This has been a wonderfully busy first quarter, with a cornucopia of activities to keep me sharp.
The Nor Cal EFA hosted speaker Judith Horstman in January, and she provided the participants with insider information about writing for magazines and talked a bit about her new book.
I attended the California Writers Club and met Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, who confirmed for me the importance of digital publishing and presented a convincing argument regarding the obsolescence of the old publishing model and its gatekeepers. While there, I ran into an author whose debut novel I had just downloaded to my Kindle, at the suggestion of a mutual friend, but had not yet started reading.
Uploading a correctly formatted document into Smashwords was actually more difficult than the founder purported it to be, but getting it to work was a technological learning experience that didn’t kill me and therefore made me stronger.
Completing a substantive edit on a statistics textbook for a non-native English speaker contracted to Wiley allowed me to breathe a sigh of relief, and confidently say that my comprehension of statistics increased tremendously! It also allowed me to use my APA knowledge, neglected in the fiction world.
San Francisco Writers Conference orientation was held in January and the event is next weekend, February 17-19. I’ll be there. Will you? Come visit me at the Cafe Ferlinghetti, where I’ll be hanging out early Saturday morning and throughout the afternoon on Friday.
I’ve got fiction manuscripts lined up all quarter; working with a 630 page suspense novel currently, and this will be followed right away by a suspenseful love story, then a contemporary fiction/social justice novel, then Brad’s sequel comes in to me, then a mystery. Phew! Gotta love it. Thanks to Mark Coker and others like him, there are a lot of people out there taking the bull by the horns and going for it. Thankfully, they are embracing the need for an editor before they put it out to the world.
Do you suffer from idiopathic craniofacial erythema? I do, and so does Yale Professor and essayist Colleen Kinder. Her essay about blushing is the feature story in the newly released Volume 2 of Under the Gum Tree, a non-fiction literary micro magazine put together by Janna Marlies Maron at Thinkhouse Collective.
Can we every really understand why our fathers behave the way they do? Can we comprehend what exactly it is that they pass on to us?
And why is it that sometimes we can’t keep ourselves from steering straight into disaster?
Steve Almond is in these pages, helping us to see the trouble with easy listening, as he explains how the move away from vinyl has affected his relationship with music and, for all of us, the very act of listening.
Contemplate why a woman would have herself wrapped in red crepe paper in the desert.
I don’t know about you, but my downtime looks an awful lot like my uptime. I am very happy to be one of those people who loves her work. I spend a lot of time reading for pleasure, which means reading the stuff I have been wanting to read and in no way suggests that I don’t get pleasure from reading what I am paid to read. Of course there are those things that physically pain me to read, and other things that I can give or take as far as my job goes, but that’s not what this post is about. It is about reading. For pleasure. For vacation even.
Over the last couple of holiday weeks, it was my pleasure to read This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey, hot off the Harvard Book Store’s EBM, by Steve Almond (who I am so excited to announce is a featured author in the next issue of Under the Gum Tree, due out in Jan. 2012), A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, No One Here Gets Out Aliveby Daniel Sugarman, everything under the Music category at The Rumpus, Stephen Elliott’s Daily Rumpus- daily, and because of that, “Adrian Brody” (still thinking about that one). And because I’m a girl, I’m listening to a book on CD– Life, by Keith Richards (unabridged, on 20 CDs)– read by Johnny Depp. I still might buy the hardcopy.
I bought 2011 American Short Fiction, and am eagerly awaiting its arrival in my mailbox. I bought Anne R. Allen’s latest release for my Kindle (okay, maybe this is research, as was Amanda Hocking’s book Hollowland). I just know I’m forgetting something, and leaving out what I’m reading with my kid.
What are you reading? Are you on Goodreads? Friend me there, if you are!
You probably didn’t notice that my site was down again last week. I don’t understand why anyone would want to hack little old me, but whatever. (Hey, while I’m under, you might as well…) Now I have a little facelift! This is one aspect of freelancing that I really enjoy– no, not the hacking part– but the fact that I get to hire other creative freelancers and work with them. Thanks again, Glenn Weatherson, freelance web designer, for being my web-guy and dealing with all the rigamarole at Word Press.
Developmental edits. Substantive edits. Line edits. A self-publisher could use professional assistance in all of these areas. There are other uses for an editor as well.
