Stephen King – TS Hottle Editing

Zen In The Art Of Writing by Ray Bradbury

Posted on March 31, 2025 by tshottleediting_hcwymb

The bulk of what I edit comes from a publisher. So it stands to reason each writer, regardless of flaws, knows how to write. Now, how well they write is up for some debate, and that includes your humble narrator. Self editing, of course, is a tricky skill to master. It’s why I’m a fan of Stephen King’s process, where in the rough draft gets shoved into a drawer or dark corner of the cloud for two or three or six months. That masterpiece you wrote in the heat of the moment suddenly looks like the literary equivalent of a Very Special Episode of Hoarders.

But you should know how to write, even in that messy, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink first version of the story you’re writing. I mentioned on my author Substack that I just started a short story I knew was already bloated because it takes too long to wade in. Of course, I’m GenX. Typewriters and dedicated word processing machines were still a thing when I began to work on my craft. I know one Gen Z writer who says he doesn’t do drafts. He just revises the existing original. He’s about fifteen years younger than me and started writing probably on Word Perfect or even the early Microsoft Word. Which means we’re both old enough to have owned cassettes for music and don’t cotton to these fancy, newfangled apps like Scrivener. (Scrivener has been around long enough to cultivate quite a few “Get off my lawn!” types among its fan base. Welcome to the geezers club, Scrivenites. The guys still using IBM Selectrics will be tending bar this evening.)

“Well, gee, Hottle. Are you going to get to your point?”

Now that the bush has been thoroughly beat around, yes.

This column, and dozens of others just like it, are about beating a manuscript into submission. (For submission, though no pun was intended.) Some time back in the 2010s, all the writing advice became about flogging books on Kindle, how to crank out 10,000 words while walking your dog, taking a shower, or getting a root canal. (Pro tip: Dragon Anywhere does not understand WTF you’re saying when a dentist is ripping bone out of your mouth.) None of it was about the joy of writing, why we do it, what drives us to sit at the keyboard and make stuff up.

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury Ray Bradbury wrote a book about it. He came up in the age of pulps. His best known science fiction novel, The Martian Chronicles, was welded together in outline form almost on a dare from his editor (who wrote him a check the next morning.) Bradbury knew he wanted to write from earliest childhood. I’ve heard tell of writers whose parents discouraged them. One gent I used to know took beatings over it. (He’s old enough to be my father, so put that into generational context. My dad transitioned from spanking to the time-out because the latter really pissed off my brother. I digress. Again.) No, Bradbury collected memories. He wrote down lists of nouns that triggered those memories. And he talks to his characters. He actually will chat with them, listen to them. It’s how he adapted Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes for stage and screen. And I’ve noticed movies based on Bradbury’s work tend to hew more closely to the original source than that of other writers. Stephen King comes close, even when a director “has their own vision” (Shut up, Stuart Baird!), though the director of The Outsider needs to apologize for trying to excise Holly Gibney from that story.

Bradbury approaches life as one long journal entry. Something happens to him or around him, and he knows an idea from it won’t emerge for years, sometimes decades. It’s obvious to anyone who’s read Something Wicked This Way Comes. And if you read between the lines, you can see an homage to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio in The Martian Chronicles. And, I suspect, shades of Stephen King’s Castle Rock, too.

There is actually no Zen in Zen in the Art of Writing. Well, not until the end, with the essay that gives the book the title. This is Ray Bradbury telling you he’s not a science fiction or literary god but just a kid from Waukegan, Illinois, who got to make stuff up for a living. One suspects he’d have done it whether he got published or not. Writing is, after all, an unstoppable madness for many. Including Bradbury.

The Editor’s Toolbox

Posted on February 17, 2025 by tshottleediting_hcwymb

I’ve talked about the software tools I use to edit. ProWritingAid and PerfectIt are my go-to suites for copy editing. Story analysis and developmental editing, despite what OpenAI would have you believe, is very much a human art and has to be learned. By humans. Sorry, Sam. Good luck buying Twitter. (Like Sam Altman, I’m not holding my breath on that one.)

