Don't blame the author!

by Carola

I'm in the middle of checking the galleys (known these days as First Pass Pages) for the third of my Daisy Dalrymple mysteries, Requiem for a Mezzo. It's going to be reissued with new artwork next January.

The process involves re-typesetting the text. I'm very glad I've been given a chance to go over it. You wouldn't believe how many fresh errors have crept in. There are letters missing from the middle of words; letters replaced with a different one; transpositions; and even one four-word phrase printed twice consecutively.

Last week I was checking the first pass pages of Buried in the Country, my fourth Cornish mystery, due out in December.

The manuscript went through my own final edit before sending it off, my editor's reading, the copyeditor's reading, my reading and editing of the copyeditor's corrections and suggestions, and then typesetting. The result was--not unexpectedly--considerably worse than Requiem's. Besides a few things all the editing eyes had missed, I found the horrid results of the typesetter's trying to make sense of my red-pencil changes to the copyeditor's brown-pencil changes. But as well as those, there were several introduced errors such as missing letters (as for was, offical for official), a name not capitalized, and oddest of all, scotch for splotch!

I hope I caught everything, but I wouldn't swear to it. Nor can I be certain that my corrections will make it correctly into print.


It's a complicated business going from a .doc file to a book. If the end result isn't perfect, don't blame the author!

Dexter Meets Clarinda Clarabelle and the Bear

by Jaden Terrell


I've been reading a lot of unpublished manuscripts lately. Most of the manuscripts aren't bad. Most of the writing is competent, sometimes even clever. A number seem like they could be publishable with some work--in some cases, with a lot of work. Very, very few are just not good.


There are two trends I've noticed in the unsuccessful manuscripts. Not all the unsuccessful ones fall into these catagories, but an astonishing number do.


The first is the story with the unsympathetic protagonist. If all a reader sees your "hero" do is kill or terrorize innocents, scam elderly grandmas, or say snide things to and about family and "friends," they're unlikely to care if the character escapes the trap your antagonist has set. In fact, they're more likely to hope said character gets swallowed by an anaconda.


Sure, it's fine to have a flawed protagonist. It's even fine to have a protagonist who is a criminal. Look at Dexter. Dexter is violent. Heck, Dexter is a monster. The thing about Dexter, though, is that he is sympathetic. Not because he's a monster, but in spite of it. For one thing, he only kills bad guys. The worst of the worst. But IMHO, the real reason Dexter is so popular is that there's something vulnerable about him. He's a lost kid who wants to be human--as much as he's capable of wanting--and doesn't know how. He says he's incapable of love, but you sense that he felt, if not love, then something akin to love for his foster father, Harry. He admired Harry, not least of all, for Harry's humanity. At the same time, Dexter has a sharp wit and a tilted view of humanity that allows him to make humorous yet insightful social commentary. It's a hard thing to pull off, but if you're going to put your readers in the mind of a psychopath, then you should definitely study how Jeff Lindsay makes it worth their while.


In general, though, readers want to read about characters they can like and identify with. If you want readers to invest time and emotion in your work, it's a good idea to write about people readers can care about.


The second trend I've noticed is the killer "hook" followed by forty pages of drinking coffee and picking up laundry. I'll read an amazing first chapter in which Clarinda Clarabelle snatches her baby boy from his cradle and flees through a blizzard, her maniacal, axe-wielding husband close behind her. She stumbles. The baby gives a squall of protest. A shadow passes over her, and she looks up into her husband's maddened eyes. The scene ends.