We believe we know everything there is to know about our characters. We believe we have created a compelling read, a clear conflict, characters the reader can either love or fear for, a satisfying resolution. But the problem is, we’re too close to it. No matter our credentials, we must have someone else read our work. Depending on what they discover, we may need further editing, and might seriously consider hiring a professional to help.
At the recent Self Publishing Boot Camp, I spoke about the need for an editor before self-publishing. I focused particularly on a novel or memoir, because the whole purpose of a book like this is that it engages the reader. If it doesn’t engage the reader, your book will not be successful, or worse, it will attract negative reviews and make you sad.
Someone who has a background as an acquisitions editor at a literary agency or publishing house or who selects and acquires fiction for literary magazines that you like to read might be a good fit for you. I talked about professional readers in my last post. I also talked a bit about Brad. I want to come back to him.
Brad DeHaven hired me to read what he had tentatively titled, “Beyond the Picket Fence.” It was a 65 page memoir of his life. He was 50. The manuscript began before his conception, at the conception of his brother, took the reader through his dysfunctional family situation, his mother’s re-marriage to a Greek mobster who beat him, his drug use and violent teenage years, his brother’s incarceration, meeting the woman he would marry, the upbringing of his children, and culminated in the tale, essentially, of how he went undercover to bust his son’s drug dealer. All this incredible story in 65 pages. Like a freight train headed from point a to point b, it barreled through telling the reader this happened then this happened then this happened. It was a great story, and he has a fantastic voice. The book, the way it was put together, was ineffective.
We had to find the real story in all of that. What did he want the story’s takeaway to be? Where was the hook? The real story was how despite the experiences from his own youth, he was unprepared to deal with his son’s addiction to a powerful prescription painkiller. We worked together on a developmental edit. It became Defining Moments: A Suburban Father’s Journey Into his Son’s Oxy Addiction.
A developmental edit is what you hope your book doesn’t need, frankly. It takes the most time and costs the most money. It doesn’t know what kind of story it wants to be yet. A professional can help a writer uncover this. If it has no focus, it probably needs a developmental edit. If the reader can’t tell who the story is about, it probably needs a developmental edit.
A substantive edit is more common. Sometimes this is called a heavy line edit. The writer understands what the story is and has a decent story arc, cast of characters, resolution. The writer may not have well-rounded characters, there may be inconsistencies with narrative voice or point of view, there may be needless layers of filtering or instances of telling where it really needed to be revealed in a scene. Most manuscripts have these problems, which interfere with the emotional connection the reader makes with the story.
The ability to eliminate these problems is what separates the writer whose self published book languishes on even the shelf of his best friend and the writer whose book is read and recommended and passed around and receives favorable review.
Common problems that necessitate a substantive edit (via pptx nee jpg):
At this past weekend’s Self Publishing Boot Camp, I was privileged to speak on the topic of editing for self-publishers. I had only 30 minutes to speak on the topic, and I wanted to cover the nuts and bolts of what an editor can do and how to find an editor who will work best with you and your work (and your budget). I think I succeeded, but there’s always more to be said. I will focus in this post on the professional evaluation and critique.
As you know, I am a writer and an editor, and in that capacity have taken projects from the idea stage to local celebrity, have helped make good manuscripts better, and bad manuscripts a little less embarrassing for the author. Editing is not just about catching those embarrassing spelling and sentence structure errors.
I framed Saturday’s presentation with my history of working with Brad DeHaven, author of Defining Moments: A Suburban Father’s Journey Into his Son’s Oxy Addiction. (Originally titled Beyond the Picket Fence). Brad is a financial planner who brought me a 65 page manuscript, a memoir, that was a chronological telling of his life until that point. He was 50. Everyone kept telling him he should write his story, so he did. He hired me as a professional reader and I provided an evaluation and critique of his manuscript.
Ideally, you have been receiving critique from readers all along. Ideally, this critique has been free or in exchange for critique on their work, such as in a writing group or a workshop class.
If you were to complete a manuscript to the rave reviews of your beta readers (none of whom you were having sex with or otherwise emotionally attached to) and if you were planning to send it to an agent and go the traditional publishing route, your manuscript just might be ready. The agent, in this case, might be your first professional reader.
