Editing a Novel: Not Just About Copy-edits

When I started editing my first novel, I felt like an astronaut in free fall. Yes, my novel had problems. Some of them big, some of them small, but mostly workable. The problem was, approaching it with a list of fix-its wasn't always helpful, and was, at times, a back-fire, because it meant I only approached edits with my critical, logical mind rather than letting my writer's brain have a say.

Part of the reason it's so hard to convey how to edit a story is because 1) we all have our own process and 2) I don't think people care to put down the emotional aspect of how to look at a story. So when I found this article by David Farland about your character's feelings and how your book portrays them, I was thrilled.

It's another good way of looking at edits. Here's a small quote from it:

Ultimately, with every pass, every rewrite, you need to ask yourself, “Is this the right choice of words, images, and scenes to make the reader feel what I want? Have I selected the right details?”

"The Rules" of Writing - Lee Child's Advice

I read a really great article today which got me to thinking. In this article, Lee Child dispenses healthy, common sense advice about a publishing career.

Although I liked how he pointed out how to be a gracious professional, what stood out to me was his dismissal about the 'writing rules'. How many times have I, or my critiquers, used "show, don't tell" to explain something? Were we 'right', or were we trampling on the writer's story? Now it has me wondering.

And the bottom line:
“It’s a long game. It will look bad on plenty of days, but hang in there, keep showing up and see where you are in 10 years.”


This is something I've been meditating on for the past few weeks. There are so many writers I see lathering at the bit to make their stuff go-go-go in the fastest way possible - always reading a how-to book or needing a critique partner to evaluate their work. And yet, as this shows, sometimes that can backfire in the writing process.


I'm not saying either of these are useless, but they're tools which must be used with care. Care and a deeper understanding of how you as a writer write.

New from the Super Secret Writer's Workshop

**Begin Transmission**

-crackle- Things have been busy and I've just managed to escape. My apologies for the delayed response, but I can only give eyewitness accounts. Handouts will commence as soon as I find access to a scanner.



Monday, June 15th

The first day of our writing institute. I can’t really call it a conference; workshop is a better term. The keynote speaker, John Dalton, was fabulous. I don’t usually have a need for an inspirational speech from a writer; I figure I make my own inspiration whenever I sit my butt in the seat. His website has a wonderful story that, if you're feeling a bit down about getting the novel done, is a great read. However, having started my new position in OT has made things a little hectic as I figure out my job. I’ve been so tired for the past three weeks that my usual work ethic has gone down the tubes. This is my chance to recharge and think.

John Dalton's Contrary Writer's Rules, as mentioned in his keynote speech:

1) It takes time to develop your work.
2) You can learn a lot from workshops, but you have to learn the most important ideas on your own.
3) Books are often boring.
4) The best writers are all nerds.
5) There's cause for hope.

In class we focused on the writing industry and making writing a career as a whole. We talked about how non-fiction is a great way to break into the writing field and establish contacts while making cash. It also teaches a writer about marketing, focus groups, and forces a writer to learn how to research.

Important distinction:
*Non-fiction talks about fact.
*Fiction uses lies to tell the truth.

I enjoyed the reinforcement about research, as it’s hard to remember that you can only fake so much in fiction. Don't be afraid to talk to experts in a field to get an accurate account of how things are done in the field. Right now, as I started rereading my police procedural book, I’m trying to figure out how much I can “bend” without outright breaking rules in my novel.

I love research. :o) -crackle-

**End Transmission**

Writing Advice is Hazardous to Your Health

/dusts off her small box and climbs on top

Ahem. This rant, writers of non-repute, is for you and your incessant received writing advice.

There is a thing called too much advice. If you're on your first draft, if you haven't taken the weed whacker to the selection, or had a chance to finish the arc to see where it goes... how can you get advice that's truly valuable? Good advice about a story is precious, and requiring someone to validate your writing every chapter won't help you accomplish anything except angst, and we writers have enough of that.

I know how you feel when you have a WiP. The excitement and madness of writing down your heart's thoughts and your head's emotions. The thrill of racing along with your protagonist as you're swept into their story is beyond compare. And who can blame you? For you, the story is crystal clear.

You've written your first chapter, or perhaps the entire novel, and that little voice, the who's so proud of your work and yet desires some advice speaks up. It tells you to get out there and get people engaged in your piece. Perhaps a Hooked contest over at Authoress's blog, or a writing forum; maybe even the coveted writing group.

To see if you're you're headed in the right direction, of course.

I mean, it was written for you and others to enjoy, right? A little advice and some compliments in one go - how bad could it be?

Let me give you an example from a fellow writer I know. She's a good writer, is free with her writing advice and time for others, and has a wonderful WiP that's shaping up nicely. My friend recently relayed an incident to me where she asked for people in this writing blog group she's in to give her critiques on her WiP. She got 18 people giving feedback on the entire thing.