Chapter two: Twenty-six-year-old Buffy Belinda and her friends are sitting in a quaint little cafe grousing about their boyfriends, eating cream puffs, patting their skinny bellies, and moaning about how fat they are. One of them is getting married in a few days. They go try on bridesmaid's dresses. She share cute anecdotes and reminiscences. Buffy Belinda goes home and snuggles up on the couch with her cat, feeling a little sad because she just broke up with her handsome boyfriend, who is a lawyer, and while she doesn't begrudge her friend the big wedding, she can't suppress a twinge of envy. Forty pages later, as she is helping her friend attach her wedding veil, Buffy Belinda gets a run in her panty hose. She goes out to her car to get a bottle of nail polish from the glove compartment. Her cell phone rings. Her cousin Angelina has been killed while hiking the Appalachian Trail. The rangers say Angelina was killed by a bear, but that's impossible, because Angelina has always had an affinity for bears; remember how, when she was six years old, she climbed into the grizzly enclosure at the zoo and curled up with the mama grizzly and her cubs? No way would Angelina be killed by a bear.


But . . . What happened to Clarinda Clarabelle? That's the book I want to read.


Don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to a good prologue, or even a first chapter that serves as a prologue, but that chapter should merge seamlessly with the rest of the book, not stand out like a fur coat tacked to the end of an heirloom quilt.


In some cases, it's obvious that the writer knew there was a problem with the story and tried to make up for it by putting the most exciting scene in the story--or even a tangentially related scene that wasn't originally in the story--right up front. Grab 'em by the throat and don't let go, we're told. You have to hook the reader in the beginning. True. But what do you do once you've hooked 'em?


I think the biggest reason for these problems--and most of the others I've seen--is that it's so hard to tell when your work is ready. You finish your first draft, and it seems wonderful. You love it so much you can't even see that your new literary baby is red and wrinkled and its head is a little squished on one side. Then you let it sit for awhile and it seems terrible. You edit and edit until you have something you're really proud of. Wonderful again. Then the rejections begin to roll in, and you're convinced it's the worst drivel ever written and why did you ever think you could do this anyway?


But we do it anyway. It takes a tremendous act of courage to put your work out there for others to see, even knowing that six months or a year from now, you may read over what you've written and cringe. Take heart. When you can see the previously invisible problems in your manuscript, it means you've become a better writer. And if you can write that terrific chapter one, you can write an equally terrific chapter two.

I Just Want Somebody to Love

By Beth Terrell

Lately, I've had occasion to read a number of manuscripts from aspiring authors. Some have been excellent, some interesting but rough around the edges, and some in need of serious editing. One of the most frustrating issues I've seen is the grammatically polished manuscript that lacks emotional resonance. I hear the same complaint from others who are involved in the same endeavor as I. "This is very well written, but...," followed by a helpless gesture. "No spark." It's frustrating because these stories are written by good writers, writers who have worked at their craft and who clearly have ability.

Sometimes the plots are action-packed, but there's no one with whom the reader can be emotionally engaged. These stories, no matter how brilliantly-conceived, feel flat. Sometimes there is a remarkable prologue that is both poignant and authentic, with a richness of detail and a depth of emotion that made me say, "Yes! This is what it's all about." But then, chapter one would bring an adequately written scene with a reasonably likable protagonist doing things that ought to be rife with tension but somehow aren't. Often, the rest of the piece has no connection to the prologue, or the connection is only tangential. Sometimes the story is elegantly written, but the writer gets caught up in the language and forgets to tell the story. Beautiful writing can only carry a story so far; if there are twenty pages between the time our hero pours a vodka tonic and the time he takes his first sip of it, there's a good chance the story could use some tightening. (I'm talking about mystery/suspense, not literary fiction, but even in literary fiction, a writer who's going to try that had better be very, very good at it.)

I think this happens for several reasons. First, we know our characters so well, we often think we've put things on the page that we haven't. "Of course she locked him out of the house and threw his electric guitar out the window. He knew her father was an abusive drunk who beat and humiliated her throughout her childhood, but he still came home three sheets in the wind after a night out with the boys." We know our character's motivations, but unless we find a way to (subtly) show our readers this, they'll just think she's an irrational witch who just broke her husband's most prized possession without warning.

