I know. I ought to be the one doing the free drawing. And I will be giving away freebies when I’m closer to the release date for The Art & Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual and The Art & Craft of Prose: 3rd Practitioner’s Manual (September, cross your fingers).
But in the meantime, if you’re planning on working on your manuscript this summer, you might want to see if you can snag a free ebie on Katie’s blog: Wordplay.
Once again, my sterling memory rewards me. That and the big ole note I wrote to myself last week.
It’s #editingchat day again, people, today at noon Pacific Standard Time. (That’s 1:00 pm MST. 2:00 pm CST. 3:00 PM EST. And I believe 8:00 pm GST for those of you on the windy Yorkshire moors & southward.)
Last week we did a demonstration of Developmental Editing from a single sentence. And I’ve heard rumblings there’s at least one person out there eager to submit her own this week for the same working over—I mean illumination—I mean, actually, it’s @mterrygreen, so really, there’s no telling WHAT’S going to happen.
Today noon PST: #editingchat on Twitter. You can go to that link and follow the conversation even if you don’t have a Twitter account (although you need to be on Twitter to contribute)—every time Twitter tells you there’s a new tweet, just click on those words, and it’ll refresh your screen.
Last week, Roz Morris and I had the third of our four scheduled weekly editorial chats: Talking Prose. The week before we were Talking Character. And the first week we were Talking Plot. We’re running these chats here once a week throughout the month of April.
We were deep and profound last week and taught you exactly how to write beautiful prose. (For the record: it’s not a quick pill.) We gave you examples of the difference between first-draft prose and polished prose from the greats. And, as Roz said on her blog, it’s true—I did threaten to shave my head and move to Tibet. Finally, we gave you a pop-quiz: name that poet!
Now please join us today for our grand finale of these weekly editor chats: Talking Revision.
Roz: A lot of writers don’t realise how much a manuscript can change in the editing stages. How completely a first draft has to be pulled apart, twisted and tested. I think for most writers the intensive creative work happens after the first draft and when they’re into revisions.
I come across a lot of writers who think revision is just about correcting their spellings or finding the more felicitous phrase. And they imagine when they send the manuscript to me that that is mostly what I’ll focus on. It’s a bit of a shock for them when they find I’ve written one page on their prose style, if that, and nineteen on the physics of their story, how the characters could be tested more and whether the subject’s full potential has been brought out.
Victoria: ‘The physics of the story’—such a lovely phrase. Yes, there is great confusion out there about the differences between Copy Editing for correct writing, and Line Editing for beautiful writing, and Developmental Editing for great storytelling. So much of writing a novel happens before you write it. (And then so much happens afterward!) It’s diving deep, deep into the river of this story, swimming at the bottom, feeling into the nooks and crannies between the riverstones for the treasures buried down there.
Roz: Victoria, I know you do developmental editing—working with the client before they’ve even drafted. Can you tell me more about that?
Victoria: Oy! Thank you for asking. What a wonderful time we have!
Say someone comes to me and says, “I’ve been writing stories all my life (or since I went to college or, you know, just since last week), and I have these characters, and this is who they are, and this is what they do, and I want to tell the story about these things that happen to them.” Maybe they’ve already written a first draft of that story. Or maybe they’ve written several drafts and even polished the most recent within an inch of its life. Or maybe they’re already a publishing author and just stuck trying to think themself all the way through this new story, to figure out how to tell it in just the right way. Whatever the reason, they bring it to me because it’s not yet what they so profoundly long for it to be.
Roz: You have hit on something really important—’what they so profoundly long for it to be’. How do I know if my novel’s finished? Because it is, at last, what I profoundly wanted it to be. And more. That’s not me patting myself on the back saying I’m a clever so-and-so, that’s me knowing I have mined far enough and deep enough, and have not stopped until I could say ‘yes, finally I got to the bottom of this’.
Victoria: I always tell clients, “You know you’re done when your editor tells you you’re done.” [wicked laugh] To a certain degree, you know, that really is the quickest way to tell. If you’re in an all-fired hurry to get published, folks.
Roz: It takes so much time. Often we don’t know what that vision truly is until the book’s finished.
Victoria: No, we really don’t. That’s why we’re writing, always writing toward the Climax, but we don’t worry about the Resolution until we get there. We’re writing to learn what we know, but we won’t know what we know until we’ve written it. And it’s not just what we know about this story. It’s what we know about being alive.
Roz: Before we’re finished we know only this: is there is more potential and more work needs to be done. A good proportion of the thinking and wrestling time is trying to get the idea to talk, to stop being just potential and start being scenes, dilemmas, characters, resolutions.
Victoria: Sigh. All that great meditative mental exercise! Yoga for the creative muscles.
Roz: Eek, not yoga! Yoga makes me murderously cross. You think tartan makes me irritable? You haven’t seen me in a yoga class.
Victoria: [laughing] Oh, no! Don’t make her do lotus position in a plaid tam-o’-shanter!
Roz: But you make a solid-gold point about meditation, as this is a process of deep exploration and refinement. So how do you do this with someone else’s story?
Victoria: Well, the first thing I do is ask the writer, “What matters most in the world to this main protagonist?” (In fact, we just did this exercise on #editingchat last week.) And they say, “He wants his ex back.” Or, “She’s afraid her husband’s having an affair, but she’s also afraid of a lot of even bigger things happening to her.” Or, “They want these nuts relatives out of their life.” And we go into that—talking about where this character’s deepest need is aiming them.
Then I say, “And what does this main protagonist need that keeps them from attaining that goal?” And very often I hear, “Someone interfered.” Or, “There was an earthquake.” Or, “The relatives are just there.” And I say, “Yes, but how does the main protagonist interfere with that goal? In what way is this character buying into their own problems?”
