Two recent posts with great advice about this whole editing lark (because my weekend, when I write these posts, has been eaten by a very dear friend's wedding):

On WriteToDone, the step-by-step guide to hiring a freelance editor. And on Plot to Punctuation, a breakdown of different editing stages and what you can expect from them.

And on a lighter - but very valid - note, a post on the publishing deals you don't get to hear about.

 

Yeah, that last one was a bit of a stretch for the 's', but alliteration is a seductive mistress. Once again, a blog post full of other people saying interesting things, because I've had a week long headache, and computer screens are unfriendly beasts at the moment. Except my laptop, because I can write novels on that without having to actually look at the screen. Anyway.

Subtext is a wily beast. We'd all like to feel our writing's rich with it, and occasionally we mistake our pen for a sledgehammer and it wanders onto the stage and starts flashing the reader through your dialogue, making little "woo-hoo!" noises while the trenchcoat's flapping in the breeze. Subtext is not a sledgehammer - and it can often weave itself into the work without you even realising (especially if your book is being read by literature students, whose marks depend on finding the damn stuff everywhere). It can add a lot of 'subconscious body' to a piece - make a scene feel more 'real', more accessible, more emotive and visceral, because we can sense what's going on under the surface. But it can be tricky to get right, especially the first few times. Over on QueryTracker, Stina Lindenblatt has some tips on creative subtext in your work.

Something all writers struggle with is figuring out how they actually write. What works for them? Should they outline first, or does that take all the fun out of it? Or, if they don't outline, maybe they'll wander around for five years not really achieving anything except massive plotholes and impossible events. Should they set aside some time every day sacred to writing? Mix it up and write at different times? Write only on weekends? Never write on weekends? Snatch time whenever they can, or wait unti they have hours to dedicate to a good sprint of writing? Do they need to get a book down fast, or does writing before the story's ready kill it in its sleep? Another QueryTracker post by Danyelle Leaftyl has some options to think about in finding how you work.

Once you've put all that imagery into the novel, however, you might find it a tad overlong. Or maybe you're in the editing stage and need to cut it down anyway. Rachelle Gardner talks about cutting your novel down relatively painlessly, but looking for words and phrases not pulling their weight. I'd add to her comments:

where you find adverbs, you've probably chosen a weak verb. (Ie, one that isn't very descriptive, like 'run' or 'walk', and has to rely on an adverb to give it presence). Fix the verb, remove the adverb. ditto adjectives - if you're using two or three for a single noun, find a better noun, or find an adjective that combines the tone and visual you're looking for. if you're spending long passages describing a character's thoughts, consider an action to sum up those thoughts - what would a character do that shows us that's what he's thinking. That's often a lot more powerful, as it lets us put ourselves into their shoes more. repetition - re-explaining, re-describing, summarising, stop it. Trust your reader.  over-explaining. Again, your reader's not in kindergarten. Trust that they can work it out. Most readers tend to enjoy working it out, it makes them move involved with the story.

Cutting down can be a difficult process. I also like to look long and hard at each sentence and paragraph, shine a torch in its eyes and demand to know what, exactly, it's adding to the story. If it can't answer me promptly and succinctly, it goes. Waffling at this point is a definite indicator that it's there for my ego reasons (eg, because I think it's really clever or awesome) not for story reasons.

 

Here's a great two-page PDF by Phyllis Radford about submitting stories electronically to editors. Electronic submission is increasingly becoming the standard - it's cheaper, faster and easier to track. It does open up a whole slew of new problems, however, because almost every program you use to write something (unless it's notepad or wordpad, or something similarly basic) puts "hidden" code in your text. Code that tells a system how to format it, how to display it.

Code that does not play well when you take that document and open it up in something else, or copy-paste it in (ever had weird things happen when you copy-pasted into or from a Microsoft Word document? Yeah, that's what's going on, here. Secret formatting gremlins.)

A word to the wise: if you want to get anywhere at all in this industry, or any related one, you need to know how to use these programs. Writing skill alone won't cut it - even if you just want to submit stories to your local paper, or to competitions, you need to know the basics of something like Microsoft Word. It's a basic expectation - without it, you're basically turning up to a job interview in your underwear. 

  I know several people who are in the process of getting feedback for their first or early novels. This post from Ray at Flogging the Quill is great for pointing out the chief issue here - that although people are critiquing the work, we too often feel like they're critiquing us. Ray's post is well worth a read, even if you're not taking feedback right now.

