Editing Tips: Telling Your Story Your Way

by Libby Sternberg

Before putting on the Editor-in-Chief hat at Istoria Books, I edited books for a couple other publishers. I still edit for one of them on a freelance basis.

My editing experiences run the gamut from full-blown line editing, where I make substantive suggestions for changes, to copy editing, where I correct grammar, check facts, and straighten out continuity problems and the like.

Here are some random observations on how to edit your own manuscripts in order to ensure your readers "get" your story, told your way. These suggestions include both the substantial and what might seem like the picayune (and, yes, I, as a writer, have made some of the mistakes mentioned myself):

1. Heed the red lines: When I first typed the line above, I misspelled "picayune." Blogger was helpful enough to underline my mistake in red, alerting me to my error. Most, if not all, word processing programs do the same. Don't ignore these--fix them. You don't need to fix them during your first pass when you're on fire with the passion of creating something wonderful. But surely you can and should correct these mistakes during revision. Often, you'll find these red lines showing under compound words that aren't really compounds -- "voicemail," for example, is not one word, and the little red line tells me so. Why is this important: a few misspellings here or there aren't going to sink your chances of having your manuscript acquired if you've written a gangbusters story. But once your precious work is in the hands of editors, you want them to catch the important stuff--maybe when you said Sally's eyes were blue on page 5 and green on page 75, or maybe where you inadvertently put eight days in a week or forgot that your protagonist's mother is deceased so she can't make an appearance late in the story. The point is, the more you ask an editor to fix, the more chance there is that the editor will miss something important while catching all the little problems. Sure, it's the editor's job to capture all those mistakes, but do you really want to take a chance on having something important slip by because you've left so much to tidy up?

2. Keep track of time, characters and family relationships: This rule is important for the same reason as the one above. The more you ask an editor to fix, the more chance there is she'll miss something else important...or the more chance there is she'll change something in a way you don't like. Sure, you'll probably have an opportunity to okay the editor's changes, but why set yourself up for the back-and-forth with editors that might create tension as well as more mistakes (the more keystrokes, the more possibility for error)? When you are in the revision stage, keep a notepad handy and jot down things such as how many days you account for in the book, whenever you mention a specific day ("on Saturday, he would go into town..."), and character descriptions as well as the preferred spelling of their names (unless you want the editor to choose among several different spellings you use). It's far better for you, the author, to fix these things the way you want them fixed, rather than having an unknown editor suggest changes when deadline pressures allow for little flexibility.

3. Don't clutter the manuscript with names your readers don't need to know: Unless you have a compelling reason to do so, you shouldn't find it necessary to name all characters in your book if they don't play a pivotal role in the plot. So, for example, if your heroine goes for a haircut, you don't need to tell us her hairdresser's name is Sue unless she has a conversation with Sue, (all those "the hairdresser said" lines would get tiresome) or unless Sue is going to show up in some way later. When you name characters, readers subconsciously try to remember them, not knowing if they'll be crucial to the story later on. When you clutter the manuscript with unnecessary names, you clutter the reader's mind with unnecessary information. Keep them focused on the story and the characters you want them to care about.

4. Similarly, don't throw in a bunch of back-story about secondary characters unless it's critical to something in your story: Does your reader really need to know that Sue, the hairdresser, is married to Al, who owns a shop on Main Street that sells custom-built cabinetry? Not unless this info relates to the plot or the tone in some critical way. Sure, it's good for you to know secondary characters' back-stories if you're writing dialogue for them or having them interact with your protagonist. It keeps them real in your own mind, and you're more likely to write them as real people and not caricatures. But your reader doesn't need to know all that information.

5. Avoid the info dump: If you're writing a historical, you might get excited about all the interesting factoids you're coming across concerning the time period and characters you're dealing with. It's a great temptation to write long paragraphs that begin something like this: "In the year blah-blah..." -- sharing those fascinating facts with readers but not in a way that advances the story. It's okay to sprinkle these facts throughout the book, but be careful not to slip into a nonfiction approach to writing fiction.