Because that’s the inherent conflict in the story. That buying into one’s own problems is what fiction is all about. Even in a thriller—the protagonist is never just an innocent victim of the dreadful people in black with all that high-tech weaponry. That protagonist needs to save their own life, of course, but they also have a very powerful need to be in that uber-dangerous position in the first place. And that need is what they have to resolve. Then the people in black go away.
Roz: Buying into their own problems—absolutely! That is satisfying because when they stop, we know we’ve come out into the sunshine.There should be a reason why this story is happening to this character and not to a different one.
Victoria: Yes. Because there are only so many basic plots, but there are as many characters are there are human beings throughout history, meaning: infinite. And how this one, unique protagonist copes with the plot you give them creates this one, unique story. Every protagonist comes eventually up against dreadful people in black. It’s just that sometimes those are symbolic people, they’re things going on around them that they—because of their needs—have to be involved with. Identifying those conflicting needs is the first and most important step. That tension is the muscle that moves the entire story irresistibly forward.
Roz: You know how interesting characters are ‘this but that’? Maybe we should redefine that. Interesting characters ‘want this but do that’ or they ‘do this but want that’.
Victoria: Yes. Those conflicting needs. The characters need to go for one thing, but they also need to go for something else simultaneously. “Do as I say, not as I do!” From this craziness we can extrapolate, “What is this protagonist’s worst nightmare?” It is, of course, the ultimate collision of those two needs. So we aim the protagonist at that collision. And that’s going to be their Climax.
Then we do all the work of identifying how the whole thing starts, the Hook, what you need to know to understand it, the Backstory, and three good, cracking Conflicts of increasing tension, including the Faux Resolution after the last one that makes the reader think it’s all over, the Climax isn’t really going to happen after all.
That’s the basic work of designing a great story. It sounds quick and easy, but it’s really huge and complex and rich. And it’s different for every single story—every writer has a whole world of information and knowledge and understanding to explore, and every story is bursting at the seams with things that can happen, things that can be said, details that can be recorded in tracking the progress toward that Climax. We talk about all that. Tremendous stuff!
Roz: And that, folks, is why stories change a lot as you write and revise them. The more we get to know our characters and our world, the more collisions we get, the more finely tuned the conflicts can be.
It’s funny how seeing the process written out like that, with key stages and instructions to add three drops of conflict and stand well back, can make it look like painting by numbers. Of course it’s not at all, but I’m sure I can hear some people shifting and tutting.
Victoria: Play devil’s advocate, there’s a love.
Roz: They’re saying that they don’t like designing to templates, they want the story to evolve naturally and so on.
Victoria: Tut tut, indeed!
Roz: Folks, this is natural—it is the way storytelling works. It’s about hitting psychological beats. Not every single story has to do them in the same way, and yes you can have four conflicts if you want instead of three, but you have to mine the idea so that it takes the reader on the best journey for the kind of story you want.
Victoria: You know, I objected to the idea of a set number of conflicts for quite some time. I thought long and hard for many moons before finally deciding to call out those three big, main ones. It’s just three-act structure. You need a catastrophe to spin your story at the ends of Acts I and II, and of course things do change at the mid-point of any story—that’s simple symmetry. However, I know, it sounds like formula when you first hear it because that’s only on the grand, macro-scale. Every novel needs a whole, rambling, bingety-bang-boom series of problems for the characters to deal with. Keep throwing catastrophes at them! Readers love that.
Roz: Also, we have to keep that original vision in mind. I often find as I’m experimenting that my story wanders into flavours I don’t want. Of course I’ll stop and examine them, and check if I should revise my initial vision. Each idea probably has many possible stories in it and I spend a lot of time trying to crystallise how I want to explore it—and how I don’t.
Victoria: Oh, the long, luxurious work. That’s really what it’s all about. Taking that original vision and re-imagining it in more and more crystalline layers to get at the gold at the very bottom of the magical river, what you so profoundly long for this story to be.
Hey, folks. It’s going to be a light-weight post this week, for two very good reasons:
Last week’s post ate my brain. But at least now it’s written, so the next time someone asks me, “What’s really going on with publishing these days?” I can just give them a Mona Lisa smile and point silently in its direction.
I broke my laptop last week (What do you mean, You’re not supposed to pick it up by the screen?), and it spent the weekend being dismantled on the kitchen table, with the result that its hinges aren’t broken anymore, but now the touchpad doesn’t work. So I’m on a backup laptop my sys admin dug out of the IT museum of his office, and I’m not familiar with this keyboard and I don’t have access to my bizillions of notes I write to myself all the time. Please bear with me.
I asked for suggestions on Twitter last Friday on what I should write about today, and Shane Arthur said, “Write about Show Don’t Tell.”
But none of that contains a whole lot of instructions on exactly how to Show Not Tell, even if you wholeheartedly believe me.
Today let’s talk Show Not Tell. Showing is scenes. And scenes can be broken down into the three basic aspects of showing:
Description
When you describe things in scenes—the setting, the environment, the objects, what the characters look like—you’re creating the fictional world in which your story plays out. You’re inviting your readers in. And, although writers used to be able to wax quite lyrical with description, readers nowadays are mostly antsy little devils, raised on television where all the description is delivered in the blink of an eye, so you have to be pretty canny with this.
The key to great description is the significance of your details. Describe everything in as great a detail as you can, then go through and decide which details are the ones that mean the most to these characters in this world at this very instant of your story. Which ones carry the greatest significance. Get rid of the rest, and use only those. Those are your telling details.
Action
When you show action in scenes—the things your characters do, the ways in which they move, the places they go, the terrible, dreadful, portentous activities they get up to when they get there—you’re creating a physical experience for the reader of identifying with those characters. This is why action scenes must be crafted and written with such extraordinary care, especially nowadays when (ditto) your readers have been raised on television, which employs carefully-rehearsed choreography to keep audience investment in the characters under perfect control.
