if you just say they did it. Unless the starting is salient, like if they are going to be interrupted, it just reads as weak writing. “Olivia screamed” is almost always better than “Olivia started screaming”.

• Over-describing: You don’t have to write every single thing that happens in a scene. If your character is sitting and they need to move to the bar, they don’t need to “stand up and walk to the bar” they can just “go to the bar”. Your reader will assume they didn’t take the chair with them!

• Unnecessary dialogue tags: It’s OK to indicate who is speaking with action sometimes. If you’ve written: “‘Hi,’ said Kate, putting her phone on the table. ‘How are you?’” You can just write: “‘Hi.’ Kate put her phone on the table. ‘How are you?’” Sometimes you need a dialogue tag, but not always. If there are only two people in a conversation and it’s clear who’s speaking, you can sometimes just let the dialogue stand alone, which can be very effective if you’re writing a conversation you want to stand out.

If you’re at the point with your writing where you’re ready for some professional, constructive criticism to help make you a better writer and help you learn to edit your own work before submitting to an agent or editor, give me a shout at The Write Advice. 

For more information about what services The Write Advice provide,

including their editorial services, you can visit their website

Justin was a professional writer and editor for 15 years before his debut novel, Carpet Diem, was published, going on to win the 2018 Audie award for Humor. His second novel, The Lost War, won the 2020 SPFBO award, leading to a four-book deal with Orbit for The Eidyn Saga.

Two short animations Justin scripted and produced were shortlisted for Scottish Creative awards, and he also writes TV and film scripts with his wife, Juliet. Their children’s audio story, The Great Bumpkin King, was produced by BBC Scotland in 2019. Justin and Juliet live with their family in East Lothian, near Justin’s hometown of Edinburgh.