6. In historicals, be careful of your language: Not every word we use today was in the lexicon back in the day. You might be surprised, in fact, at how many words and terms we use regularly today simply weren't around or in common usage even 80 years ago. There was a wonderful scene in the BBC television series Downton Abbey, set in 1914, when the Dowager Countess mentions a character saying something about his "weekend." Weekend, she commented, what on earth is that? For members of her class at that time, it was a foreign concept. If in doubt, look it up. You don't need to be a purist--after all, you're writing fiction, you will be using contemporary spellings of words, and you are setting up an artifice where characters might express themselves in contemporary terms so today's readers understand and sympathize more easily--but some words jump out at the reader as anachronistic.

7. Do you really need that accent? Having a French character continually use "Z's" for the "th" sounds is not only tiresome, it's a bit lazy. It means you've not tried any other way to communicate the different tone of that particular person. I once edited a book where the author included a Central American woman whose "voice" was vividly conveyed. Every time she "spoke," I could hear her gentle accent. Yet not once did the author use a wrong spelling to convey her accented pronunciation. He did it with sentence structure and word choice. Someone for whom English is a second language might use more formal words--for example, automobile for car, occasionally. If you can convey an accent with these techniques, it keeps the manuscript cleaner and more readable.

8. If you put a gun on the mantel in Act I, someone has to fire it by the end of the story: I'm paraphrasing the great Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. What he means with this advice is that if you include something or someone that is capable of having a dramatic impact on the story, your readers will keep waiting for that impact to occur. They'll keep one eye on that gun on the mantel, in other words, throughout the story. So, for example, if a secondary character appears whose ex-husband is about to be released from jail after serving time for domestic abuse, the reader will reasonably expect that sinister character will have an impact at some point. If you're not going to use that big "gun," don't include it unless you want readers distracted throughout their read as they wait for the "big bang" that never comes. They might even feel cheated if they don't hear it.

Okay, those are my "rules" in a field where there really are no rules. But these are suggestions that might help your story have the impact you're hoping it will have, without readers distracted by small mistakes or big disappointments and without editors changing things in ways you don't like.
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Justin Morrill, Land Grant Colleges, and, Oh Yes, Writing: A Rant

Justin Morrill

by Libby Sternberg

When I lived in Vermont, I provided occasional commentary for Vermont Public Radio. As part of that gig, I ended up delivering a three-minute piece on Justin Morrill during a series about Vermont contributions to the country and the world.

Morrill was a Vermont Representative and Senator who introduced legislation in the mid-1800s establishing and funding colleges that combined "liberal and practical" education. "Land grant" colleges wouldn't just be devoted to studying theory. They'd combine classic liberal education with practical instruction in agriculture and "the mechanic arts."

Today, all states have institutions that originated as land-grant colleges. They range from Rutgers in New Jersey to the University of California and include anything with an "A&M" after the name. Most are public, but two elite private institutions got their starts as recipients of land-grants -- Cornell and MIT.

Okay, what does this have to do with writing? I'm getting there.

Morrill might not have realized it, but he was starting a quiet revolution with his land-grant idea. Land grant colleges eventually became the model for virtually all American colleges and universities, combining practical with theoretical, shaking off a stuffy, elitist approach to higher learning and opening it up to people who wanted to do as well as think. What a quintessential American idea!

This doing-and-thinking approach plays out across the curriculum of most colleges, with students availing themselves of highly practical majors--everything from hotel management to engineering--while still studying the humanities. Even majors that might not be considered practical (well, to parents, at least) often include some useful component -- internships and research projects that push students to think about how to use their humanities background to earn a living.

And then there's writing...

You knew I'd get to it eventually.

I wasn't an English or writing major myself. No, I studied the highly practical field of voice performance at a music conservatory. But I've had numerous occasions to encounter writing students and programs over the past several years. And here's what my window on that world has led me to believe:

While the history professor might be helping her students learn history and learn how to apply that knowledge to future aspirations (whether they lead to becoming a historian or a lawyer), writing programs--their fiction components, at least--seem to focus almost entirely on what I will call Academic Fiction. That is, prose and poetry that is celebrated, talked about, discussed and enjoyed almost exclusively by other academics.

That's fine. There's a place for that. Huzzah for those who are successful in that field!

Literary fiction that is also commercial

But there's a world of fiction beyond the edge of the campus, and most of it is found in bookstores and on e-shelves. It's called commercial fiction. Yes, it can include literary fiction. But it also includes genre fiction--romance, mystery, sci-fi, horror, young adult, historical.