Dialog
When you create dialog for scenes—the words that come out of your characters’ mouths in their incessant, futile, unending struggle to communicate and understand each other (as well as the internal dialog of their thoughts, but don’t use internal dialog, guys, because unless it’s the whole point of your story it’s just laziness)—you’re introducing your readers to your characters. You’re saying, “Reader, meet protagonist.” And your protagonist is saying, “This is who I am inside, what relationships I have to these other characters. These are the qualities I have with which to cope. These are the things I need.”
And the pleasure of meeting your characters is, fundamentally, the whole reason your readers are reading this story.
Now, when you write in exposition—when you tell your story instead of showing it—you’re putting yourself in front of your characters and interpreting what they go through for your readers.
Readers don’t like that. It’s talking down to them. They really prefer to interpret for themselves.
But when you strive to write always, always in scenes—when you show your story instead of telling it—using these three aspects of description, action, and dialog, a funny thing happens. Your characters come alive. You, the narrator, disappear, and your readers are suddenly in the room (or on the train or hanging from a parachute or running across a plain) alongside your characters. They’re watching, they’re identifying, they’re listening. . .and all of this adds up to an experience: the experience of your story.
Give that to your readers. That’s why they read fiction.
I remembered! May the heavens open and the angels sing. I remembered to tell you guys we’re holding #editingchat!
Today at noon Pacific Standard Time on Twitter. You can go to that link and follow the conversation even if you don’t have a Twitter account (although you need to be on Twitter to contribute). Every time Twitter tells you there’s a new tweet, just click on those words, and it’ll refresh your screen.
That’s 1:00 pm Mountain Standard Time, 2:00 pm Central Standard Time, and 3:00 pm Eastern Standard Time. For one hour. I think we’re going to talk about writer’s block.
Do you guys know the old Calvin & Hobbes cartoon about Calvin putting a big cube in the middle of his desk so he can’t work? It’s his Writer’s Block. He says, “I must be way ahead of my time.”
Today at 12:00 pm PST. Look for the #editingchat hashtag. . .or else just me typing as fast as I can.
UPDATE: We didn’t even get to writer’s block. We were too busy doing a Developmental Edit on an unwritten story based on a single sentence. It’s posted: #editingchat
Last week, Roz Morris and I had the second of our four scheduled weekly editorial chats: Talking Character. The week before that we were Talking Plot. We’re running these chats here once a week throughout the month of April.
We had great fun and talked about the very essence of character, how to discover it, how to design it, how to illuminate it on the page. Roz admitted she hates loud plaid, and I gave her a tam-o’-shanter and a Scottish accent.
Now please join us today for the third of these weekly editor chats: Talking Prose.
Victoria: So let’s talk prose. Roz, you’ve mentioned in our earlier interviews your meticulous attention to the final polish of your manuscript, the scrutiny of every single detail and removal of even lines you love if they cast slightly the wrong atmosphere over a scene.
Roz: Oh yes. That’s one of the many painful things you have to do for a proper edit. When you say it in one sentence like that you make it sound so easy, but it isn’t. I might wander around for a good couple of days, trying to ignore the nagging voice that tells me a phrase doesn’t fit, or a joke is breaking the fourth wall, or the precious sequence I’d always wanted to use from the very beginning really does not work, no matter how much the shoehorn is applied. Especially towards the end of an edit, where all the drek has long gone and everything feels beautifully polished and meaningful.
Victoria: Drek. [laughing] Wonderful word!
Yes—that’s where even the most wonderful Line Editor in the world can’t Line Edit their own work. My husband does mine, and then I send it to another writer friend as well. Otherwise I’ll spend the next twenty years clutching that manuscript in my sweaty little palms, listening to the ringing in my ears and thinking the angels are coming to get me.
Was it Oscar Wilde who said, “I spent all morning taking out a comma and all afternoon putting it back in again”?
So, Roz, if you could give writers only one piece of advice toward accomplishing the best possible prose, what would it be?
Roz: If your writer’s spider sense is tingling, telling you something is wrong, for goodness’ sake listen. It knows what it’s talking about, and it is speaking for the good of your book. Fortunately I find that the more I edit a novel, the more sure I become of what it needs and what it doesn’t need. That allows me to be more and more ruthless and send those darlings packing.
But so much of writing comes down to instinct. Do you feel something is wrong? Well, you’re probably right.
Victoria: I have such a terrible time with my own manuscripts, and I have to warn clients away from this same trap—I’ll get to that point when I’ve done everything I can possibly do, and, by gum, it looks like it might actually be finished. . .and I’ll get a blinding flash, ‘No! Instead of being finished, I must now transpose something enormous and fundamental that will alter the entire novel!’ And the next thing I know it’s one particular night last week, 2:30 in the morning, and I’m doing a read-through of my latest novel, which has been going cold for the last year, and shaking my head, tutting at myself because that last enormous alteration was completely idiotic, and now I have made a ton of work for myself putting it all back the way it was before.
I know, I know. You’re going to say, “But didn’t you save the original?” Of course I saved the original! But that previous, correct iteration wasn’t it.
It’s a huge soapbox with me, with the manuscripts I see every day, that the hardworking, dedicated development of prose skills is criminally neglected by the mouthpieces of today’s publishing industry. “The writing’s not important,” they’ll say, and I just want to say, “Sure, the writing’s not important—if you don’t want to be a writer.” Otherwise, yeah, it’s kind of important. In fact, this is one of the four questions I get asked most frequently: what exactly is Line Editing and why is it important? Every time I see mindless cliches in published works I just want to shave my head and move to Tibet.
Roz: It’s not just about cliches. It’s about originality and developing an ear for what belongs. A book’s prose style is like its singing voice. Some people don’t mind too much about this, but for me, it’s tremendously important. I can be put right off a story if the writer’s voice grates on my ear.