Another reason may be that we tend to do more of what we do well. Elmore Leonard does dialogue very well. You'll notice that his books have a lot of dialogue. James Lee Burke is a master of description. Guess what his book is full of. Of course, Leonard and Burke are geniuses at what they do, but we lesser souls do the same thing. I'm good at character development. The first draft of my book had almost no plot at all, but boy did it have character development. It was one long character study with a little thread of mystery woven through it. I'm pretty good at dialogue too, so naturally, people in my first draft talked a lot. To make that book into something readable, I had to become aware of my strengths and weaknesses and then work hard to showcase the former and strengthen the latter. I'm still no James Lee Burke, but I learned how and when to describe things. I'm no Philip Margolin, but I learned how to plot.

Reading these manuscripts taught me that, while the ability to write beautifully is a great gift, it can only carry a book so far. The reader has to care about what happens---and they usually only care what happens if they care who it's happening to.

Give us someone to love, though, and we'll follow you anywhere.

Nothing Wasted, Nothing Gained

by Beth Terrell

Last week, my agent called me with the news that she was heading to New York for BEA (Book Expo America) and that a publisher who had been considering my manuscript might be interested. "He loves the first 100 pages," she said, "and he loves from page 266 on, but he'd like you to do some work on the pages in between."

Ever been there? Maybe you're there now, knowing your book needs work but not quite sure where to start.

In my case, "some work" turned out to be cutting 12,000 words from the 166 pages in question. This wasn't an easy feat, since I had already trimmed the manuscript as much as I could figure out how to at the time--some 8,000 words. But he was right; the story dragged in the middle. "There's a lot of back and forth in there," I was told. This gave me the clue I needed to start renovating my novel.

I realized that I'd fallen into the trap of trying to follow my private investigator's progress too realistically. In a real investigation, one interview leads to the next, then to another. Somewhere along the way, an inconsistency is revealed. or a new clue uncovered that leads back to the first person in the chain. Then the detective goes back to confront that person. It's also not unusual for an investigator to ask the same question of several suspects. Subtle differences in their answers may provide illumination or reveal deception. Realistic, yes (at least, I think so), but when I combined all the scenes with the same suspect (as much as possible), it became painfully clear that the result was not realism but repetition that bogged down the plot.

If you've edited a novel before, you know what comes next. The first step was to combine all scenes that could be combined. This involved more than just cutting one scene and slapping it onto the end of another. In one case, Jared (my PI) wants to interview a husband and wife who recently lost a son. He calls the house, and the husband agrees that Jared can come over to talk to them, but believing his wife is in an emotionally vulnerable state, the husband makes sure she isn't home when Jared comes by. In the original version, Jared comes back later to interview the wife while the husband isn't home. I needed to combine the two scenes, but I also needed the husband to want to keep Jared away from the wife. What to do? I finally realized (yes, gentle reader, I'm slow sometimes) that if the wife answered the phone instead of the husband, I could combine the two interviews into a tension-filled scene with the wife trying to be forthcoming and her husband trying to steer her away from painful subjects.

This scene was both challenging and enlightening to write. Often, we think of tension or conflict as arising from two people arguing or fighting. (Think of the traditional romantic formula in which the man and woman seem to despise each other from their first meeting and then spend at least half the book sniping at each other.) But in this scene, two characters who love and want the best for each other have opposing ideas about how that "best" can be achieved.

With each chapter, I asked myself, "What's the key information the reader must get from this chapter?" and "Does this sentence contribute to that?" I ended up with eight fewer chapters than I had when I'd started, and after that, I was able to find some other places to tighten the manuscript. I ended up cutting a few small things that, if a publisher (the one who requested the edits) or another should accept the book, I would make a pitch to put back, but overall, I'm pleased with the results.

When she first gave me my editing assignment, my agent said, "I hate to have you do all this work when another publisher may want it as is."

"If it makes the book better, it won't be wasted," I said. "And if it doesn't make the book better, I'll learn something from it, so it still won't be wasted."

As it turns out, it was both, so whether anything comes of the pitches she's making on my behalf this week, I'm grateful to that publisher for pointing me in a direction that helped me write a better book.

How about you? Care to share a time when you learned something valuable from editing your novel?