The Editor’s Lexicon by Sarah Cypher

Reviewed for The New Podler Review of Books by Libby Cone

This is a very helpful book. It gives names to many of the pitfalls we try to avoid in our writing, such as scope (which I would call “getting bogged down in one little detail”) and info-dump (nobody wants to know that the conference table was rectangular or the taxi was drive-by-wire). The author even has the courage to use a passage from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight to illustrate weak style! She includes typical editorial comments to demonstrate how one might come across the terminology, as well as book  excerpts illustrating good and bad execution and concepts that might otherwise seem obscure. It is a very short book, but its treatment of editorial lingo gives writers another tool for looking at their work with a bit more objectivity.

Technorati Tags: editing,writing technique

Sarah Cypher is the author of "The Editor's Lexicon: Essential Writing Terms for Novelists" (Glyd-Evans Press, 2010) and runs a two-woman editing and book design shop, The Threepenny Editor.

Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach

I have read a great many books on writing stories—fiction manuals, screenplay and playwriting books—only a few have been useful to me in learning the rhetoric of fiction. One such book is Screenwriting: A Sequence Approach, by Paul Joseph Guilno.

The book presents four methods of creating anticipation: pointing, dangling cause, dramatic irony, and dramatic tension. Pointing gives an indication of where the story line is going. A dangling cause occurs when a cause is not immediately followed by an effect. Dramatic irony occurs when the reader or viewer knows something that the character does not. Finally, dramatic tension occurs when the character must achieve something but has problems doing so. All these create, if used properly, anticipation and forward momentum of the story. But how does one use these concepts properly? It is impossible to learn to use structural elements such as these without seeing how they work in real stories, so analysis of films is indispensable in learning. Now, the dedicated writer who is serious about his craft will do this analysis on his own, looking for the concepts in the stories and films that he is exposed to. Guilno provides such analyses in his book to help you see how to think using these elements. The movies he analyses include Toy Story, The Graduate, North by Northwest and a few others. The analyses are well worth the price of the book. Guilno is a screenwriting professor and he knows what he’s talking about when he shows in his analyses how these elements work.

Obviously, no book will replace your own effort to understand how stories work, but this one will certainly give you the tools to conduct your own analyses.

Reading Like a Writer

I have come across this wonderful book while on a trip to my local independently owned bookstore. (Remember to support independent booksellers!) Francine Prose has come up with yet one more book in the writing manual genre, but hers is a different kind of offering, focusing on the real craft: Reading Like a Writer covers such fundamentals as words, sentences, paragraphs, narration, character, details, gesture, among others and she does so in an inspiring way, providing brief quotes of exemplary writing specimens. I certainly am glad that I have come across this book, which is well worth the cost of purchase. I would recommend it to all writers, and even to those who just want to write better.