Victoria: Oh, me too. That’s why I read so little recently-published fiction. I’ve waded through a certain amount of it, but since the demise of the publisher’s Line Editor it’s really not worth it to me anymore. Why bother, when there’s so much beautiful literature from the first half of the twentieth century still waiting to be read? (I just read Shirley Jackson’s ghost story, The Haunting of Hill House last week. Talk about beautiful.)
The thing is structure can be learned fairly quickly. The necessity for pitting characters against each other and themselves can be learned fairly quickly. Cliches of course can be learned without even thinking about it. But beautiful writing is a craft it takes a lifetime to learn to do properly.
Roz: That’s right, and it’s probably one of the hardest things to teach. Structure is logical, although the logic is often emotional as much as constructional. But writing good prose seems to come from somewhere else.
Victoria: It absolutely is the hardest thing to teach. Just last week I got a question for the advice column on how much Line Editing of a peer critique manuscript is too much, and I had to say, “Any at all. Just don’t do it.” It’s taken me thirty years in this profession to develop the proper ear for voice. It is simply not something you can learn to do from only a year or two in the trenches.
Beautiful voice involves the work of both a talented, dedicated writer and a talented, dedicated editor, and mastery of prose defines the literary voices we best remember and love. There is simply no comparison between a writer saying, “We threw ourselves into each other’s arms and smothered each other with frantic kisses,” and Hemingway saying, “Like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.” Or between the writer who says, “She was a tramp and a whore, and I would never forgive her for what she did to Moose Malloy,” and Chandler saying, “It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way—but not as far as Velma had gone.”
Prose is, in fact, the single greatest over-riding quality that separates passing blips on readers’ radar from timeless classics.
Roz: What makes good prose? Can we pin it down?
All the great stylists wrap you in their rhythms and the way they see the world. You know that if you had them in the room with you, the way they talked would be very different from the way anyone else did. To build that distinctive quality takes a long time. They are more persuasive than the average writer, more compelling. Charisma on the page.
It doesn’t have to involve fancy or complex language, although that works for some. But ‘writerly language’ is often used to hide, too. Those two examples you’ve picked are excellent choices because the words and the sentences are simple. So what do we find so compelling about this simplicity? Intelligence , perceptiveness. The confidence the writer has to be stylish yet direct. Too many writers assume that good writing has to be complicated, or difficult to read. But good writing doesn’t obfuscate. It lets through all the light it can.
Victoria: Absolutely. It’s all about learning the many techniques of fiction—techniques that have been stumbled upon and investigated by literary geniuses ever since Austen and the Brontes—that allow you to make your words transparent. You want the page to completely disappear, so your fictional dream itself comes right out and takes up habitation in the reader’s world, in their own living room. It is, as you say, all about illumination.
Roz: I love these words we use to try to define what makes great prose. Transparent is a good one. Crystalline is another. Good writing doesn’t get in the way.
Victoria: Crystalline’s a fabulous word. Words are wonderful, aren’t they? You know, I’ve seen the last few Line Edits Chandler did on the final sentences of The Long Good-Bye. It’s meticulous.
Roz: Now that would be interesting to see. But final sentences need forensic amounts of work. Indeed, I always feel like the final scene in a novel, more than any other, needs to be as carefully staged as a conjuring trick. It is pulling together threads, withdrawing from the story, tucking it away (neatly or not) and saying farewell. It often feels as though there is too much to squeeze in—and not just in terms of tidying away the plot details. There are emotional beats to despatch as well. Very tricky to make them all play well together.
Victoria: Totally forensic! Ye gods. The first page, too. But the final scene even more so. It’s the point at which you’re no longer hauling the reader willy-nilly through your story, you’re jujitsu-ing them through you and blasting them forward without you into their own future, the epiphany that changes them.
Now, after all these years of editing, I can actually pin the preliminaries of beautiful writing down pretty closely: clean, clear, detailed language. Notwithstanding someone like Henry James—who was a pure-&-simple sadist about his perfect grasp of English—simple language is classic language. So that’s the first thing I do in a Line Edit: go through removing all extraneous words. You’d be surprised how many words we can take when we think we know how to say something we think is the thing we want to say. Just say it.
Roz: Still trying to work out how to. . .
Victoria: You say that, but with your publishing track record I know you’re being modest. Because as soon as the writer cuts out the extraneous words, they see they forgot to put in quite a bit of the actual story—and I happen to know from reading Nail Your Novel this isn’t something you let happen to you.
Roz: [laughing] It still doesn’t come easily. I sweat waterfalls trying to strip out the unnecessaries so that I can see what needs to be there.
Victoria: Take stuff out, put stuff in. There’s that comma again. I spend a lot of time with clients saying, “Cut all that exposition. You don’t need to explain. Send me a description of x, send me a sketch of y. When so-&-so looks at such-&-such, what do they see?” I don’t care if they’re writing fantasy or sci-fi or whatever—it had better be completely and entirely detailed and tangible.
Roz: That goes back to the groundwork we talked about in the Character chat last week. Sometimes authors leave these questions until late in the process, others prefer to do it earlier. Those descriptions, thoughts and reactions may not reach the final text, but they are necessary to make the world of the novel real.
Victoria: Those are your complex layers, which is why you need simple language, so the complexities of your characters’ world will be clear and deep and intuitive to your reader. I even tell aspiring writers to use simple rhythms for their sentences: when in doubt, two short sentences and a long, or two longs and a short. Start with these basics. Later, when your manuscript has gone cold, you can go through cutting compound sentences in half or creating new compound sentences, altering an active verb to a gerund here or a gerund to an active verb there, smoothing it all out, listening for the silence in the background that signals the white noise is gone, ‘This is the way it’s meant to sound.’
But of course doing that kind of thing over and over again on your own manuscripts takes years—years added to your ms, years off your blessed life. This novel I was working on until 2:30 am last week I started when my son was four, and he’s now almost fourteen. And it’s one of my more recent novels!
