Write

This post, by Cheri Lasota, originally appeared on her site on 7/15/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with her permission.

I was about to email this information to one of my editing clients (yes, I edit fiction as well), but realized many writers out there could benefit from these tips. I’ve worked with dozens upon dozens of writers through the years, and I walk each of them through the best way to go about incorporating my comments and edits into their manuscripts ( MS). It can be overwhelming and sometimes even devastating for a writer to receive a manuscript back that looks like the editor dumped a can of red paint on it. I know. I’ve been on the receiving end for my own novel, Artemis Rising.

Here are the steps, in order, of how to go about receiving and revising your manuscript edit from an agent, editor, critique group, or kind friend with time on his or her hands.

Give yourself some peace and quiet.

Carve out a quiet block of time—several hours’ worth—to read through your MS. Try to clear your mind of distractions, upcoming appointments, the fight you had with your significant other. If you don’t have time to browse through slowly, then hold off until you do. The reason? If you’re rushed, you won’t be able to take anything in or think critically about it. The more you can retain in this first pass-​​through the better. In fact, it’s imperative. I’ve initially zoomed through edits from critique groups and failed to catch important points and suggestions. And worse, I’ve misread comments as snarky or unkind, when in truth, they were just specific and honest. When I cooled off and read back through, I would have to adjust my incorrect assumptions, which wasted my time and energy. In general, a critiquer or editor’s goal is to aid you in achieving your dream of publication. They wish to make your manuscript better, albeit through their own subjective viewpoint. But we’re all human, and sometimes editors/​critiquers aren’t as tactful as we could be. This is something, the writer must anticipate and eventually overlook. Why? Because you might miss the valuable advice buried under the snarkiness.

Don’t scan or skip.

Don’t skip ahead and scan through a document looking for how much the editor’s pen has bled onto the page. This is a self-​​defeating exercise from the beginning. Why? Because many of those comments might be praise. I often litter manuscripts with praise and encouragement. I do this because I know how important it is for writers to know when they are hitting the mark on their language, characterization, or plot.

Sit on the manuscript.

Yes, you heard me. Sit on your MS, like a chicken incubating an egg. That’s quite literally—okay, metaphorically—what you are doing. Incubating, concocting, inventing, spawning . . . That last one sounds wrong, doesn’t it? Anyhoo, let that sucker fester for a LONG time. I mean it. Don’t touch it after you’ve read all the edits and comments. I recommend two weeks at least. Perhaps a month. Here’s why: a writer’s natural response to criticism—either positive or negative—is to be defensive. That doesn’t make the writer childish or foolish. It is just a natural response, and waiting to dive into revisions cools off that natural tendency. If you wait for a long time before jumping in, you’ll be shocked at how different your response is to the edits than the first time around. I’m always surprised at the difference, and I’ve been at this for years.

Mull over your options.

During your "vacation" from the MS, start thinking about some of the major issues the editor mentioned. Allow yourself to come up with ideas for how to fix that character’s inconsistent personality or that plot hole in chapter nine. Maybe write some notes down to remember for later or freewrite possible avenues to explore. But again, don’t touch the MS. You’ll thank yourself later, when you’ve had time to let your anger or confusion cool and you begin to see the edits for the first time with clear, objective eyes.

Make a copy.

Whether you’re working with hard copy or electronic edits, you’ll want to start revising in a COPY of the manuscript the editor worked on. You want to preserve those original comments/​edits for future reference as well as keep your original draft intact in case you need to go back to it for any reason. So copy and rename that master file with the current day’s date. And every day you work on your edits, save the previous day’s draft, and start a new file with the current days’ date. This way, you’ll have a log of all edits you’ve ever done and when. Works brilliantly. I learned that trick from the president of a publishing house actually. And don’t worry about drafts filling up your hard drive. Your manuscript file is probably not even a megabyte, which is nothing compared to one music or photo file. Oh, yes . . . one more thing: BACK UP YOUR NOVEL FILES frequently. All of them. Most of us have lost drafts to laziness, stupidity, or busyness. Learn from those previous mistakes. Back up, even if you are just emailing the file to yourself. ‘Nuff said.

