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Authors often love to polish their prose, shining up the words of their story until they gleam. But there’s much more to skillful line editing than just making the words pretty.

In the strongest stories, the language serves the story as potently as any other element of craft. It strengthens, clarifies, deepens, and heightens impact.

Line editing means taking a microscope to every word of your story and making sure it says what you want say in the most impactful way, that it says exactly what you mean, that it clearly conveys your intentions, and most important, that it never draws attention to itself and gets in the way of the story or risks pulling readers out of it.

Even if your story is compelling, well paced and gripping, what sets a good book apart from a great one can be the prose itself. With concrete, specific examples, learn how to tighten up the flab of useless verbiage, unnecessary modifiers, dueling descriptions, spoon-feeding, and more to make your style as tight as your storytelling—and how to elevate your prose to serve and deepen the story. Plenty of specific examples help attendees see firsthand how to apply these techniques to their own WIPs.

In this 90-minute online workshop, career book editor Tiffany Yates Martin will show you how to trim the fat from your prose that can lead to flabby writing and stall out or dilute the effectiveness of your story—and how to add the flavor, conveying your intentions in the most elegant and effective way, while expressing your unique voice that will set your story apart.

Tiffany Yates Martin has spent decades in the publishing industry and edited literally thousands of manuscripts. She knows what will capture a reader’s attention and what will risk their putting your story down.

What will we do during this class?

 You’ll learn to make your prose:

• Clear and specific: Do you convey exactly what you mean to say, with depth, nuance, and impact?
• Accurate: Are you using the correct words and phrases with the exact meaning you intend?
• Visual/visceral: Are you painting a vivid, visual picture for readers—one that elicits powerful reactions in them?
• Elegant: Are you conveying your full intentions in the most economical way, without flab that can bog down the prose, dilute the impact, and stall momentum?
• Effective: Does the prose serve and further your story: deepen and develop characters, the plot, the stakes?
• Original: Does your work have style, voice, and your own unique stamp?

 What will you get after the class?

•  PDFs of the presentation
• A line-editing checklist to help you elevate and streamline your prose