Chapter Twelve

Revision as Ritual

“On the last drafts, I focus on the words themselves, including the rub of vowels and consonants, stressed and unstressed syllables. Yet even at this stage I’m often surprised. A different ending or a new character shows up and I’m back to where I began, letting the story happen, just trying to stay out of the way.”
—Ron Rash

If writing a story is like building a piece of fine furniture—and let’s say that it is—then congratulations. You’ve sawed the wood, carved the flourishes, assembled the pieces, glued them in place, stained and sealed the whole thing. Now it’s time to wax. This is the polishing part of the process—and how you approach the polish determines how beautiful the final product will be. It may also determine whether you sell it.

The more you polish, the greater the shine. Publishers are as attracted to shiny objects as everyone else is. So make sure that your story is as well polished as it is compelling. This is where professionalism comes in. The willingness to comb through these final drafts with a sharp eye and a red pen is what separates the pros from the amateurs.

Being perceived as a professional is as important in publishing as it is in any other field. Perhaps more so, since too many writers see their calling as “artistes” as license to forgo the usual hallmarks of professionalism. Present company excepted, of course.

“I have to rewrite a lot. I couldn’t tell you how many drafts I write, but I know I’ve done at least twenty rewrites on each book.”
—Kimberly Willis Holt

Harnessing Your Inner Critic

The editor in you, whom you’ve kept at bay while you wrote your first and second drafts, is now allowed to come out and play. Your inner editor is that smart kid from sixth grade, the precocious girl who always raised her hand for every question, the vigilant boy your teacher always put in charge of the classroom when she left the room. If this smart kid was you, then you probably count a spelling bee championship among your grammar school laurels—and you’re all set. Just pretend you’re grading someone else’s homework, and set to work. Don’t worry, I’ll provide precise instructions.

If, on the other hand, you were the kid who was launching spitballs at the teacher, spent most of your time in school with your desk facing the wall, and conned your mother into writing all of your book reports while you played video games, then you might have trouble locating your inner editor. Or you may find that your inner editor is as indifferent to spelling, grammar, continuity, and the nuances of elegant sentence construction as you were when you were a kid. It’s up to you to learn to pay attention and develop an eye for writerly detail.

Either way, you need some training in the art of editing. Sure, you can always hire a good line editor and/or copy editor. (You can also take a class in copyediting at your local community college or sign up for an online class—it will be money well spent.) But you should still do the best you can to edit your work yourself before you pay for help. Developmental editing is a trickier proposition than line editing, but there’s no shame in hiring either or both (see the sidebar in chapter eleven). That said, it would behoove you to learn to copyedit your own work. Not doing so is like showing up for work unwashed and unkempt in shorts and flip-flops. It’s simply unprofessional.

My first editor, the inestimable Tom Owens, taught me to edit my own work when I landed my first job as a reporter for a now-defunct monthly business magazine in the late 1980s. This was before the widespread adoption of PC workstations; we wrote our stories on IBM Selectric typewriters and turned our pages in to Tom, which he then returned to us marked up in red pen. We typed up the stories again, incorporating his changes, and then saved the clean copies. Once a month, during the production cycle, we collected our pages, took them into the computer room, and typed the stories into the mainframe.

This was actually far more efficient than it sounds, not so much in terms of all that typing—I was the worst typist ever, and when word processors came along shortly thereafter it made my working life exponentially easier—but in terms of learning to edit my own work. Tom marked up my pages, and I had to make those changes and type the pages all over again. Over time, I began to anticipate his remarks and to edit my stories as I wrote before I turned them in to Tom—creating a sort of editing muscle memory for prose. This saved me a lot of typing. Most important, it taught me to produce clean, clear, tightly written copy.

Within a few years, I was the editor, in charge of teaching reporters as green as I had been how to produce clean, clear, tightly written copy. We had computers by then—laptops even!—and many editors switched to editing their reporters’ work electronically on the spot and sending it right along to production—rather than giving it back to the writers to incorporate their changes. It was faster, perhaps, but inefficient in terms of teaching reporters to edit themselves. I stuck to Tom’s technique, editing my reporters’ stories on hard copy in red pen and handing them back to the reporters to input the changes, just as Tom had done for me. They learned the art of self-editing, just as I had done.

When I traded journalism for book publishing, I was faced with the opposite problem: I had to train editors to write jacket copy (that is, the sales copy that appears on the flaps and back covers of books). These young editors all made their living editing book-length manuscripts directly on the computer; they were horrified at the thought of my marking up their copy in red pen on paper. I know they wondered why I didn’t edit the pages using change tracking so they could see what I’d done and accept the changes. But they could do that with just a click on the keyboard. Better they should have to make the changes themselves to learn how to think like a writer.

Because that’s what writing is—it’s thinking on paper. Editing is correcting sloppy thinking on paper.

And now, as promised, those instructions for polishing your work.

“The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.”
—Robert Cormier

When in Doubt, Delete

“I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it’s one of the most satisfying parts of writing.”
—Karen Thompson

This is the mantra editors live by: When in doubt, delete. You may have heard the writer’s version of this, which is: Murder your darlings. Generally speaking, this means that whenever you read a line you feel particularly proud of, you should lose it. Odds are you’re just showing off—and to paraphrase Elmore Leonard, if it sounds like writing, you should rewrite it.

