Write, Edit, Publish: What Every Writer Needs to Know but Only an Editor Will Tell You

WRITE EDIT PUBLISH

WHAT EVERY WRITER NEEDS TO KNOW BUT ONLY AN EDITOR WILL TELL YOU

MICHAEL J. TOTTEN

CONTENTS

Also by Michael J. Totten

Introduction

I. Hook Your Readers

1. How to Write a Killer First Sentence

2. How to Write a Killer First Page

Writing a Book is Like Eating an Elephant

II. Plot and Structure

3. How to Structure a Scene

4. How to Know If You Should Delete a Scene

5. Deep Story Structure

6. Life-or-Death Stakes

7. How to Write Flashbacks

8. How to Kill Your Plot—Especially Your Ending

Get Some Distance from Your Manuscript

III. Character Development

9. Plot Is a Character Arc

10. How to Write Three-Dimensional Characters

11. Don’t Write Stupid Characters

What If You Write a Bad Book?

IV. Setting and Description

12. Start (Almost) Every Scene with Some Setting

13. Reveal Setting Over Time, Not All at Once

14. Real Details Versus Vacuous Details

15. Setting Is an Opinion

16. Skip the Walk-Through Details

Don’t Write a First Draft. Write a Draft Zero.

V. Point of View

17. How Limited Third-Person Point of View Works

18. Be Wary of Omniscient Point of View

19. Thou Shalt Not Head-Hop

20. How to Write Character Thoughts Without Using Italics

21. Put Down the Filter Words and Back Away Slowly

A Few Tips on Creative Angst

VI. Dialogue

22. Intro to Dialogue

23. Dialogue Mechanics

24. As You Know, Bob

25. On-the-Nose Dialogue

26. Dialogue Should Sound Spoken, Not Written

27. All Your Characters Need Their Own Voice

Talent is (Mostly) Bullshit

VII. Show, Don’t Tell

28. Don’t Tell Your Readers How Your Characters Feel

29. I’m Sad, Bob Said Sadly

Treat Writing Like a Job

VIII. Narrative

30. Search and Destroy All Information Dumps

31. Use Narrative Summary with Caution

32. Information Flow

Common Mistakes that Self-Publishers Make

IX. Words, Punctuation, Sentences, and Paragraphs

33. The Most Important Comma Lesson You’ll Ever Learn

34. Stop Using So Many Capital Letters

35. Be Careful with the Word Would

36. Watch It with the Fake Intensifiers

37. Take It Easy with the Dashes

38. Stop Using Exclamation Points!

39. AI Editors and Software Grammar Checkers Are Garbage

40. Tell the Grammar Police to Get Lost

41. You Need the Word That More Than You Think You Do

42. Don’t Use Present Tense in a Past-Tense Narrative

43. Break Up Your Gigantic Paragraphs

44. Your Plodding Sentences Are Killing Your Readers

45. Help Readers Keep Your Characters Straight

How to Hire an Editor

Final Thoughts

About the Author

Copyright © 2025 by Michael J. Totten

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by

any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,

or otherwise, without the prior written permission of

Michael J. Totten.

First American edition published in 2025 by Belmont Estate Books.

Manufactured in the United States and printed on

acid-free paper.

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

Totten, Michael J.

Write Edit Publish: What Every Writer Needs to Know but Only an Editor Will Tell You

ALSO BY MICHAEL J. TOTTEN

Fiction

Taken

Resurrection

Into the Wasteland

The Last City

Nonfiction

The Road to Fatima Gate

In the Wake of the Surge

Where the West Ends

Tower of the Sun

Dispatches

INTRODUCTION

I wish I could have read my own book—this book—decades ago. It would have saved me so much time, effort, and angst when I was struggling to learn how to write. Twenty years before I wrote this, I managed to quit my day job and become a full-time professional writer and editor thanks to some great mentors, teachers, books, and years of diligent effort and practice. And I wrote this book to teach others some of what I’ve learned over the past thirty-plus years.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that writing cannot be taught. No one thinks you can’t learn basic composition, but academia in particular is bursting with ignorami who think creative writing cannot be taught. Which is another way of saying creative writing cannot be learned. Which is another way of saying you can’t learn creative writing. They say this because they haven’t learned it, and that’s why they can’t teach it. And it sounds better (to them) to say, Creative writing cannot be taught, than to say, I can’t teach creative writing.