I've come across outright disdain for some of these genres among some academics. (Uh, like the professor who sneered that writing historicals was cheating because the sepia tones that permeate the work make it too easy to....well, whatever. I don't even remember the rest of it.)

But generally, there's a sort of cluelessness about commercial fiction. How many college writing workshops and series don't feature a single commercial artist?

Let me pause here to celebrate two local colleges where writing profs did see the value of introducing their students to commercial fiction. Millersville University and Elizabethtown College professors both invited yours truly to talk to writing students on their campuses, and I wasn't talking about Academic Fiction.

Those two colleges and their writing professors, sadly, are often the exception and not the rule.

So, while today's music major might graduate with an understanding of music theory and some practical knowledge of the music world--how to audition, what the market is, how to get gigs--many writing/literature students graduate appreciating and admiring Academic Fiction but with no clue as to how to get an agent, what a book contract should look like, what editors in New York are looking for, what small presses are respected and which ones don't show up on anyone's radar screen, how to get reviewed, how to promote your books (which, yes, often falls to the author).

It bugs me that commercial fiction has somehow been excluded from the gated community we know as the Ivory Tower. As I've pointed out on these pages before, it bugs people like Stephen King, too, who said (it bears repeating) in his acceptance of the National Book Award:

"I have (no) patience with or use for those who make a point of pride in saying they've never read anything by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark or any other popular writer.

"What do you think? You get social or academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture? Never in life, as Capt. Lucky Jack Aubrey would say. And if your only point of reference for Jack Aubrey is the Australian actor, Russell Crowe, shame on you..."

As I said before, bravo to those who succeed in the world of Academic Fiction. But even if that's the world of letters that lights the fire in the belly of writing instructors, they shouldn't cut their students off from the rest of the writing world. Those students might not be interested in feeding their writer's soul by penning tomes they read aloud to college students as part of a writing series. They might be more interested in making enough money at writing to literally feed themselves and their families. They might want to take the theoretical and combine it with the practical, just as Senator Morrill envisioned with his land-grant college idea a century and a half ago.

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Libby Sternberg is an Edgar-nominated author of a bunch of books ranging from young adult to historical to humorous women's fiction. She also writes under the name Libby Malin. She is Editor-in-Chief of Istoria Books.

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The Truth Within the Lie

by Libby Sternberg

Earlier this week, I mentioned Stephen King's acceptance speech when the National Book Foundation presented him with the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters award in 2003. He talked a lot about genre fiction vs. literary fiction in that speech, passionately arguing for taking popular, or "commercial," fiction seriously.

Here are some more ruminations about his talk. In particular, about his desire to be an "honest writer."

King said:

"Frank Norris, the author of McTeague, said something like this: 'What should I care if they, i.e., the critics, single me out for sneers and laughter? I never truckled, I never lied. I told the truth.' And that's always been the bottom line for me. The story and the people in it may be make believe but I need to ask myself over and over if I've told the truth about the way real people would behave in a similar situation....

"To ignore the truth inside the lie is to sin against the craft, in general, and one's own work in particular. "

The truth within the lie--that sums up what good fiction should be. Fiction is a writer's exploration of what truth is--how real people react, what those reactions say about them and about humanity, how they deal with boredom, fun, giddy happiness or Job-like grief.

And transcendent writing--the kind of writing that transports the reader to a deeper understanding of the world and themselves--is at the heart of that "truth within the lie."

Last week, Hannah talked about the importance of including fiction along with nonfiction in one's reading diet. Nonfiction purports to lay out the truth through reporting facts. Fiction lays out the truth through canny observation and character analysis.

I myself love nonfiction. Oddly enough, I often reach for nonfiction, rather than fiction, when I'm tired. Maybe because fiction actually challenges me more--to think and to feel. When I remember all the books I've read, novels stand out as those that have influenced me the most. Novels prod me to see myself and others in different ways.

What novels have influenced you and how?

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Okay...Not This

by Libby Sternberg

One of my favorite YouTube videos, this captures so comically the sometimes confusing signals writers get from editors and agents. As an author myself, I once had an agent who, after taking on my mystery which she claimed to love, suggested that I might want to consider...changing who the murderer was.

Changing the murderer in a murder mystery is writing an entirely new book.

At Istoria Books, we won't tell you, authors, "Okay...not this...." if we take on your book....