Preparing an Audiobook for a Narrator Who Isn’t You
Recently I read through a book to make notes for a professional voice actor who would be reading it for an audiobook production.
Recently I read through a book to make notes for a professional voice actor who would be reading it for an audiobook production.
One of the goals of Fiction+ has been to encourage writers and editors to leave the stylebook behind whenever it gets in the way of creative expression.
The other day, I ran across this line in a recent novel by a best-selling American writer (key words are disguised): “His disposition warmed faster than did the gradually dawning day.”
This year isn’t over just yet, but when it does finally come to an end, the current decade will end with it. In other words, we will soon be leaving the 2010s and entering the 2020s.
When it comes to punctuation, there’s a difference between formal prose and creative writing.
A few months ago in a conference session, a group of novelists digressed into good-natured complaints about being copyedited. One writer drew a lot of laughs saying, “I mean, I got A’s in English! I know where the freaking commas go!”
If you follow Chicago style, it’s a safe bet you know that a Chicago-style ellipsis consists of three spaced periods. You probably also know . . .
In novels and stories and other creative works, words spoken by a character are normally set off from the narrative with quotation marks, and the speaker is identified in the run of text by tags like “she said.”
In editing formal prose, we fix nonstandard English without hesitation. But in editing creative works, we often need to throw out the stylebook so a narrator or character in a novel or play can abuse grammar to good effect. . . .
Since it was first published almost twenty years ago, The Copyeditor’s Handbook has served as both textbook and guide for copyeditors in book publishing and corporate communications. The revised fourth edition of the Handbook is now published alongside a companion, The Copyeditor’s Workbook, . . .