The first time I heard someone who was supposed to be an expert say, Creative writing cannot be taught, I was a college student in his creative writing class. I squinted at him. Why were my tuition dollars paying his salary if he couldn’t teach me? Why would the university even allow such a person to teach a subject that he thought no one could teach? If my math professor stood in front of the class and told us he couldn’t teach math, even if he used the passive voice (Math cannot be taught rather than I can’t teach math), the university would have sent his ass packing.

My professor had no business standing in front of that classroom. I was a newbie, years away from being able to write professionally and still too young to legally drink in a bar, but I knew as an ironclad fact he was wrong because I’d already learned plenty about creative writing, some of it from books and some of it from—you guessed it—teachers.

His class was about short stories. It was advertised as a class about how to write short stories, but he believed creative writing cannot be taught, so he didn’t even give it the old college try.

All the students read everyone else’s work, and we discussed the stories in class. Each person had a minute or two to share their feedback with the author. Nearly everything everyone said was insipid.

I really like how Barney saw his reflection in the stovetop.

It’s so neat the way you describe that rainbow!

The white picket fence is a brilliant symbol of suburban alienation.

Not a single person ever said anything that would help someone learn to write professionally and publish their work in magazines or books. Everyone but the professor was still just a kid, but what was his excuse? His feedback was nearly as vapid as everyone else’s. I brooded in my seat, feeling ripped off. I wanted to earn a living as a writer, and to do that I needed to learn the craft, and he was not helping. I wanted and needed to know: How does plot work exactly? How do I structure a scene? How do I create three-dimensional characters instead of two-dimensional caricatures? How much setting is too much, and how much is too little?

I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. No one had ever told me the first thing about filter words, head-hopping, how to use action beats in lieu of dialogue tags, how to structure a flashback, how and when to use narrative summary, why info dumps will kill your story as effectively as getting shot in the face, or really anything else. Our professor could have taught us these things, but he didn’t know any more about them than I did.

At first, I wondered if he was holding back on us. Technically we were adults—old enough to vote and serve in the military even though beer was off limits—but in his eyes, we were still children. You can’t teach a four-year-old to calculate orbital mechanics, nor can you teach epic Greek poetry to a cat. Maybe he wanted to encourage our creativity by not smacking us down and telling us we had no idea what we were doing. Which is perhaps good advice if you’re teaching kindergartners. Maybe our esteemed professor was saving the good stuff for his graduate students and treating us like toddlers in a sandbox bereft of the capacity to comprehend the literary equivalent of quantum mechanics and string theory.

One day I offered some feedback about another student’s story. I don’t remember what I said after all these years, but I knew I was right. Not because I had it all figured out. I was just passing on some advice I’d read in a book about writing that an award-winning author had written, an accomplished professional who had forgotten more about professional writing than everyone in that room put together had ever learned. And my professor argued with me. He almost never argued with anyone. It was like a rule in that class: Everybody’s story was their precious little darling, and all feedback was equally valid. And yet the one time I offered to share something that I’d learned outside that classroom from an author who had mastered the craft was the one time my professor chose to deliver a smackdown.

That’s when it hit me, ton-of-bricks style: He had no idea what he was talking about.

I didn’t want to push back. At least not then and not on that day. I wasn’t a full-fledged adult yet, but I was old enough to know that kids who think they know everything are always wrong, that students who think they know more than their professors are likewise always wrong, and that students who think they know even one particular thing better than their professors are usually wrong. I’d only written ten or twenty short stories in my entire life, and I knew damn well that I didn’t know what I was doing even though I may have been right about a couple of things.

On a different day, halfway through the course that was ostensibly about how to write short stories, I asked him, in as pleasant a voice as I could manage, How many short stories have you written?

He smiled. I’m a poet. I’ve only ever written one short story, and I wrote it on a dare when I was in college.

The English department was not a complete farce. Thanks to my professors, I read a vast amount of literature spanning centuries that I never would have picked up on my own. I didn’t like all of it, but I learned something from most of it, and I learned a lot more under their guidance than I would have if I’d read those books in my spare time. But the university taught me nothing whatsoever about professional writing. The university did not even try.

I did, however, meet my first real writing teachers when I was a college student thanks to an extraordinary coincidence that astonishes me to this day.

With no professional skills and little free time, the best I could do to earn a living while I was in college was by working a couple of nights a week as a cashier at a convenience store for ten cents above minimum wage. There wasn’t always work to be done when customers weren’t in the store (you can only mop a floor so many times), so I brought books and magazines to help pass the time.

One day I brought the current issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I wasn’t one of those kids who only read science fiction, but I was often in the mood for something radically different from my regular diet of William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Emily Dickinson that the university fed me. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is a monthly publication that publishes some of the best short stories and novellas in those two genres by some of the best-known, award-winning writers. Kristine Kathryn Rusch was the editor at the time.

