Tag Archives: editing

August 31, 2010 · 5:53 pm

TMI

I had to stop while driving the other day to ask a stranger for directions, and quickly regretted it. The man was willing to help, but after telling me how to get where I was going, he added, “otherwise, you could take a left at the Walmart, go down over the bridge and and then take a right after about two miles. Then you take a quick left over the tracks and it’s just past the frontage road. There are fewer traffic lights that way. The bridge is normally out, but lately there hasn’t been any rain, and it’s open.” (Okay, this is not exactly what he said, but you get the gist of it.)

I thanked him with glazed eyes, trying to keep his original instructions straight in my brain. Amazingly, I got where I was going, no thanks to his confusing directions.

This experience put me in mind of a large number of writing samples that I’ve seen posted online. The story is there, and sometimes it’s not bad, but it is buried in details and extraneous words that require the reader to work to figure out what the author is trying to say.

I made that mistake, when writing the first draft of Jim and Jack. I wanted the reader to see things the same way I did, in order to provide a better understanding of the characters and the story. When I read it over the first time through, I had a lot of trimming to do.

The best way to recognize this “overwriting” is to read the work of authors who are not yet published. When encountered, the issue is so obvious that it is much easier to identify in one’s own work.

Each person has his/her own style, but clarity is something that all writers should strive for. Nothing is worse than having to re-read a passage because it is too convoluted to “get” the first time through. If an agent has to do much of that, the manuscript is going to get rejected.

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May 15, 2010 · 1:13 am

Just a Trim, Please…

I took my boys to the barber today for their quarterly haircuts. I wanted them to get summer cuts (short) so that they wouldn’t need to go back until school starts in the fall. Neither boy wanted to go, but my youngest was philosophical. “Just tell Char that I want it like it is now, but shorter.” 

My oldest was another story. At the end of fifth grade, he is very aware of what’s cool and what’s not, and apparently short hair is not. The most prevalent style at the school he attends is basically what he already had: overgrown, slightly past the collar, with bangs pushed just far enough to the side to not interfere with his vision.

In the waiting area, he went through various stall tactics until he realized the futility of that (I threatened him with cutting it myself) and sat down in the chair. Stone faced, he would not speak to the barber, and I finally took pity on him and told her not to buzz it or anything, just trim it a little bit and keep it long in the front.

Several minutes later, I looked over and saw that she had not understood. It was shorter, and she had left it long in the front, but the sideburns were somehow non-existent. The whole look was similar to a cube with a face in front. My son had tears in his eyes, and I could understand why. “Uh, maybe trim up those sideburns a little bit, and expose the ears,” I suggested.

“But this is how they’re wearing it,” said the barber.

“Not at his school!” I said.

She did what I asked and it looked better, but as far as my son was concerned, the damage had been done. He glared at me as she vacuumed his neck, and was muttering fifth grade cuss words as I paid her. Rather than expressing gratitude for my saving him from total humiliation, he whispered, “I hate you.” 

It occurred to me that the process of editing was similar for me. I liked my manuscript the way it was. I didn’t mind trimming a few adverbs here and there, and was grateful when critique partners pointed out echoed words, but when they suggested some changes that were more dramatic than that, I experienced a great deal of conflict. It was not that I didn’t see the value of their ideas, it was that I knew what I wanted it to look like, and that’s what I wanted to go with. Striving to be reasonable, I weighed their suggestions and realized that the story might benefit from some of them. The current version is not dramatically different, but the pace is better and the action begins earlier. I suspect that it is more marketable than it was.

As we left the barbershop, I noticed that my son’s hair actually looked pretty good. In my opinion, there had been a happy compromise between what each of us wanted and what he’d ended up with. I don’t expect him to admit it, but I think that he basically felt the same way. By the time we’d made it to the parking lot, he was playing with the little car he’d chosen on his way out, and hasn’t mentioned the haircut since.

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January 22, 2010 · 8:52 pm

Judge Not…

There is a contest on WEBook.com right now* which you can pay a small fee to enter a short summary and the first page of your manuscript. The submissions are rated by WEBook members (who can also enter the contest, but are only able to rate others’ entries, not their own). The best entries are elevated up four judging levels (more of the book gets read each time), and during the process get the eye of the agents involved with the contest and potential representation.

I have not entered, but several fellow Agent Query members have, so when the first round of judging officially began, I hopped over to the WEBook website to get my feet wet as a critic. Hoping to spot my virtual friends’ entries, I read and evaluated more than thirty submissions.

I LOVED IT!!!  You get to choose what genre(s) you want to read, and you can judge as many as you want. You rate each entry from 1 (bad) to 5 (great), and then you get to see how all the other peer judges rated it.

It was easy, after the first line or two, to tell if the entry wasn’t a 5, but I had to read each one all the way through to give it an accurate rating. Most of the time, I found that my opinion was right there with the majority. Some entries were awful, a lot were OK, and a few weren’t bad. None of the ones that I read stood out to me as a 5.

After reading about twenty, I found my mind wandering and I had to force myself to concentrate so that I could judge fairly. As I was doing this, it struck me that these entries were basically the same thing that agents have to deal with every day. It is easy to understand how they get to the point that they only need to read the hook before rejecting a query.

Many agents mention in their blogs that they can’t take the time to tell every author why their query or manuscript has been rejected, but I discovered while judging that if you read enough of other people’s writing, you don’t need them to.

As I was working my way through the literary fiction category, I noticed many entries that seemed to have a decent storyline, but the author had buried it in the writing. Then it occurred to me that the things that I was most critical of were what I had been vaguely bothered by in my own manuscript.

I feel an edit coming on.

* This is not an endorsement of the contest; my only connection to WEBook is that I am a member.

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