That’s why I’m always telling aspiring writers, “Be in it for the long haul, or find something you like better. This is not a lottery, it’s an art form.”
Roz: I’m always telling people novel-writing is a long game. We write stories in long form. We take even longer working out how to do it. Novels and novel-writers evolve at glacial pace. It’s a wonder we have time to get good at it. At least we can look forward to getting better at it the older we get! (Touch wood. . .If you ever see me wearing plaid, soft or loud, you’ll know I’ve lost my marbles. . .)
Victoria: ‘I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.’
Here’s your question, people: In your experience, what’s the most difficult part of developing prose? (Extra brownie buttons if you can identify that quote!)
So let’s tackle the one you’re all really interested in:
4. What’s the inside scoop on the state of publishing these days i.e. POD, ebooks, self-publishing, multimedia, et cetera? I mean, what’s really going on out there?
Short answer: fireworks.
Medium-short answer: the most exciting, innovative, anarchic era since the invention of the Gutenberg Press.
Long answer: Let’s sit down for a chat. Go ahead, get yourself a cup of tea. I’ll wait.
Got it? Good. Get comfy.
You see, the crux of the matter is that, historically, printing a whole book has always been simply too complex and required too specialized of machinery for the average layperson to manage—meaning the distinction between writers (who need only pens and paper and at least one physical receptor on the material world) and publishers (who need that specialized machinery and its attendant expertise) has been vast, complex, and well-deserved.
Remember those hand-cranked purple-ink mimeograph machines schools used to use for handouts? Well, it would’ve taken some real OCD dedication to turn out an entire purple-ink book that way. And, wow, did that ink smell.
Of course, there was a time—Virginia Woolf’s day—and a place—the small, circumscribed world of London publishing of that era—when you could still run out and buy a small offset printing press, install it in your basement, and just go into the publishing business for yourself. Leonard Woolf actually bought the Hogarth Press to give Virginia something mindless and rote to do to stave off her recurring bouts of mental illness, which qualifications certainly describe setting type by hand. (As it turned out, that was a little too mindless and rote even for Virginia, so they wound up hiring aspiring young writers to do it for them instead, while Virginia wrote her books and lovely short stories until her mental illness got the best of her and she loaded her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse.) Hogarth Press originally published such canonical luminaries as T.S. Eliot and Freud.
And, naturally, there was an even earlier time when every single copy of every single manuscript in circulation had to be handwritten by specially-trained monks with simply fabulous handwriting. That era ended with the invention of the Gutenberg Press, which extraordinary mechanical development not only launched the first major European marketing campaign that turned the Tudor family from scary-cousin violent ursurping freakazoids into a recognized and even acclaimed dynasty on the English throne, but also brought the concept of libraries out of the universities and into private homes.
Picture all those monks staring in amazement as they shook out their cramped and aching writing hands.
And the publishing industry has remained hooked to that machine ever since. In our own twentieth century, printing presses became more and more sophisticated and consequently more expensive over the decades, until the only people who could afford to print books in the identical masses to which readers had grown accustomed were big publishing houses, most of them headquartered in New York City. However, even into the 1960s and early ’70s small presses did frequently produce what appeared to be books straight off hand-cranked presses, especially in the heady anarchy-soused days of the 1960s. In fact, Richard Brautigan’s original works—which sold well enough for him to become an icon of his time—look like he produced them in his basement.
But in the 1980s and, increasingly, the 1990s and twenty-first century, New York publishing became not about publication, but about creating a lucrative income stream for a tiny (and I mean tiny) handful of people. As of today, many of the best-respected publishing houses of the twentieth century have vanished into thin air (where are Charles Scribner’s Sons when you need them?), and New York’s contemporary Big 6 publishers—Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, MacMillan, Hatchette, and Penguin—are either controlled or owned outright by just five families. That’s right—five self-proclaimed modern publishing dynasties, one of them one man alone. Only Penguin, owned by Pearson, is controlled by multiple shareholders.
Random House is owned by Bertelsmann of Germany, which is owned by the Mohn family, whose leading members during WWII were SS men and the largest publishers of Nazi authors and propaganda, including the author who gave the commemorative speech during the 1933 Nazi book burning (US publisher originally, bought in 1998).
Simon & Schuster is owned by National Amusements, which is controlled by the National Amusements theater franchise, its stock controlled by the Redstone family of Massachusetts (US publisher originally, bought by Gulf+Western/Paramount in 1975 which was bought by Viacom in 1994).
HarperCollins is owned by News Corporation, which is of course controlled by Rupert Murdoch (US publisher originally, Harper & Row bought in 1987, Collins bought in 1989, along with the Hearst Book Group including William Morrow & Company and Avon in 1999).
MacMillan is owned by the Holtzbrink family of Germany. (English publisher originally, bought in 1999).
Hatchette is owned by Legardere Group of France, which is controlled by the Legardere family (US publisher originally, Time Warner, including Little, Brown, merged in 1989, bought in 2006).
Penguin is owned by Pearson of England (US publisher originally, bought in 1970).
Take a look at those dates, guys. Almost all of this has happened within the past twenty-five years, the bulk of it in a six-year window between 1994 and 1999. That’s a lot of tectonic shift in just six years!
What this means is that when the people controlling the financial interests of the Big 6 of American publishing today tell the old joke, “How do you make a small fortune in publishing? Start with a large fortune,” they are laughing in their sleeves all the way to the bank.
And this is the situation we were living with—in great frustration and despair—when the technology for Print-on-Demand (POD) and ebooks hit the publishing scene approximately ten years ago.
Print-On-Demand (POD)
Lightning Source, owned by Ingram Distributors, incorporated in 1997 to use new printing press technology to print books individually rather than in print runs of many multiple copies. Suddenly—you don’t have to print a copy of a book until it’s paid for. In fact, you don’t even have to know anything about printing technology.
