Creative Writing Tips from NCL Proofreading Services

So, why should you get your new novella proofread, or if you have the courage, edited? Well, if you are on an MA then obviously your final grade is at stake. And, if you are engaged with regular peer revision groups, then it might make it more readable for them and give you confidence that it is definitely OK. If you are from another nation - that is, if English is your second language - then your ideas may be utterly incredible, but your English spelling, grammar & punctuation might demand improvement. So proofreading can help you immensely by polishing your prose and ironing out minor errors.

Editing, however, is even more exciting. It is a bit like a massage for your writing; a rub here, a rub there - a spot lighting effect on another sentence with some creative changes in word usage. It's about releasing your creative style as well as simply dotting the 'i's and crossing the 't's. It also includes offering feedback on your writing - its overall impact, its weaknesses, strengths, and areas for improvement. I feel very privileged to be thus involved in your writing process, and understand that my opinion is not necessarily any more valid than yours. However, I believe that editing is a skilled activity that is more fruitful and pays more dividends than simply getting a peer to comment on your work.

In case you didn't know, editing is proofreading (correcting spelling, grammar & punctuation) plus some reworking i.e. the creative application of another head to your masterpiece.

I was reading some G.K. Chesterton this morning. He is one of my all time favorite authors, and I remembered why when I encountered his larger than life characters and his flamboyant language.

If you've never read Chesterton's Father Brown stories, then they are worth a go. He's writing with an older style (having died in 1936), but don't be deterred. They are terrific - unobtrusive short stories about the intriguing little priest-detective called Father Brown.

Father Brown often functions as something of a voice for Chesterton himself, through which he comments on social issues e.g. the introduction of the lie detector (see The Mistake of the Machine). The stories always end slightly too quickly, and leave enough ambiguity on your taste buds to make you want to reread them.

The first thing I relished as I got into the stories today, was the richness of the language. It's delightful (and instructive) in itself, even if you only read a paragraph. 'The Duel of Dr Hirsch' opens with some typical Chesterton characterisation:

"...They [M. Maurice Brun and M. Armand Armagnac] both had black beards that did not seem to belong to their faces, after the strange French fashion which makes real hair look like artificial. M. Brun had a dark wedge of beard apparently affixed under his lower lip. M. Armagnac, by way of a change, had two beards; one sticking out from each corner of his emphatic chin."

And so he continues. I find the attention to detail quite pleasing (e.g. the 'emphatic chin'), as well as the prolonged descriptions of the characters' physical appearances. I also think the way he describes characters in twos and threes - contrasting them with each other - is something we can do better today.

But the excellence of the language alone isn't what makes the Father Brown stories so successful. It's that they are extremely well-crafted detective stories, with genuine twists at the end; normally involving a case abruptly resolved by Father Brown himself.

And yet, the reader likes Father Brown because of his self-effacing simplicity - this isn't Sherlock Holmes. His ever-present observations, made from some subliminal location in the plot, always end up solving the case - often as much to the surprise of the little priest as to anyone else.