Turn your Track Changes ON!

After your "vacation," give yourself a long block of time to begin looking at your MS. Have a notepad by your computer or an open blank document up to write notes. Critical at this stage: turn your Track Changes on (in Microsoft Word). Yes, you heard me right. Any changes you make need to be tracked from here on out. Why? Because you are more likely to introduce errors into your manuscript at this stage than at any other. Yup. This is because despite your best efforts, you’ll start rushing through accepting edits, and you won’t pay attention to the fact that an extra space just slipped into that sentence or the first letter wasn’t capitalized, etc. This happens ALL the time. Trust me. I know.

Choose your direction.

This depends on the type of edit/​critique you’ve received, but usually you can separate your edit into the "easy stuff" and the "hard stuff." The easy stuff is straight copyediting issues: grammar, punctuation, etc. These are relatively quick fixes. I have to say that I heartily recommend this route. It will:

• ease you into the revision process.
• eliminate a lot of the editing marks that are riddling your document.
• ensure that most of your grammatical problems are fixed before you press on to more difficult edits.

Conversely, you could go straight to the more time-​​consuming developmental or substantive edits. Bear in mind that this will save you some time if you end up cutting a lot of scenes from your manuscript. But again, I don’t recommend this route for the reasons I listed above.

Don’t just make changes. Learn!

If you’ve hired a professional editor to work on your manuscript, you’ve invested in that editor’s expertise and knowledge. To get the most from your investment, don’t just go through and blindly make changes. Understand why the editor has made these edits and suggestions. If you notice an editor has repeatedly added in paragraph breaks around blocks of dialogue, find out why. What is the general rule/​guideline? What is the goal? If you notice the editor has re-​​done your comma usage in a particular type of sentence construction, find out what you are doing wrong. Memorize that grammar rule. Look it up in the Chicago Manual of Style (the fiction writer’s style manual). Learn the rule and vow never to make that error again. This will aid you not only as you rewrite your current MS but in subsequent manuscripts as well.

Incorporate only what you feel will serve your story.

Remember that you don’t have to incorporate all suggestions. I personally break my edits into two categories:

• Comment is optional/​recommended.
• Ignore at your own risk.

My optional comments usually involve issues of language, style, voice, clarity, or sentence structure. I’ll suggest a change in these instances sometimes, but there are always other ways to smooth out structure, rhythm, or language in your own author’s voice. Often, I’ll set off these types of comments with a "consider this" or question mark to make its optional nature clear. For example, I might say: Delete this phrase to tighten the sentence structure here? Or: Consider expanding on your description of the MC to better illustrate her tendency toward self-​​deprecation. Other editors/​critiquers might use different methods, so ask them if you are unsure.

The key is to use both your head and your gut when making these decisions. If you feel a suggestion may compromise the overall plot or the characterization or the theme, etc., then put that comment on the back burner. You can always come back to it later or ignore it completely if you feel it doesn’t serve your story well.

WARNING: There is a big difference between deciding that a change isn’t right for your story and being too lazy to make the change. Confession: This is a problem for me personally as a writer. I’ll often see the merit in a critiquer’s suggestion, but due to lack of time or energy, I’ll put it aside and "conveniently" forget to go back to it. *blushes with shame* This is a bad practice for writers, considering that our ultimate goal is to better our books. And don’t forget that the critiquer took his or her valuable time to make the suggestion in the first place. So, don’t be lazy or use busyness as an excuse. Do the hard work—you won’t regret it.

Overhauling? Then get out of your MS.

If your editor has recommended doing major revisions to whole scenes or chapters, I highly recommend copying and pasting those scenes into a new document. Playing with ideas or major fixes outside of your master MS file accomplishes two things:

• You eliminate the possibility of losing any valuable original material.
• You allow yourself the freedom of exploring ideas and possibilities in a "throwaway" document.