I cannot tell you how this totally alters the distinction between writers and publishers that’s been the great, insurmountable obstacle throughout history.
eBooks
Although the concept of digital books has been in use since the inception of Project Gutenberg in 1970, the first machines designed and produced for the reading of books in digital form were marketed in 1998, only a few years after the launch of Amazon online bookstore began decimating the independent bookstore landscape.
Within ten years, Amazon had become the Godzilla of the online publishing industry—remarkably and inexplicably remaining to this day unchallenged by the Big 6, which could take it down any time they seriously felt like pooling their resources—and was launching their own ereader, engaging in ungentlemanly hand-to-hand combat over their efforts to leverage their Godzilladom into a monopoly on the ebook market. Barnes & Noble is still giving ole Godzilla a run for its money with their monopoly on brick-&-mortar stores and their own online bookstore (while their only real brick-&-mortar competition, Borders, gives a single high shriek and melts like the Wicked Witch of the West). This all took a nasty but not unexpected turn about a year ago when the Silicon Valley Wizard of Oz, Steve Jobs, tapped his chin thoughtfully and said to himself, “I think I’ll take a piece of that pie.”
Meanwhile, at some point around that time it occurred to everyone else with access to a computer and the Internet that an ebook is just a PDF with a college degree. You could publish a book any time you wanted without a printer. In fact, your reader doesn’t even need an ereader, so long as they also have access to a computer and the Internet.
Again, the great, insurmountable obstacle between writers and publishers falls like the Berlin Wall, without so much as a shot fired.
Self-publishing
This combination of developments has turned what was previously a small but valiant subculture of hardy souls, who’d been for a long time investing their own hard-earned money in offset printing and hand-selling of their books out of the backs of their cars around the country, into a primordial explosion of inexpert typists who would like very much to become J.K. Rowling. The noise of that initial detonation was supersonic and continues to reverberate even as we speak.
Multimedia
Along with the rise of publishing technology, the similar-but-distinct rise of computer technology in the past generation (I used to typeset typewritten, hand-edited copy on a CompuGraphic IV, while a friend on the other side of town was getting his computer science degree using punch cards) has created a whole other world of computer graphic and Graphical User Interface (GUI) tools, making it possible for those same eager typists to incorporate all kinds of neat whizbang and even interactive stuff into their works, which at that point become really no longer books.
So where does that leave you?
Should you self-publish—or keep slogging away at the bottleneck of traditional publishing, bowing to its increasingly restrictive dictates on form and content and hoping against hope you’ll be one of the lucky handful caught up in the lucrative income stream for which those restrictive dictates are designed? Should you release your book for $.99 on Kindle, beg all your friends to buy it the same day, and let Amazon do the rest? Should you become a self-marketing expert? A newbie-novelist/blogger guru? A GUI programmer? Rupert Murdoch’s masseuse/masseur?
I’m not going to make any quantifiable predictions about the future of publishing—there are plenty of industry insiders doing that already.
I am only going to say this: at a time when the traditional publishing industry continues to speed its own decline in the plummeting quality and intellectual level of its product, and yet the blogosphere continues to deliver onto these literary shores tens of thousands more aspiring writers every day, all seeking a new land of opportunity and hope, and computer technology continues to revolutionize faster and faster what’s possible in the real and virtual worlds with the means at our disposal. . .
The stories and novels that comprise the height of quality literature so far on this planet are still available to us (some of them even back in print after decades of obscurity), still accessible to absolutely anyone with the dedication, passion, and a modicum of intelligence who would like study and model their craft upon them.
Right now—before the paper of those printed pages succumbs to complete dissemination by whatever unaware or uneducated folks might inherit them or, if salvaged from the garbage, the eventual, inevitable disintegration of age—they still exist.
The apex of literature. At the same time as this exponentially-expanding power of publication technology.
We—you and I—are standing this very moment at a crossroads in fiction of unprecedented, almost unimaginable potential.
Can you feel the ground vibrating under your feet?
“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .it demystifies the essential aspects of the craft while paying homage to the art.”
—Millicent Dillon, five time O.Henry Award winner and author of the PEN/Faulkner-nominated Harry Gold
“Teeming with gold. . .will make you love being a writer if only because you belong to the special little club that gets to read this book.”
—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel
“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”
—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel
“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches.Highly recommended.”
—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering
“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”
—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop
UPDATE ON #EDITNGCHAT: It’s settled. Thursday noon-1 PST on Twitter. #editingchat: only for serious writers.
Well, this week I managed to spaz even worse than last week, and I didn’t let you know about #editingchat AT ALL.
I do apologize—what was I thinking?—and I’ve archived today’s #editingchat for your edification & entertainment.
If you’d like to see another #editingchat next Friday, please feel free to drop me a line. I can’t do it weekly ad infinitum, but maybe weekly through April and/or monthly after that. Depending, of course, upon just how much time you all want to spend chatting online, as opposed to locked in your office with your dreams and your manuscript. Of course.
Last week, Roz Morris and I had the first of our four scheduled weekly editorial chats: Talking Plot. We’re running these chats here once a week throughout the month of April.
We had a fabulous time and covered all the basics of plot—Hook, Conflicts, Faux Resolution, and Climax—as well as event-vs-temporal structure, the biggest plot problem we see in client manuscripts, what stories are really about, and who originally said, “B’doing!”
Now please join us today for the second of these weekly editor chats: Talking Character.
Victoria: Roz, what’s your take on techniques for developing character, such as questionnaires?
Roz: Personally, I think all writers are different. We all need to get familiar with our characters somehow. For some, that will mean using exercises such as questionnaires, interviews and so on. Others will plunge into getting to know them as they act, perhaps writing scenes that will never be used, recreating their wedding list and what the most treasured items from it are. And of course, a lot more becomes apparent about a character once we’ve put them into the story and made them interact with other people, take action, make decisions and test them a bit.