I was standing there reading it next to the cash register when a customer came in. I closed the magazine and set it aside so I could give him my full attention. Gotta strive for quality customer service.

He glanced down at what I was reading, and I’ll never forget what he said: The woman who edits that magazine is across the street.

What?

We were on an unremarkable street in Eugene, Oregon. Not downtown. Not next to the university campus. Not in some hip urban neighborhood. Nowhere near a bookstore. More than a mile from the city’s cultural center. We were on a suburban-style street lined with Burger Kings and Jiffy Lubes. Kristine Kathryn Rusch was across the street? Where? Why? This guy had to be joking.

She runs a writer’s workshop every Tuesday night at G Willickers.

My head must have snapped back. She lives here?

She does.

G Willikers Neighborhood Bar & Grill was a generic restaurant, one step up from a diner and one step down from an Applebee’s. It was locally owned, not a chain. Not a fancy or popular place. A perfectly average establishment.

"She’s there every Tuesday?" I said.

The writing workshop is every Tuesday at seven.

How can I apply to get in?

It’s free and open to the public. You a writer?

I slowly nodded, feeling a bit like a fraud. I wanted to be a writer. I wrote short stories and hoped to write novels once I got the hang of it, but I didn’t know what I was doing, and school wasn’t helping. So … I can just show up next Tuesday?

He nodded.

She’ll read my work?

Yes, but I have to warn you. She’s brutal. Scares the hell out of most people, and hardly anybody ever comes back.

I’d never met a professional writer and editor before. She’d really read my work and give me some feedback?

I showed up the following Tuesday, excited and nervous and feeling as sheepish and out of place as I’d ever felt in my life. There were around twenty-five people in the back room sitting around a rectangle of tables pushed together. Whenever somebody new showed up (hi!), everyone briefly introduced themselves, and that’s when I realized what I’d truly stumbled into by sheer dumb luck. Roughly half the people in that room were accomplished professional writers. There was Kristine Kathryn Rusch herself, of course, but also her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, publisher of Pulphouse magazine and the author of several books of his own. Mystery writer O’Neil DeNoux and the inimitable Ray Vukcevich were there along with quite a few others. I hadn’t heard of most of them, but they were working professional writers who had published novels and short stories, much farther down the path I wanted to travel than anyone at the university.

And then there was me, sitting there like a dumbass and utterly incapable of contributing anything to the room’s collective knowledge and experience. Impostor syndrome doesn’t quite say it. I felt like a recruit in army boot camp who’d blundered his way into a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I truly did not belong there. Letting me in had to be some kind of mistake.

But no. Half the people in that room were like me, wannabe writers who’d never published anything and had thousands of miles to go.

I did not bring one of my own stories that first day. It was important to get a feel for things first, to read the room, to know what to expect, to introduce myself to everybody, and to make sure it was really, truly okay if I brought something for them to read. The pros in that room could not have been more encouraging, and everyone had helpful advice about how to improve that week’s handful of stories and make them publishable in paying magazines. Even if flawed, all the stories were vastly superior to the dreck I had to slog through in my creative writing classes at school that may as well have been written in crayon. Nobody said anything brutal or rude or belittling. The workshop scared most new writers away? Really?

I felt good about things. This was exactly what I’d been looking for at the university, and I’d finally found it. Strange that it happened to be at a generic restaurant on a four-lane suburban strip instead of in a classroom, but whatever.

I went home and wrote a short story to submit the following Tuesday. I thought it was brilliant, the best thing I’d ever written. It was original, or so I believed, and it was funny, though not, as it turned out, for the reasons I thought it was.

Roughly two dozen people read it, half of them professional writers and editors. And they hated it. They eviscerated it. They stuck hand grenades down its gullet and blew its guts to smithereens. The restaurant’s staff had to come in and hose blood off the walls when it was over.

I did everything wrong. Dean and Kris both said, as magazine editors, that they would have rejected that story before reading to the end of the first paragraph, never mind the first page. And they told me why. They took apart my literary atrocity one sentence and even word at a time before finally giving up halfway down the opening page.

I wrote furiously in my notebook, making a list of crimes against writing that I would never again commit as long as I breathed. My body surged with adrenaline. I’d just learned more about how to write professionally in thirty humiliating minutes than the university had taught me in years.

When I got home, I felt like I was floating an inch off the floor. My roommates asked me how the workshop went. Everyone hated my story, I said, "and it was awesome."

