The Artful Edit
by Susan Bell · Susan Bell
Editor Susan Bell's book on revising literary work, combining a close study of how Fitzgerald and his editor Max Perkins revised The Great Gatsby with practical methods for gaining distance from a draft and reworking structure, pacing, and prose.
This link may earn us a small commission at no extra cost to you. Affiliate disclosure
More resources on Editing & Revision
Helping Writers Become Authors
K.M. Weiland's long-running craft blog and podcast covering story structure, character arcs, outlining and scene construction. Readers get a consistent structural vocabulary of beats, arcs and act turns for diagnosing why a draft stalls and revising it.
The Editor's Blog
Fiction editor Beth Hill's archive of articles, written 2010–2020, on punctuation, dialogue formatting, point of view, scene structure, and manuscript self-editing, so novelists can spot and correct common craft and mechanical errors before submitting work.
Style: Toward Clarity and Grace
Williams diagnoses why prose reads as dense and supplies repeatable revision rules built on subjects-as-characters and verbs-as-actions. Readers can rewrite tangled sentences and paragraphs into clear ones instead of guessing from vague style advice.
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers
Two professional editors show fiction writers how to revise their own manuscripts, with chapters on show versus tell, point of view, dialogue mechanics, interior monologue, and voice, plus before-and-after examples and checklists for applying each technique to a draft.
Creative Writing: The Craft of Story
Your style is as unique and distinctive as your face, your voice, except that you can choose it, you can can work on it, enhance it. In this course we will introduce aspiring writers to the art of putting pressure on written language. We will study the use of metaphor and imagery, and demonstrate how clarity, grace, and inventiveness in word choice are imperative to a story’s success. Writers will emerge with the revision skills essential to all writers of good stories and good prose.
writersdigest.com
WritersDigest.com is a comprehensive resource for writers, featuring craft articles, writing prompts, market guides, contests, and publishing tips to help aspiring and established authors improve their craft and get published.