18 - gosh, she must feel incredible, right? So many people came and gave advice on her piece! And as it turned out, she had several people remark on the same thing, and did find something useful.

The problem, however, was that verbal flood overwhelmed her. While some of the advice was good, just as much of it wasn't. There were people who didn't know how to act like professionals, and there were so many specifics that by the end she felt like she had to please everyone. It became frustrating and depressing to read - knowing when to not listen to unprofessional people still doesn't stop you from feeling down about it.

I know many people say the advice helps them to improve their writing, and I'm not saying advice should never be sought - it should only be sought after you've put it through the wringer and your writing is ready to be viewed by the public for final tweaking. Stephen King calls those people Ideal Readers; an apt phrase.

The thing is, until you've had a chance to sit and sweat over your writing a few times, any adivce you get will be moot, as you'll end up changing the whole darn thing anyways.

Another example: a second friend of mine recently had the first part of her chapter 1 put up for critiques on a board. The dozen or so comments that followed were about as useful as an umbrella with a hole in it. Vague comments about how they didn't like or liked it, with only one person pointing out any specifics was a total wash from her. She knew her first chapter needed some work, but all she found out was that it didn't work for most people. Oh, and the place two people wanted her to start at was trite and overdone for her genre.

If you take the time to sit with your story and look it over, you can figure out yourself the extensive rewrites you'll need to get the much-valued second chapter. All the advice in the world may or may not give you ideas and help, but it'll be their ideas, not yours. Your piece is your creation for so long before people start putting their mark on it - go through it at least twice on your own before delving to the outside realms.

You yourself, and the fact that you stuck your butt in the seat every day to finish the 60k-200k monstrosity is validation. Every day you go back and chip away at the boulder of a bad scene, or use your plot hole shovel, or wield those slice and dice knives - that is validation.

If you need permission to brag, you have it. Less than half of the people who say they'll write a novel end up starting it, let alone finishing a first draft.

When that voice starts speaking up, smack it with a stick. I'm serious. Advice is always a two-edged sword, and putting a piece out somewhere that's not ready to go will give you bad jujus.

Patience, young padawan. You'll know when the time is right to pass out those copies for others to read. Find those ideal readers, the ones whose advice you can trust won't steer you off into stereotypes or change your writing style.

Your writing and you - the best duo in the world. Keep it that way.

Discussion on Hook and the First Paragraph

I found a link to a nifty PDF that everyone should read. It's by Nat Sobel, and it discusses the first paragraph in your book and why it's so important to hook a reader from the start. Fascinating, and worth the quick read.

Nat Sobel on A Literary Agent that Reads Reviews.

Advice from "The King"

And don't you forget it, published author wannabe's!

This week was a long week. I struggled with word count completion for my novel every day, but I pulled through it, and I think my novel is better and stronger for it. The thing I hate about long writing projects is the further you go on, the more you can get bogged down in the worries and what-ifs. I'm doing my best not to hit the plateau of discouragement by proxy, and so far I'm doing pretty well, but I almost had a moment this week.

When you're writing, you have this whole world in your hands, with people that move around like chesspieces on the board you've crafted. Sometimes you direct the movements, but other times your characters can take you down a completely different path than you're expecting. And when you're engrossed in the world, you can write and write and everything will come out just fine, but once you're out of that world and if you start thinking about all of the outside influences that you will have to inevitably work with to get published-- i.e., the marketing to agents and publishers, the editing and polishing, the scrutiny by others -- it can feel pretty harrowing.

I write mostly in the fantasy genre, with some other elements thrown in, and one of the hardships of genre writing is there are some things you must satisfy in order to get your book published. And I really need to stop being so hard on myself about it, because I'm nowhere near the point where I even have to worry about that. I'm in the first draft, so why am I worried about what to change for an editor? It's no wonder that out of the number of people who say they're going to write, so few actually make it to the step of publication. The steps inbetween are huge, a big commitment for very little money, and they can be brain busters.

So, for myself and the other writers/readers who read my blog, I thought I'd post Heinlein's rules for writing success as explained by Robert Sawyer, a popular sci-fi writer. Here is the direct link, with the text posted below:

"ON WRITING"

by Robert J. Sawyer

Heinlein's Rules

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Copyright © 1996 by Robert J. Sawyer. All rights reserved.

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There are countless rules for writing success, but the most famous ones, at least in the speculative-fiction field, are the five coined by the late, great Robert A. Heinlein.

Heinlein used to say he had no qualms about giving away these rules, even though they explained how you could become his direct competitor, because he knew that almost no one would follow their advice.

In my experience, that's true: if you start off with a hundred people who say they want to be writers, you lose half of the remaining total after each rule — fully half the people who hear each rule will fail to follow it.

I'm going to share Heinlein's five rules with you, plus add a sixth of my own.