I reckon there are few downsides to noodling around with a character before we start using them properly. Except for this—sometimes writers are tempted to shoehorn in everything that they have produced about a character, even where it may clutter. There’s a lot you might know about a character that no one else needs to know or see. But these facts help you write them with more certainty and authority.
Victoria: Yes—you’re talking about the 90% of the iceberg you can’t see, what Hemingway said gives it its dignity.
Roz: Dignity—and depth. Eee, he knew a thing or two.
Victoria: Good ole Hem.
You know, I find it’s almost always an issue of too much exposition rather than too many telling details. It’s fascinating to learn about characters by watching them walk and talk, move and act and interact with others. This is how we learn real people in real life. They have a cow if anyone alters the time on the little china clock? They won’t eat butter on their scones? They can’t be in a room with someone wearing loud plaid? These details aren’t important enough to stop the story over, but when you use them as layering—drop them into scenes in passing, in the middle of the real action—they snap those scenes vividly to life, while implying the needs and drives inside the characters that fuel the plot.
Roz: I can’t stand loud plaid either. Can I go in a book?
Victoria: But of course! I will give you a jaunty little tamoshanter and make you speak with a Scottish accent.
Roz: Drop the details in—that’s so important. It’s similar to the way you should use research. Find out loads about your topic, setting, situation—and use it only when strictly necessary. Not a drop more or the reader will spot you’ve inflicted an info-dump on them.
Victoria: Information is essential to learn how to handle properly. That’s a layering issue, and layering really is the life breath of three-dimensional fiction. I’m always telling writers, “Get your butt out in the world and take copious notes on what’s there. That’s your telling details,” but when you have a lot of information you need to convey—from research, as you say—that’s even better! You’ve already taken your copious notes!
Now you can either use them the difficult way, by launching straight into your story without any further preparation and just trying to develop a hyper-sensitive nose for exactly when a detail needs to drop, or you can use them the easy way, by taking a long, long, looooong time to develop on paper and in your mind this entire world in which your characters move. Writing scenes you may never use, as you mentioned. Then when you do write the scenes your plot needs, those details will simply be apparent because you’re already living among them.
You know, Flannery O’Connor noted when these details surface organically they begin to take on resonance and become symbolic. Those are the details that eventually form the nuances of your Resolution. I always tell writers to spend a long, luxurious time getting to know their characters. Not just the details of their world, but identifying the conflicting needs that power them and extrapolate from there.
So what’s the single most important thing aspiring writers should know about character?
Roz: Use the plot to test the things the character doesn’t want to face. That makes the most compelling story. It’s the skeletons in the cupboard, the stuff they need to deal with and move on from. Perhaps it’s emotional baggage that’s making them choose the wrong type of boyfriend. The grudge that means they can’t forgive a particular kind of behaviour. The nasty fact they’ve been avoiding. It’s got to be something that’s holding them back or spoiling their lives.
Victoria: Internal conflict. Absolutely. Stories are about people in trouble, characters struggling to save themselves, and the best threats are always internal because those are the ones that are hardest to combat. “You I can walk away from. But me I’m stuck with.”
Roz: Yes, yes, yessity yes! And if they deal with it they will emerge different and free. Which will be extremely satisfying for the reader. Would we be making a simplistic generalisation to say that all truly satisfying stories are really about that question—the ‘me’ that the characters are stuck with? Their own worst enemy who they have to make their peace with? If they can’t achieve that peace, is that tragedy? Even if it’s not high tragedy, it certainly leaves a tragic note.
Victoria: Simplistic generalization? [laughing] You say that like it’s a bad thing!
It’s neither simple nor a generalization. It’s the truth. We read to experience the resolution of the protagonist’s worst nightmare, and we have to go through the nightmare to get to the release at the end. In fact, I’d go even further and say we’re reading not for the character’s release but for our own. Storytelling is the careful, powerful, professional construction of a catapult to fling a reader into space toward epiphany. We can’t create the reader’s epiphany—it depends in part upon the reader themself, so each epiphany is a tiny bit different. But a really well-built catapult will put the reader pretty much where the writer wants them to go.
Roz: I wrote about this in a post a short time ago. I work out the emotion I want for the final scene and angle everything towards it. I realised in all my work, even the novels that are only seeds in my head, my last scene would be ‘feels so good to be free’. In each book, the story is about what the character has to do to break into that state of freedom.
Victoria: Oooh. Brilliant plan. Sometimes I like to write the Resolutions, too—sometimes that’s the best reward for slogging through the writing of the rest of the novel! But sometimes I like walking that wildcat line where the reader’s experience of freedom has to be inside them rather than on the page.
I have a client who’s writing very dark, very detailed, very beautiful edgy literary fiction. His first novel ends on the protagonist facing death. He didn’t want to tell the reader whether the guy lives or dies—he said he wasn’t sure himself. So we designed that final paragraph, those final sentences, to make the last words a clue (just a clue!) to the protagonist’s Resolution—which is not about life or death, but about his internal struggle as illuminated by the threat of death—leaving the reader to extrapolate their own Resolution from that.
It’s a gorgeous ending. It’s a hell of a novel!
Roz: I bet it is. An ending is emotional as much as eventful—a question of finding the point where the profoundest struggle has ended.
So today let’s get technical, shall we? Let’s talk about the craft itself—the writing—and answer the third of these four most Frequently Asked Questions.
3. What is this Line Editing thing of which I speak? And why do I keep speaking of it?
Have you ever held a book in your hands and, as you read, felt the hair stand up on the back of your neck? laughed out loud? noticed goosebumps rising on your arms? or had your heart contract, your chest heave, and real, wet tears come to your eyes?
You read the sentences over and over, trying to analyze them, wondering what gives them the power to do that to you, and you don’t find it. There’s something about those particular words in that particular arrangement at this particular moment in the story that creates an experience you can’t account for. It just happens.