You couldn’t expect to receive a personalized letter about why they reject your manuscript, however. You could trust that it was almost there if they request the first fifty and then the rest of the manuscript before refusing to take it on.
When I worked with Andrea Hurst, the agents there often took on manuscripts that they loved but that still needed editing. The agents took on authors with whom they would work to refine and shape the story until it was ready to pitch to publishing houses. This was a tremendous benefit for the author. The agent knows the audience to which she’ll be trying to sell your manuscript. That knowledge makes an agent a particularly valuable editor.
The downside of this is for the agents– who might work on a manuscript for six months or more (as I did on two occasions) on spec, hoping that the financial reimbursement will come when the book sells with a large advance. Something that ultimately lies with the CFO of large house X.
Now, I understand, agents are feeling the pinch and doing this less and less because they end up working hard without a paycheck. So even if you were planning to pursue traditional publishing and obtain an agent, it would behoove you to have a professional read/evaluation before querying.
One of the things you give up by electing to go the self publishing route is even the possibility of built in professional readers who will “fix up” your book along the way: the agent, and the editor at the publishing house (who are also doing this less and less according to popular wisdom). When working towards being a self-published author, you need to hire an editor.
If you self publish a book without an external, objective, professional read, you open yourself to harsh public criticism of your writing via reviews of your book.
The appropriate editor can evaluate and critique your manuscript, revealing shortcomings you didn’t know existed as far as character, plot, narrative voice, point of view, exposition rather than scene. So you can fix them before you either send it to an agent or publish them to your later dismay.
In my next post, I’m going to talk about common issues that necessitate a substantial edit. For now, I want to leave you with this:
In a prior post I mentioned some blogs I enjoy . Here is another blog I follow. Today Jody talks about why you need an editor. I enjoy receiving the RSS feed from Jody Hedlund. Check it out, because you might enjoy her insight on the writing process too.
The big Success, with a capital S is elusive. You do know this, don’t you? Success a la big time fame and fortune, cover of People magazine, tooling around Nob Hill in a Maserati, that kind of success. Slim chance. I’m saying this not to be cynical or mean, but…yeah, I guess I’m cynical. Or maybe let’s call it incredulous.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was pursuing a career in modeling. Another long shot career, another long shot to Success with a capital S. I could pay the best make-up artists and pay the best photographers to do my portfolio. I could pay a personal trainer, starve myself, etc., but when push came to shove, I could not make John Casablancas or Eilene Ford give me that contract. I didn’t have what they were looking for. It didn’t mean what I had wasn’t fine in its own right, just that it wasn’t seen as marketable right then. Having said that, though, if I had gone to the Madison Ave. agencies carrying 25 extra pounds and a Polaroid shot, I never would have even had a chance with these people. Was I disappointed that I didn’t become the next Linda Evangelista? Heck yes. Was I devastated because I spent my retirement money trying to get there and didn’t? No. I didn’t spend more than I could afford to lose on a long shot.
I just have to say that even if you get the perfect book- you pay for the best cover design, buy the best interior layout, hire the industry’s best editors, there is no guarantee, in fact it is not likely, that you will end up driving a Maserati down California Avenue.
All I ask is that you be truthful with yourself. Have a sit down with a mirror and a cup of coffee. What are your goals? What does success look like to you? How will you know when you are successful? What resources will you reasonably commit to get you there? Don’t set yourself up for devastating disappointment. Do you have the diligence not to quit halfway? Create a business plan or a book proposal. Who will buy your book? How will you reach them to sell it?
Just go into it with your eyes open and the rose colored glasses off. And eat healthy, and get regular oil changes for your Toyota.
Starting to think about my presentation at Carla King’s Self Publishing Boot Camp, Nov 12, 2011.
A full Saturday in Palo Alto at Stanford University’s Tresidder Memorial Union. I have 30 minutes to speak on the role of the developmental editor. That’s not a lot of time. What do you think: Should I talk about the business side of editing or the craft side of editing?
If you’re going to be there, please take a moment here and tell me what you’d like my focus to be. I’m looking forward to your comments and questions.
After experiencing some technical difficulties, 1776 Productions, the publishers of the Sacramento Book Review and the San Francisco Book Review, are back in business. The latest issue is on newsstands and here, digitally. If you don’t see it, ask for it!