Or just hit the delete key.

As you comb through your manuscript, every time you think, I’m not sure that works, you’ll be tempted to second guess yourself and think, Oh, it’s fine. Think again. It’s not fine. Fix it—or lose it.

The easiest way to recognize overwriting when you hear it is to read your work out loud. Yeah, you heard me right. Print out your story on hard copy, and read it out loud. Every word. Mark every passage over which you stumble in yellow marker. When you’re finished, go back through and fix or lose those passages. Read it out loud again.

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
—William Strunk Jr.

Cut Your Story Down to Size

Is your manuscript way too long? Then reading it out loud and trimming here and there won’t cut it. More drastic action is needed.

Many of the queries I receive begin, “In my 200,000-word novel. …” I stop right there. As I tell all my clients, I can’t sell anything by a first-time writer over 120,000 words. And I won’t even try to sell a thriller over 90,000 words. (Word count requirements vary according to category; do your homework and find out what the preferred word count is for your genre these days.)

“Help me cut it,” they say, knowing that I spent some fifteen years as an editor before becoming an agent. But I won’t do it. Once it’s cut down to size, I can help refine it. But they need to do the cutting themselves.

And so do you. Only you know your story well enough to determine its basic shape. That said, I have created guidelines that will help you make those big cuts you need to make.

Let’s say that you have a manuscript that weighs in at 180,000 words. Start by answering the questions only you can answer:

• Do you have two books? If you’re writing a series or a trilogy, this might be the case. If your current manuscript is at nearly 180,000 words, you could still carve it into two 90,000-word books. This would mean that you have a storyline that could accommodate two structures, as follows, with each book coming in at 360 pages (250 words per page):

• Or do you have one book that is simply too long? In which case you need to cut it down to 120,000 words, which is 480 pages (250 words per page):

Answer these questions by writing out the basic storyline in your plot points only (for a refresher on plot points, see chapter six): Inciting Incident, Plot Point 1, Midpoint, Plot Point 2, Denouement. Breaking it down into these basic chunks should help you figure out if you have one book or two. You can then break it down into acts.

Once you have the acts and accompanying plot points, you can cut your story to the word counts I’ve outlined above. This should be easy, because anything that doesn’t get you from plot point to plot point must go.

“My basic rule for action scenes is that, as a reader, I want to see it. I want to feel it. So as a writer, if the words aren’t helping me see and feel very clearly what’s happening, then I need to choose different words. … Each word should have the same impact as a landed punch.”
—Adam Sternbergh

Principled Polishing

You can use certain polishing principles to buff your story to a perfect gloss. Here are some steps for that final review:

• Check your characters’ names. It’s better if you stick with character names that are: (1) easy to read, pronounce, and spell (so the reader doesn’t stumble over them every time as she reads); (2) not too similar to other characters’ names in your story (so the reader doesn’t stop reading to figure out who’s who all the time); and (3) are in keeping with the gender, background, and even temperament of the character.
• Don’t write in dialect. Ever. It drives editors crazy. Use word choice, sentence structure, etc., to indicate dialect.
• Tone down the hyperbole. The more dramatic the story, the more you need to tell it straight. There’s no reason to use hyperbolic language; the action is dramatic enough. You need to tone down the hyperbole—otherwise you fall into melodrama, undermine your authority as a storyteller, and lose the true impact of your story.
• Use American English. If you are submitting to an American publisher, agent, or editor, you need to use American grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
• Run a reading level on your prose. This is one of the best ways to make sure that your prose is engaging and easy to read. If you are writing in Microsoft Word (which you should be, as that’s the standard for submission), you’ll find the reading level under the Review tab in the Spelling and Grammar tool. (Note: Make sure that you’ve checked the “show readability statistics” box in the options under Spelling and Grammar.) Then when you run the Spelling and Grammar tool, the Flesch-Kincaid reading level will show up under readability statistics. This level refers to the grade level of reading proficiency needed to comprehend a given work. The average newspaper in the United States is written at a sixth-grade reading level, so if yours comes in at anything much above that, you need to simplify your prose. Aim for a reading level between sixth and eighth grade.
• Watch your dialogue tags. Don’t use dialogue tags like queried, proclaimed, pondered, etc. That drives editors crazy. Stick to said. Or use action instead. Craig Johnson, best-selling author of the Longmire series, never uses any dialogue tags. He uses action only.

• Lose the clichés. Common turns of phrase—hot as hell, cold as ice, soft as butter—clutter up your prose and diminish your style.
• Swap out weak verbs for strong verbs. Weak verbs include all forms of “to be” as well as the tired verbs we use all the time. Why say talk when you can say whisper, communicate, inform, debate, sing, pronounce, murmur, mutter, mumble, express, clarify, vocalize, verbalize, chat, chatter, gab, yak, discuss, articulate, converse, enunciate, tell, gossip, or confess?
• Lose the adverbs. If you’ve used strong verbs, you don’t need adverbs. Seriously.
• Stir up the reader’s senses. Arm the language of your story with all of the senses. As you go through your manuscript, make sure that the reader can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste the world in which your story takes place.

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
—E.L. Doctorow

“You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show though the smoke.”
—Arthur Polotnik