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Rule One: You Must Write

It sounds ridiculously obvious, doesn't it? But it is a very difficult rule to apply. You can't just talk about wanting to be a writer. You can't simply take courses, or read up on the process of writing, or daydream about someday getting around to it. The only way to become a writer is to plant yourself in front of your keyboard and go to work.

And don't you dare complain that you don't have the time to write. Real writers buy the time, if they can't get it any other way. Take Toronto's Terence M. Green, a high-school English teacher. His third novel, Shadow of Ashland, just came out from Tor. Terry takes every fifth year off from teaching without pay so that he can write; most writers I know have made similar sacrifices for their art.

(Out of our hundred original aspirant writers, half will never get around to writing anything. That leaves us with fifty . . .)

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Rule Two: Finish What Your Start

You cannot learn how to write without seeing a piece through to its conclusion. Yes, the first few pages you churn out might be weak, and you may be tempted to toss them out. Don't. Press on until you're done. Once you have an overall draft, with a beginning, middle, and end, you'll be surprised at how easy it is to see what works and what doesn't. And you'll never master such things as plot, suspense, or character growth unless you actually construct an entire piece.

On a related point: if you belong to a writers' workshop, don't let people critique your novel a chapter at a time. No one can properly judge a book by a piece lifted out of it at random, and you'll end up with all sorts of pointless advice: "This part seems irrelevant." "Well, no, actually, it's very important a hundred pages from now . . ."

(Of our fifty remaining potential writers, half will never finish anything — leaving just twenty-five still in the running . . .)

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Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order

This is the one that got Heinlein in trouble with creative-writing teachers. Perhaps a more appropriate wording would have been, "Don't tinker endlessly with your story." You can spend forever modifying, revising, and polishing. There's an old saying that stories are never finished, only abandoned — learn to abandon yours.

If you find your current revisions amount to restoring the work to the way it was at an earlier stage, then it's time to push the baby out of the nest.

And although many beginners don't believe it, Heinlein is right: if your story is close to publishable, editors will tell you what you have to do to make it salable. Some small-press magazines do this at length, but you'll also get advice from Analog, Asimov's, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

(Of our remaining twenty-five writers, twelve will fiddle endlessly, and so are now out of the game. Twelve more will finally declare a piece complete. The twenty-fifth writer, the one who got chopped in half, is now desperately looking for his legs . . .)

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Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market

This is the hardest rule of all for beginners. You can't simply declare yourself to be a professional writer. Rather, it's a title that must be conferred upon you by those willing to pay money for your words. Until you actually show your work to an editor, you can live the fantasy that you're every bit as good as Guy Gavriel Kay or William Gibson. But having to see if that fantasy has any grounding in reality is a very hard thing for most people to do.

I know one Canadian aspirant writer who managed to delay for two years sending out his story because, he said, he didn't have any American stamps for the self-addressed stamped envelope. This, despite the fact that he'd known dozens of people who went regularly to the States and could have gotten stamps for him, despite the fact that he could have driven across the border himself and picked up stamps, despite the fact that you don't even really need US stamps — you can use International Postal Reply Coupons instead, available at any large post office. [And those in Toronto can buy actual U.S. stamps at the First Toronto Post Office at 260 Adelaide Street South.]

No, it wasn't stamps he was lacking — it was backbone. He was afraid to find out whether his prose was salable. Don't be a coward: send your story out.

(Of our twelve writers left, half of them won't work up the nerve to make a submission, leaving just six . . .)

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Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold

It's a fact: work gets rejected all the time. Almost certainly your first submission will be rejected. Don't let that stop you. I've currently got 142 rejection slips in my files; every professional writer I know has stacks of them (the prolific Canadian horror writer Edo van Belkom does a great talk at SF conventions called "Thriving on Rejection" in which he reads samples from the many he's acquired over the years).

If the rejection note contains advice you think is good, revise the story and send it out again. If not, then simply turn the story around: pop it in the mail, sending it to another market. Keep at it. My own record for the maximum number of submissions before selling a story is eighteen — but the story did eventually find a good home. (And within days, I'd sold it again to a reprint-only anthology; getting a story in print the first time opens up whole new markets.)

If your story is rejected, send it out that very same day to another market.

(Still, of our six remaining writers, three will be so discouraged by that first rejection that they'll give up writing for good. But three more will keep at it . . .)

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Rule Six: Start Working on Something Else

That's my own rule. I've seen too many beginning writers labour for years over a single story or novel. As soon as you've finished one piece, start on another. Don't wait for the first story to come back from the editor you've submitted it to; get to work on your next project. (And if you find you're experiencing writer's block on your current project, begin writing something new — a real writer can always write something.) You must produce a body of work to count yourself as a real working pro.

Of our original hundred wannabe writers, only one or two will follow all six rules. The question is: will you be one of them? I hope so, because if you have at least a modicum of talent and if you live by these six rules, you will make it.

30,000/90,000 completed