Another great post about writer's block and how the notion of 'a book as an event' can stifle your creative freedom. Feeling that everything you write has to be meaningful and monumental is a huge burden, and one that's absolute nonsense. Linda Nagata over at Book View Cafe has some good words to that effect, go read.

And not-very-related but kinda important: Wired has a new article on what's actually happening with the DOJ's price collusion investigation with Apple and the publishers.

 

Crit groups. Some people hate them, others swear by them, everyone uses them differently, and they may or may not be 'for you'. (I spent five minutes trying to think of a witty analogy to that, but my brain just sidled along and said 'post-it notes' (after having looked at the ones decorating my desk) and flopped onto the couch. Clearly it's not an analogy day.)

There are as many flavours, types, varieties, and breeds as there are writers, and it can take some time to find a place that suits you. My only comment there is to recommend you steer clear of groups that love to tear a work to pieces until the author's a blubbering mess - that's not constructive, that's a bunch of people feeling smart and clever by belittling someone else. Because if I can show you all the things you're doing wrong, then I'm smarter and better than you. Never mind that it's actually much more difficult to pinpoint where the author's doing well, because good writing tends to be invisible. It's all about the ego. But I digress.

 

So, last week we looked at how to find yourself an editor. Looking around, you may have discovered that editing isn't cheap; getting a full edit for your manuscript can run to thousands of dollars - especially when you consider that there are usually several rounds of editing to bring a book to a publishable level.

You generally get what you pay for - proper editing takes time and expertise, and anyone who really knows the business is not going to charge you peanuts for it This is not the place to skimp - there's a reason traditional publishers take such a large chunk of a book's proceeds, and if you want your book to be of comparable quality, the editor you found online who works for five cents a page is not a good use of your money.

But as I said last week, there are ways to save on editing, even if you get a good editor. The first trick is to avoiding having the *entire* manuscript edited, because most of the editor's time will be spent picking up the same types of errors over and over again - that's a lot of time (and therefore money) on something you can learn to find yourself, once it's pointed out - POV slips, repetition, infodumps, etc.

Most manuscript assessment services take the first ten thousand words and a story synopsis, because from that, you can generally see how the story is developing, and what common issues the author has. It costs a lot less money to have ten thousand words edited than one hundred and twenty thousand, provided you're prepared to put the extra effort in to find those errors in the other hundred and ten thousand. If you have real difficulty recognising them, an online critiquing group can help you identify them but it's probably time for a workshop or short course in writing to strengthen those skills. You need to really understand what issues the editor is bringing up, because you're the one who'll be looking for them in the rest of the manuscript. If you don't know what you're looking for, you're not going to find them, and you're not going to learn anything.

Now, the caveat is, not all editors will want to work this way. But most will be accommodating, especially if you explain politely that you're hoping to improve your craft by learning to spot and correct your common errors - I don't know of any editor who actually enjoys pointing out the same issues six thousand times.

So, you send ten thousand words and one-to-five page synopsis (depending on the editor), and ask for developmental editing. I'd also attach a brief note requesting that the editor provide a brief summary of common issues that are (likely) rife through the work. Many editors provide this anyway in the form of a letter, but there's no harm in asking to make sure you get someone that's as useful as possible.

When the edits come back, remove your internet connection, unplug your landline and turn off your phone before you read them. It's quite likely you're going to feel utterly shredded (much like your manuscript) and you don't want to be sending nasty emails to hardworking editors who are only trying to improve your work. Read it through, calm down, put it away and come back to it in a few days when the sting's worn off. Then read it through very carefully and make yourself notes, or a checklist or a diagram or mindmap or whatever works for your brain as a guide to what to look for in the rest of your story.

You're not going to agree with everything the editor says. But think long and hard about anything you disagree with because a) they probably know better than you, and b) you're biased. If in doubt, refer to a). 

Be patient. Editing takes time. You're not going to get this done in one afternoon, especially if this is your first novel. There's a lot of brainwork involved, and your brain will tire pretty quickly. When you find yourself getting tetchy, skipping over things because "that bit's all fine, there won't be any of those things in there", it's time to take a rest.

When you've tracked down and solved the issues (and this may well involve scrapping and rewriting some scenes or chapters), you can let a trusted beta reader or a crit group read it and give you feedback. Alternatively, you can send it back to the editor - a revised synopsis with either the next three chapters or the first three again (check with the editor) and repeat the process. Which you choose depends largely on your budget, patience, and what stage you feel the novel's at. An editor will give you better feedback and more quickly. There's no magic number of how many edits to do - some books are done in one, some books take twenty passes. Use your own judgement for when you're happy with the story.