But software is not the only tool in the box. As I edit primarily books, it may surprise you to know some of my tools are… Well… Books. And the odd website, usually Wikipedia. More on that in a moment.

So what books do I recommend?

The Chicago Manual of Style – For US writers, this is the mack daddy. A fellow editor, newly minted, assumed I read the thing like you’d read any textbook. But we don’t read the dictionary or even peruse Wikipedia to absorb it. (The latter is constantly in flux, so that’s a fool’s errand.) No, CMOS, as it’s sometimes called, is a reference book. This is the baseline for writing in American English. There are UK and Canadian equivalents, so look for those. But you have the manual to look things up, it’s indispensable.

The Elements of Style -Strunk & White’s treatise on the English language. Most of it is universal. It’s less a grammar book than a style book. Chicago is an encyclopedia. Elements is the quick-and-dirty. It’ll even tell you if you should hyphenate “quick-and-dirty” and when.

Actually, the Comma Goes Here by Lucy Cripps – This is a new addition. Like Elements, it’s a short, sweet guide to grammar I’ve started keeping handy as I work.

Self Editing for Fiction Writers by Rennie Brown and Dave King – Out of print now, but you can find used copies pretty much anywhere online. (My plug for bookshop.org, the indie bookstore’s friend.) I got a copy years ago, and most of the writers I started out with still have their copy.

Websites

Wikipedia – When it first debuted, it was largely a copy of the 1911 version of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Wiki vandalism,” which I gleefully admit to provoking (Yes, I’m one of those who added “Born in Babylonia, moved to Arizona” to the Tutankhamun article. Wasn’t the first and definitely not the last), was a huge issue in the beginning. However, this non-profit operation has evolved. It’s well-policed and has become much more nuanced in its restrictions on how information is sourced. It’s great for fact checking and spellchecking brand names. And like you’re not supposed to city Britannica as a source, Wikipedia provides you the actual source for much of its information.

Duck Duck Go – Until recently, I swore by Google. And why not? For years, it was the gold standard of search. But like anything else, great brands and great products decline. Duck Duck Go is not only a secure, privacy focused search engine, it’s a great web browser to boot. Duck Duck Go’s search engine is as robust as Google’s and Microsoft’s Bing. I keep Chrome and Edge in case Duck Duck Go blocks or can’t reach something that’s needed, but that’s seldom a problem.

Writing:

Writing the Novel by Lawrence Block – This is the book that taught me how to write a novel. A reread years later convinced me to switch from pantsing to plotting, but that’s a personal preference. Block even mentions the difference while describing a historical novel whose author basically shuffled his research cards into a certain order to make them a novel. That sounded to me, as it did to the great Block, a bit clumsy. His point was it worked for that writer. The book was a best seller. (It sounds like Michener. He was a researching fool, eventually employing teams of researchers to build his stories.) Block gives it to you straight, and from an age when word processors were not yet a thing.

On Writing by Stephen King – Not so much a how-to as a how-I-do-it. King is an unrepentant pantser, but you can see that in how he structures stories. It’s also a memoir and, in the final section an editing guide. Like every writer and every editor, he has his pet peeve. His is adverbs, and he cheerfully admits he’s the worst offender. So noted. But not only should every writer read this, but it’s like spending time with a favorite uncle recounting his past.

Save the Cat – Blake Snyder – Take the Hero’s Journey and boil it down for screenwriters. Also useful for novelists. Save the cat is one of the goals of any story. How do you get to saving the cat in the end? Snyder, who sadly is no longer with us, also gave me one of my favorite tools for handling expository scenes that cannot be avoided: The Pope in the Pool. If you have a scene where people are talking about the story, but not much is happening, through something interesting into the scene. In one movie, an old man is swimming as a bunch of cardinals outline what’s happening. Gradually, you realize the guy in the pool is the Pope himself. I loved that passage of the book so much that, in one story, I named a character Pope, who forces business visitors to talk to him while he swims in his company-supplied pool. (He also dies there in another story, but that’s for the TS Substack.)