This post is a chapter from my book, The Write Attitude, which is now in a second edition. I’m posting it here to entice you to head over to Storybundle to pick up a copy, along with ebooks by T. Thorn Coyle, Ron Collins, Darcy Pattison, Anthea Sharp, and ten more great writers. Everyone’s book is an exclusive. That’s right. Everything in the bundle is exclusive to the bundle, including my book.

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The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post appeared on my Patreon page in October of 2025, and is one of the early chapters in the book.

 

GETTING LOST IN THE WORDS

From 2025

This past week, I finished the largest Fey book I’ve written to date. It is the fifth book in my side series on the Qavnerian Protectorate…and it ended up at 240,000 words long. I trimmed about 50,000 words out of it, and wrote the scenes that I missed. (Mostly the validation, because I always skip the validation in my first pass.) I figured the book was long because of how I wrote it. I dabbled at it during the two years of crisis that we endured at the business. For a while, I gave the book up entirely because I simply couldn’t concentrate on a story that big. That was when I wrote some of the novellas that came out this year, as well as a novel that will appear in late 2026.

My mind was trending long, I think, because I didn’t want to keep coming up with new things. I didn’t have the brain space for that.

I also found that I couldn’t make any decisions while still in the thrall of that huge, gigantic, super-sized novel. I wasn’t in the position to decide what I would do next. I’m going to figure that out in the next few days.

But some of the small things I meant to do included typing in about 6,000 words that Mick Herron wrote in the middle of his Slow Horses novel Bad Actors. He wrote a scene filled with mayhem that stretched over a couple of square miles of London and had at least four main viewpoint characters. (If you want to know what scene, it’s the one that more or less culminates with the iron and the bus, as well as a brick to the head.)

When I first read the thing, two years ago now, I became aware at the very end of the section that I not only had a feeling of mayhem, but that I had understood each part of the action. When a writer uses a technique that isn’t in my writing toolbox, I figure out how that technique works. Sometimes I can eyeball it, but occasionally, I type it into my own computer using my word program and my set-up, so I can see how it all works on the page.

It took two days’ writing sessions to do the typing, partly because I stopped to give my wrists a break and also because I would look up any words I didn’t know. As a reader, I skipped over the British slang that I was unfamiliar with, choosing to get it out through context, but as a writer, I wanted to know what he was doing.

So louring, cack-handed, and a whole bunch of other words entered my consciousness and, in the case of louring, changed my perspective on a moment in the scene that I was typing in.

Usually, when I type in another writer’s work, it’s a serious struggle. I want to add commas or punctuation or paragraphs or different words. Aside from the British slang, I did not feel the need to add or change words, but I did realize that he uses punctuation very differently than I do. There are a lot more colons in his work than there are in mine, and not as many commas. The only quibble I had, in fact, was that he wouldn’t use a comma in something like “For a moment he was thinking of his wife…” I would add a comma after “moment.” And he wouldn’t use an ellipsis plus a period for the end of a sentence. I don’t know if that was deliberate, a British punctuation thing, or personal preference. It caught me every time.

But the one thing I did note was this: I have been deep in the words in my own writing. Because life has thrown me a lot of lemons in the past year, I would catch them and consider them before making the lemonade. In other words, my critical voice was and is on very high right now.

Sometimes as I worked on the biggest Fey novel to ever come out of my computer, I would stop and stare at the words and think them very plain. That’s not a normal thought for me—or it wasn’t before this past year or two.

As I typed in Herron’s section, I noted that I reached the “words are plain” stage somewhere around 3,000 words in. His words were plain and sometimes repetitive. There were copy editing issues as well, one or two misspellings (not British spellings, but actual misspellings) and a few missing hyphens that my eye caught while I was working out his technique.

I had to pause and consider that moment, though. By putting his words into my format, I hit the same “these words are plain” place I hit in my own writing. Which meant that critical voice was not doing its job and looking at the technique. It was critiquing the words used instead of the effect those words had on the reader.

Copy editors make this error a lot. I train copy editors and have done so for decades now. The traditional publisher for my Grayson books in the 1990s used my books to test copy editors. If I got a heavy hand, the copy editor didn’t get hired. My Grayson books, like Herron’s Slough House series, are voice heavy. If the copy editor missed that, and put the book into proper English with traditional punctuation, they had no right to be called a copy editor at all.