It’s magic, isn’t it? That’s probably even why you wanted to become a writer in the first place, wasn’t it? To become that magician.
On the other hand, have you ever held a book you wanted to love, knowing everyone who put it on the New York Times Best Seller List obviously loved it, read words you knew were supposed to inspire that feeling, to be on the verge, waiting for it all to happen (the magic of words!), and, in the end. . .just been left flat?
You put the book down with a sigh thinking, What happened? I bet everyone else got the Big Response but me. So you don’t say anything to your friends, thinking it’s just you, until someone finally admits, “It really wasn’t that good, was it? I don’t know about you, but I didn’t like it that much—and I don’t even know why.” And suddenly, with relief, everyone’s nodding and agreeing. “I didn’t like it either!” “Me, neither!” “Oh, my god, I hated that book. I didn’t even finish it.”
And the only conclusion you can come to is that fiction in this day and age kind of sucks, and nobody knows why.
Line Editing.
That’s why.
I was in my local used bookstore one day last summer, buying books by the Moderns of the 1910s and ’20s and the Post-Moderns of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. And I mentioned to the clerk how much I love those authors. He said, “Well, sure. That was the age of beautiful writing,” in this off-hand way, as though, you know, it’s only to be expected—an Age of Rationalists, an Age of Romantics, an Age of Realists, an Age of Naturalists, an Age of Beautiful Writing.
And after that. . .what? An age of bad writing? What do you call that—an Age of Crap?
The thing is journalists have always known about Line Editing and continue to use it to this day. The authors of articles submit their works to their editors, who gaily slash-&-burn it into the shape the periodical wants. When I write for publications, I get Line Edited. Technical writers get Line Edited. Everyone writing professionally gets Line Edited.
Except, these days, by publishers.
I know I’ve directed you to the Paris Review interview with the great editor Robert Gottlieb before, but I’m going to do it again. I want you to understand—Bob Gottlieb was not just an extremely powerful acquisitions editor, not even just an astute and intuitive Developmental Editor, he was a skilled, professional Line Editor. (He probably still is. He’s alive and writing books now.) He lay side-by-side on the floor of his office with authors, talking over their novels and marking up the pages. He got in shouting matches over adjectives and semicolons. He dragged other editors out of their offices to back him up on points when the fight got too hot.
He was an Editor. He edited.
Even such meticulous, word-by-word craftspeople as Hemingway (Max Perkins), Jack Kerouac (Malcolm Cowley), John Steinbeck (Pat Covici), and Jean Rhys (Diana Athill) were edited. They understood the editors’ role in Line Editing. And they appreciated the purpose of it—if you want to use written language to its full potential, your scenes, paragraphs, sentences must be just right.
Now, most aspiring writers today have a gut feeling about all this, so they do work away at Line Editing their manuscripts, they do struggle with those sentences, they are desperate for them to be just right. And they wind up burning a whole lot of hours spinning their wheels sometimes, because those techniques aren’t always intuitive. You need someone who knows them really well to teach them to you. And, even worse, even those of us who know them can’t always Line Edit our own manuscripts into professional polish. It’s an excruciating task.
Then you hear all over the blogosphere, “The writing isn’t important. Nobody cares about that persnickety stuff. Just write your message.” And you wonder why someone would say that if it weren’t true.
Well, I know why. And I am here to call SHENANIGANS.
You can have the greatest message ever (very few of us do), but if you casually dismiss the enormous toolbox of techniques of the written word at your disposal—techniques discovered and developed and honed by writing geniuses throughout the past 150 years—you can never hope to give your reader a physical response to your writing. You will always be destined to leave them flat.
Read the writing of the people who tell you that. Getting goosebumps yet? I didn’t think so. They say it because they don’t even know those techniques exist.
Line Editing is the careful, deep-thinking, ruminative work of learning to use those techniques (and they are many and varied) to achieve exactly the effect you want through the words you choose and the arrangement that gives them their amazing, inexplicable power. To work magic.
Sure, ‘nobody’ cares—until they pick up a story or novel hoping for that wonderful, classical, visceral thrill, that weightless feeling of being flung bodily, emotionally, spiritually into the ether.
“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .it demystifies the essential aspects of the craft while paying homage to the art.”
—Millicent Dillon, five time O.Henry Award winner and author of the PEN/Faulkner-nominated Harry Gold
“Teeming with gold. . .will make you love being a writer if only because you belong to the special little club that gets to read this book.”
—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel
“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”
—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel
“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches.Highly recommended.”
—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering
“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”
—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop
#EDITINGCHAT: Last week’s Twitter #editingchat was such a success we’re all holding another this week: Friday 11-noon PST (one hour earlier than last week). That’s noon-1 MST, 1-2 CST, 2-3 EST. Be there or be square.
Short story author Scott Warrender is a Mentoring Program client. I have done full Copy, Line, & Developmental Editing on a number of short stories for him, the first of which was his poignant fictional memoir of Africa, ''The Boy With the Newsprint Kite,'' now published in the Foundling Review.
Clients’ Books
Bhaichand Patel is the author of two nonfiction books: Chasing the Good Life (Penguin Books India, October, 2006), and Happy Hours (Penguin Books India, October, 2009). I edited Patel's debut novel, When the Streets Were Cold and Dark.
I've edited a number of nonfictionessays for my friend Lucia Orth. (Many years ago, my contribution to Baby Jesus Pawn Shop was simply a peer critique and participation in a standing ovation.)
The poet Chris Ryan is the author of The Bible of Animal Feet (Farfalla Press, 2007). He has recent stories in Pank, Anemone Sidecar, and A Cappella Zoo. I edited Ryan's novel The Ishmael Blade and worked with him on his debut novel Heliophobia and WIP Pogue.