When you're ready to move forward, it's time to ask for a copy-edit. This time, you do send the whole manuscript, but copy edits are far cheaper than developmental edits, because the editor is purely looking for slips of grammar, spelling errors, punctuation issues, etc. Depending on the editor, they may or may not want to perform line edits at the same time (where they tidy up awkward phrasing, etc). Line edits up the cost considerably, so check with your editor what they're going to do before you sign off on it.

Even with this process, editing still isn't cheap. You can expect to sink at least $3-5000 into editing a novel-length manuscript. This is not money wasted: you will learn an incredible amount about what makes a good story and where the weaknesses tend to be in your writing, and you will have prepared your manuscript for whatever publishing path you want to take.

 

Note: almost all of what I'm about to say can work just as well for a manuscript assessment service. For simplicity, I'm assuming you're going to use an editor instead of an assessment service, because it achieves about the same end, but an editor will give you a longer working relationship, and is a more vital and important choice than an assessment service.

We've finished a novel, celebrated, accepted that it needs further work and read some very good books on that topic. We may have even had a crack at editing it ourselves, or at least working out where the problems are. What next?

Your novel needs an editor. Sure, you can do some of it yourself, but editing your own work is rather like cutting your own hair; everyone can guess that you cut it yourself, because there are bits that don't sit quite right, one side's slightly shorter than the other and there's that spot at the back where you can't ever quite see what you're doing well enough.

And you know the piece well enough that your brain sees what should be there instead of what's actually there. Take a look at how many typo's end up in my posts - I edit them (admittedly I'm fairly lax, there - I reread them twice onscreen and that's it. I don't print them out, or change the typeface or font size or any of the other tricks you should use, because frankly my time is limited and I consider this as rather more an informal conversation than a professional article) but there's usually at least one error per post.

With practise - a lot of practise - you can learn to cut your own hair / edit your own novel. But that involves getting a professional to show you what to look for and what you keep doing wrong. So one way or the other, you need a professional's opinion.

But hiring an editor isn't like hiring a cleaning service - the wrong editor can do just as much damage to your book and your career as no editor at all. So how do you find the good ones?

Finding editors

Find them from their work:

Find novels that you enjoyed or are of a similar genre and style to yours, and find who edited those books. Occasionally this is listed on the imprint page (the page typically right after the half-title or title page, that has the ISBN, publisher address and copyright details). If not, you can email the publisher or the author (google is your friend) and politely ask them who edited the book. 

Once you have a name, you can look them up on google and see if they take freelance work (many editors do nowadays, but don't assume - if they don't indicate it on their website (or they don't HAVE a website) send them a polite email asking if they offer their services to the general public. If you can't find any means to contact them, they probably don't want to be contacted - move on. There are plenty of good editors out there, and harrassing someone who doesn't want to work with you is not a good start to relationship.

Find them from local writing organisations:

There is usually at least a national organisation (ie the ASA - Australian Society of Authors) and a state-level organiation (eg VWC - Victorian Writer's Centre) for writers around, and they have directories of professionals (editors, agents, illustrators, etc) available for their members. You can usually purchase a kind of 'associate membership' which is a cheaper member rate for unpublished authors that still gets you access to most of the membership goodies.

Author organisations should have a vested interest in only keeping editors of good standing in their directories, but it pays to double-check anyone you find through there (it pays to double-check them period, no matter where you got them. More on that below.)

The directories typically allow you to search based on genre or style, and you can create a shortlist of editors from there.

Find them from Writer's Market / Australian Writer's Marketplace:

The Writer's Market (or for Aussies: the Australian Writer's Marketplace) is a company that maintains a directory of publishers, editors, agents and all manner of industry-related things for writing. You can purchase the book, or an online subscription (you can purchase for just a month for $5 or 6 I believe if you just want to look for editors) and search for editors who work in your genre here.

Vetting your shortlist

Once you have your shortlist of 6-10 or even 20 editors, you need to work out who is the most suitable.

There are no official qualifications you need to become an editor (that's part of the problem) but there are voluntary ones that certainly help. In Australia at least, there's an accreditation program for editors that is particularly stringent (I know; I've written and marked part of the exam in previous years). A degree of some kind in communications, english studies or literature is also beneficial, but by no means a guarantee of quality editing (and nor does its absence indicate a lack of quality - many extremely good editors have no qualifications at all, just a lot of experience).