Once you’ve rewritten a scene to your satisfaction, you’ll want to re-​​paste it into your master file and save the file again.

Take another vacation.

Once you’ve made (and tracked) all the edits you can bear to make without keeling over from exhaustion, then take another "vacation." Yes, you’ve earned it! But only a couple of days’ worth, because you’ve still got work to do on this draft. Once you’re back at it, go through the MS again and accept your tracked changes one by one. Make sure that you double check those edits before you accept them, to ensure that you aren’t introducing more errors. You’ve spent countless hours on spit-​​polishing your masterpiece; you don’t want to screw anything up at this point, eh?

Get to work!

All right, now that you know all my secrets for a proper revision, you’ve no more excuses. Get to work and get that manuscript out there already!

This post, by Suzanne White, originally appeared on The Passive Voice on 5/7/12.

From the comments to Kris’s Post – Spread the Word, a classic letter to The Author Guild from 70-year-old author Suzanne White:

It’s unfortunate that an entity which professes to be an “Authors Guild” doesn’t work for authors. It works instead for the publishing industry. It works to try to protect what is obsolete.

 

Authors today can go to Amazon with books they have written, post them on Kindle or develop paperbacks with Createspace or seek to actually be published by Amazon… and get a 70% royalty on their sales. Do you encourage them? Do you help them to understand how they can gain their freedom? Do you applaud those courageous authors who self publish, sell on Kindle and make a living? No you do not. Instead, you warble on, lamenting the fact Bezos is taking over the crusty publishing industry. DUH!

Shame.

Where in the traditional publishing industry can an author command 70%? Where can an author have utter dominion over cover art? Formatting? Content? Illustrations? Impact? Marketing? The answer is Amazon. And a little bit Pubit and sometimes Smashwords or Apple as well. Where in the standard publishing industry can an author revive a book that he or she wrote in 1982, sold to a publisher who printed it, didn’t sell very many and took it right off the market? Amazon, that’s where. Author gets rights back, re-formats the book, slams it up for sale on Kindle and in six months is making money with that book.

Where? Tell me. Where can an author do better?

Why does a Guild for Authors rail on about monopolies and decry the demise of old-fashioned publishing as we knew it? Dinosaurs still prowling the streets of Manhattan want their good old boy industry back. Give it up already.

Read the rest of the post on The Passive Voice.

Like so many people, I’ve just read The Hunger Games. I read it because I wanted to know what all the hype was about. The books on their own were a big success, then big budget movie moguls took them on and the production company engaged in a massive online hype campaign. Also, a friend suggested I read them, as he thought they were pretty good. So I did. Meh.

[Publetariat Editor’s note: strong language after the jump]

I probably won’t go to see the movie, but, in case I did, I wanted to read the book first. The book is always better than the film, after all. And so many people have waxed lyrical about The Hunger Games, I thought it must be worth a try. In all honesty, I was underwhelmed at first. The book drags interminably with an unnecessary amount of worldbuilding and backstory. It’s called The Hunger Games, for fuck’s sake – the games really should start before I’m halfway through the book. They do, just, at around the 40% mark or so, but that’s way too late. I was moaning online about it and one person said, and I paraphrase, “Yeah, I read that book. I’m sure there’s a pretty good novella in there somewhere.”

That was a fairly accurate comment. However, when the games got underway, and kids were running around trying to survive and kill each other, my interest was hooked. In case you’re wondering what the hell I’m on about, The Hunger Games is the story of a post-apocalyptic kind of future where the masses are entertained every year with one boy and one girl from each of twelve districts dumped into a wilderness arena where they have to hunt and kill each other for televisual shits and giggles. There can be only one and so on. Also, if you haven’t heard about The Hunger Games, how’s that rock you’re living under?

So, as I said, the games themselves were good. It was interesting stuff, exciting in its own way and I finally found myself enjoying the story. I could understand what some of the fuss was about. It wasn’t brilliant, certainly not worth the level of hype, but it was pretty good. That first 40% of the book, however, should really have been, at most, 10%. The whole thing would have been much better. And as a book for young adults, it doesn’t need to be a huge tome.