My younger brother, Scott, also wanted to learn how to write, and I told him he should come with me next time. I also told another wannabe writer friend of mine from the university, Scott William Carter, that the workshop was way better than our Mickey Mouse writing classes at school.

The following Tuesday, and every Tuesday after that for the next couple of years, the two Scotts and I showed up, sometimes with stories, and let the pros pummel us. Every week we learned more than we had in all our university classes combined, but I still signed up for creative writing classes at school, hoping that one or two of them might be worth it. I didn’t learn much in those classes, but they allowed me to carve out some writing time in my school schedule, and I learned a critical lesson from my interactions with other students. When I told them about the workshop off campus, how I was learning a mind-blowing amount every week and that they were welcome to join me, I was stunned by the responses.

Whoa, man, I don’t know.

"There are no rules in creative writing."

I’m just taking these classes for fun.

Who are these people? Why aren’t they professors if they know so much?

A great gulf opened up between me and my fellow students in the English department. Some of them fancied themselves writers, but they were afraid to leave the comfort zone of the classroom, where everybody’s writing was precious. They did not want to hear why a magazine editor would reject their story after reading only one sentence. They thought it would crush them, but they failed to understand that they could learn—in just two or three minutes—how to write an opening sentence that won’t throw an editor out of their story. (I’ll teach you how in Chapter 1 of this book.)

The failure rate for wannabe writers is around 99 percent. I know that now, and I knew it then, too. I suppose it required a certain amount of arrogance on my part to think I had a chance at ever belonging to the elite 1 percent, but my fellow university students inadvertently taught me something: The overwhelming majority of young wannabe writers are resistant to learning. They’ve internalized the notion that creative writing cannot be taught and that rules have no place. They’d never make it because they were not even trying. The very fact that I was trying gave me a superpower that would at least launch me toward that 1 percent even if I never got all the way there. The odds of success didn’t look so daunting any longer. I didn’t need arrogance to fuel me. I just needed grit.

I had other advantages too. The professionals at that workshop were helping me out. Half the people in that room were successful. Not 1 percent but 50 percent. And the successful half weren’t competitors. They were holding out their hands and pulling the rest of us up.

And here’s the thing: Most of the people in that workshop who hadn’t yet published professionally were young like me. They weren’t successful yet because they hadn’t put in enough time and effort. And every single professional in that room started out as an amateur too. They weren’t born professionals. They weren’t born with some magical gift denied to the rest of us mortals. They were professionals because they worked it, because they put in long hours of diligent study and practice, always learning, always striving to improve themselves. They studied the craft of writing the way woodworkers studied the craft of carpentry. They made it abundantly clear to me that if I put in the same amount of effort, I had a real shot at attaining some measure of success. I wouldn’t necessarily become a best-selling author with movie deals and millions of dollars in the bank, but I could probably publish something if I kept at it long enough, continued to learn and improve, and refused to quit.

People who showed up at that workshop, put in the work, learned everything they could, and refused to quit had an excellent chance—much greater than 1 percent—of becoming a professional. I knew it was true because I watched them do it. And I knew that nearly all the fellow writers I’d met at school, with the sole exception of Scott William Carter, weren’t interested in actually learning how to write if it meant an editor would mark up their precious with a red pen and tell them they were doing it wrong.

After a year or so, Kris and Dean invited me and the two Scotts to their house for an in-depth writing lesson that they couldn’t provide in the workshop. Dean asked us to submit stories to him in advance, and when we arrived at the house, he had already read and edited them with a red pen.

I gasped when I looked at my manuscript. There was as much red ink from Dean’s pen as there was black ink from my printer. He’d edited my manuscript in brutal, crushing detail, slashing out entire sentences, rearranging others, nuking extra words that didn’t belong, and flagging areas where crucial information was missing. He walked me through my story one word at a time and told me exactly why he made every edit, doing for me what I do for my clients today who hire me as a line editor.

I finally understood, in a truly tactile, hands-on way, how to string sentences together in a professional manner. I didn’t absorb everything all at once. Honestly, I felt overwhelmed. But I kept that marked-up manuscript for years and referred to it over and over again to remind myself of all the amateurish mistakes that lead to instantaneous rejection slips from professional magazines. It wasn’t so much a lesson in how to write as it was in how not to write.

That was in 1994. Ten years later, I quit my day job and worked as a full-time essayist, journalist, and travel writer. Nine years after that, I published my first novel, followed quickly by three more—one of which was optioned for film—and established myself as a professional book editor of both fiction and narrative nonfiction.

Some of the authors I work with only