Look up each editor on google, and find out:

Whether they take freelance work (duh) Their qualifications How long they've been in the business (are they experienced?) Who they've worked for (major trade publishers, literary periodicals, etc ) What they've worked on (do they have experience in your genre, style and length of work?) Check out some of those books - do you like them? Make sure you look at more than one, and at books by different authors - does the style seem all the same? (indicative of an editor who rewrites an author rather than polishing them) or do the individual author voices come through? If they have published rates on their sites, check those out too. And don't just discount the most expensive - proper editing is a real skill, and going with the cheapest offer is not doing your book any favours. Several thousand dollars for a full manuscript edit is fairly typical (I'll cover how to do it far more cheaply in another post).

Finding 'The One'

Narrow your shortlist down to the 3 editors you think would most suit your work (and your budget). Send each of them a polite email stating that you're considering engaging their services and would like to know:

if there's a previous client they can contact to discuss their work if they have some kind of 'sample' process to determine if you're a good fit for each other.

Some editors may baulk at the first one, but any decent editor will understand the importance of compatability and be prepared to arrange some sort of trial - often the first thirty pages and a synopsis. Note that you will almost certainly have to pay for this trial (after all, you're getting valuable feedback on your story, and taking up their time). I would recommend you take up the trial offer with at least two, preferably three of the editors (this sounds expensive, but remember you're looking for an editor long-term - if you do this right, you won't have to repeat this process for the next book.)

In the meantime, go onto the forums of the writer organisations you joined earlier and ask around if anyone has worked with these three editors, and has any feedback to give on them. Be polite and don't ask anyone for slanderous or libellous comments - forums often have a private messaging system, and I'd recommend you ask people to send you feedback that way (or by email, if there's no private message system) rather than slag off the editor in public. If the editor provided you with a client to contact, politely phone or email them and ask about their experience working with the editor, and whether they would recommend their services to a new writer. Ask if they still use that editor's services (if not, ask why - but be polite, and don't push. The author doesn't owe you any answers and may feel it's invasive) and how they would best describe the editor's process, strengths and weaknesses.

When you get your trial edits back, look carefully through (with a block of chocolate or a bottle of wine if necessary - I promise you, they'll have ripped it to shreds) and find the editor who seems to "get" you. Don't pick the person who yes-man's all your stuff, or the editor who makes you want to give it all up and become an accordian player - find someone that you think you'll be comfortable working with, who knows what they're about but is supportive and constructive.

 

 

 

It must just be my turn as a writer:  in the past month, three friends/colleagues/people I know have come up to me with variations of "I wrote a novel and I'm going to get it published!" Never written a novel before, or sent out a short story. Never taken a class in writing, or even in literature. Never looked into the industry or how it works, or what they should or shouldn't do to not get totally screwed over. In short, no idea what they were doing. But they wrote a novel, and they wanted it published.

There's nothing inherently wrong here. Everybody starts in ignorance and there's no rule that says you have to do things in any particular order. And I'm overjoyed for them, proud of them and cheering them on in the background that they actually finished the damn things - that's awesome. But after repeating the same advice three times, I thought perhaps it was blog-time.

So - you've just finished the last word of your novel - what now?

 

Editing has been on my mind lately - specifically, ways people edit and what information is useful to them. The little”learning” project I mentioned last week is software to help developmental editing, you see, and I’m a firm believer that any tool designed for artists should never constrain how the artist has to work in order to be useful.

One thing I’ve come across is a great idea for people who aren’t sure which of their plot elements have to be there. It can also work equally well if you haven’t written the book yet, and are trying to plan it out.

Start at the end - what ending do you want to see? What do you want to leave your reader with? What is the emotional finish note (and why. If we’re feeling triumphant, what are we feeling triumphant about?). Is this moment the actual climax, or a few moments after, or many moments after? What just happened?

Now, work backwards to the scene just before. What setup do you need for this payoff? What has to happen here? Where should the emotion be, and the tension?

Go to the scene before that, and ask again - work your way backwards until you reach the start of the story.

Reversing the cause and effect order (that is, taking the effect and then creating the cause) can make it much easier to work out what the bones are of the story - what has to happen, and what’s just in there because you liked it. 

There’s no reason that you have to go scene by scene, either - if you have a big sheet of paper, then just start at the end with one arc (for example, put the solving of the murder at the end or the bottom of the page) and then write the necessary elements (eg the clues) on the page in roughly where you think they’ll fall in the book. Repeat for the character arsc, the subplot, etc. Then go back and see if any of the elements on the page can be grouped into the same scene. This can work well if you know what has to happen, but you're not sure about when.