So I could kind of understand where the affection for the books came from. Whether I’ll bother with parts two and three remains to be seen. While I ended up enjoying the last half of the book on a very superficial level, it didn’t take away from the many, many flaws. The vast majority of the worldbuilding and the concepts on which the entire story is built are very contrived. There’s a lot of forced convenience in the telling. But this is okay when you’re just having a casual read. It’s not claiming to be anything else.

The dicussion on Facebook also raised another point, when someone said, essentially, “You’re reading a book for children, so you should be bored”.

I was astounded at that. There’s a vast chasm between writing/storytelling that is simpler and less sophisticated than adult fiction and writing/storytelling that is boring. Kids get bored too. To suggest a book for teens should bore an adult is asinine. It would bore a child too. A story aimed at a teen/YA audience certainly won’t have the depth and complexity of an adult novel, but should still be an engaging and entertaining story. When you read something like Harry Potter or His Dark Materials, there’s nothing boring about those. Except the last Harry Potter book, which should have been called Harry Potter And The Interminable Emo Camping*. Seriously, that book should have been half the size and it would have been great. But that’s a whole other rant.

The Harry Potter stories and the Dark Materials books are not boring, even though they’re aimed at a YA audience. They’re interesting and well-paced throughout, and they deal with subjects which challenge the thinking of their YA audience, just like YA fiction should. We should never write down to young people – they’re smarter than you might think. The Hunger Games deals with themes which should challenge YA readers too – kids as young as 12 running around killing other kids as young as 12 for sport, for instance. The whole premise of the book seems well outside a YA purview. Perhaps that very fact alone is what’s made The Hunger Games so popular. And that story, contrived and flawed though it may be, isn’t boring. The first 40% of the book is boring, however, and it shouldn’t be. To suggest we ought to find it boring as adults reading YA is ridiculous.

It should simply have been a shorter book, with all that worldbuilding and backstory tightened right up so that we got into the excitement of the Games themselves sooner. At least, that’s my opinion. And you all know how much I like to share an opinion.

SPOILER AHEAD!

One more thing before I go – I have one MAJOR issue with this story. I’ve saved this for the end, because it’s a real spoiler if you haven’t read the book. So, if you want to read it, maybe you should skip this last bit. I mean, the whole story is utterly predictable from the outset. That’s the lack of sophistication I was talking about earlier, which doesn’t have to be boring in a well-written story. But…

We know damn well that Katniss is going to survive. We know almost certainly that Peeta will survive too, somehow, or die doing something to ensure Katniss survives. From the very opening scenes, we know how this thing is going to play out, but we’re happy to go along for the ride.

There are several problems with it, which I really can’t be bothered to go into now any more than I have already and, in truth, it doesn’t matter. I still enjoyed the book and I’m glad it’s popular and getting young people reading. Top work.

But, right towards the end, there’s a surprise twist thrown in that’s just fucking mental. What the holy god-dancing shit is that thing with the dead tributes all coming back as werewolves? Or something. Seriously, what the shit, Suzanne Collins? All these kids had been killed in various ways. Many of them we don’t know how they died, but they did. Then they’re suddenly all werewolves come out to screw around with the final battle between our heroes and the one surviving tribute. It’s utterly bizarre. Why are they werewolves? How are they werewolves? What the fuck is the point in suddenly throwing that in at the end?

Sure, if you wanted some extra excitement, throw in some random attacker to mess with the balance of things. Even a pack of genetically modified wolves or something. But why the dead kids from before? Dead, remember? No longer freaking living.

And, just as a matter of detail, if Katniss, Peeta and Cato hadn’t managed to get onto the Cornucopia and have their last little scrap up there, that pack of wolfchildren would have torn all three of them to pieces and there would have been no victor, so letting those werekids out at all makes no sense.

Anyway, I’ll stop ranting now.

* I can’t take credit for that title. I can’t remember where I heard it, but it’s perfect.

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.