The copy editor’s job is to find actual mistakes (misspellings, inadvertently repeated details, misnaming characters) rather than “clean up” some established writer’s punctuation. And copy editors who are harsher on new writers will often strip those writers of the very things that make their voice strong.

I can’t imagine the discussion Soho Crime had early on with Herron’s copy editors. He breaks every single rule of grammar and punctuation on purpose and does it to make a point in the story.

For example, I noted in his latest book, Clown Town, that in another mayhem scene, one character’s point-of-view section was usually one paragraph long and just a single sentence. I slowly realized that single sentence extended over many sections and many pages. Every time we were in that character’s point of view, there was a lot of punctuation, and not a bit of it was an actual period.

The period arrived at the end of the character’s point-of-view section in that mayhem scene…and I realized (because of how I read) that the character was dead. Herron played with that idea (are they really dead?) for the next twenty pages, and most readers would have missed the period at the end of the character’s section. But I didn’t. (I had the same problem in the book Silence of the Lambs when Thomas Harris has Hannibal Lector escape a well-guarded facility. Harris used an odd phrase, a strange verb, and a long sentence in the middle of a gigantic paragraph. The odd phrase from such a careful writer caught me up short. So I went backwards, looking to see if I’d missed anything else.

And yep, I had. I knew exactly how Lector escaped pages before Harris wanted me to. Most readers didn’t catch it until Harris did a big reveal. And then they would go back and see the odd phrase. I saw it going in.

Those things that excellent writers do out of their subconscious as they’re in the moment are things that a copy editor would “fix.” I can imagine that a novice (to Herron’s work) copy editor adding periods throughout those character sections—and ruining them.

The best copy editors read the book they’re editing for enjoyment first, so that they will see the author’s intent long before they start “fixing mistakes.” Most modern copy editors don’t do that at all, which is why you’ll hear Dean tell you that you don’t need a copy editor. He’s right: better to let some mistakes through than muck up the voice.

I hire and fire a lot of copy editors even now because I have a tendency in my fiction writing to repeat myself. Some of that comes because I write out of order. So I might actually introduce a character for the first time when I write chapter 45, but chapter 45 might have been the very first chapter I ever wrote. Then, later, I might write chapter 7, where the character appears for the reader for the first time and I’ll write the same description (often in the same language without checking back) again. And maybe I’ll worry that I hadn’t described the character when I get to chapter 15, and I’ll write the same description again.

I need someone to find that stuff. What’s amazing to me is that the words-only, rules-only copy editors never find the repeated information. Or the silly stuff, like a character putting on a hat in chapter 27 and then putting on a different hat six pages later without taking off the first hat.

That’s what’s valuable about copy editors. Not fixing the grammar, but fixing the goofy stuff. On the latest book which will appear in 2026, the other book I wrote during the crisis, I changed the name of one of the main characters but never did a search and replace. So occasionally, his name goes back and forth with one letter different. The very good copy editor that I have caught that. None of my first readers did—and neither did I.

In storytelling, the words are tools. Punctuation is also a tool. Paragraphing is a tool.

The rules are there for beginners. Storytellers need to have a huge toolbox, and they need to learn how to use those tools. Most writers get by with a hammer, some nails and a few screwdrivers. The best writers have finesse tools (to extend the metaphor) like a cape chisel, saw set pliers, and an egg beater drill just in case the story needs them.

And I can guarantee you that if the story does need them, the copy editor will probably not understand why they’re there—unless the copy editor is someone who actually reads and understands the story before looking at the words.

As for the rest of us—we storytellers—we need to stay out of the words and not worry about them. So what if they’re “plain”? So what if you’ve written a passive sentence? So what if they seem to lie flat on the page?

If you’re thinking those things, you’re not in the story at all. You’re in copyedit or critic mode.

Stop it.

Remember that you’re a storyteller. Not a writer. And don’t worry about the little fiddly bits. If you misspell them and the story’s compelling, your reader won’t even notice.

Just like reader me didn’t notice all the words I didn’t know in Herron’s work. I was so caught up in that mayhem scene that I went right over those unfamiliar words, and ended up thinking that the sequence was brilliant.

Because it is.

“Getting Lost in The Words” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

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