Today we welcome Elizabeth Bailey who discusses what she’s
learned about editing.
While editing for others, I’ve
learned a great deal about editing for myself. At one point I realised
how easy
it was to use clichés instead of trying for a different way to say things. I
found out how I drop out of POV without noticing; how I’ve allowed the momentum
to drop by getting self-indulgent or chucking in unnecessary paragraphs of
introspection which are holding up the story.
I have always been conscious of
overkill with emphases and deplore my early texts spattered with italics and
exclamation marks. Thank goodness I got the rights back to them and was able to
edit all that out before self-publishing anew. I remember being told by my
editor that a heroine was two-dimensional. I didn’t know what it meant at the
time, but now I do. The character wasn’t fully rounded. I’ve been able to sort
her out as well.
Having begun in theatre, I’ve
never had trouble creating dialogue. But I have to watch to make sure it serves
a purpose in the story and isn’t just an exercise in impressive stage fluency.
Oh, and because I’m writing historically, often the characters tend to sound
the same and I have to remember to inject speech differences.
It took me some time to learn how
to refrain from intruding as the author. So tempting to tell the reader about
the characters, instead of weaving characterisation into the narrative
structure.
But I didn’t know all this when I
started. I learned some of it just by writing. Having taught drama and learned
a great deal about my own craft in so doing, I found exactly the same
phenomenon popping up when I began to assess and critique. The learning curve
became, in a way, my self-teaching curve. When I came to put it all together in
a book about editing, I discovered exactly how much I had learned from helping
other writers.
“What’s Wrong with your Novel?
And How to Fix it” does not set out to be a writing manual. Rather it is based
on what I found to be the most common problems arising to stop a novel from
getting the attention it deserved from potential publishers. Mostly it’s got
nothing to do with story. It’s almost always about how the story is knitted
together.
PTQ – Page Turning Quality – is
the name of the game these days. Ask an editor or agent what they are looking
for and they will tell you they’ll know it when they see it. They may mention
genres in particular, but really all they want is a story that grabs them from
the first sentence and doesn’t let go. The books that set new genres are
exactly that. Stories the editor just couldn’t put down.
And that’s really all this book
is trying to help with. What’s getting in the way of the reader reading on?
What’s stopping them becoming so involved they can’t help reading just one more
chapter before they put the book down and go to sleep? Why are they tempted to
give up and just flick through a few more pages to see if it pulls them in
again? Why, in a word, has the story lost them?
Losing the reader is really easy.
Holding them to the page is the skill. That, to my mind, is the where the
writing craft comes into its own. I don’t care what genre it is, literary or
commercial fiction. If the reader starts skipping paragraphs looking for the
next interesting bit, you’ve had it.
The mantra my clients likely get
tired of hearing is “cut to the chase”, but that’s the single most important
skill to learn in my view. Knowing what works and what doesn’t work. What’s
relevant and needed? What can be done without? Get that right and you’re pretty
much there.
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