I’m going to be in San Francisco next week—my husband, Jeff Osier-Mixon, will be presenting at the 2010 Embedded Linux Conference, and I’m taking my son to see the King Tut exhibit for the second time before it goes home to Egypt forever—therefore I won’t be trawling the Internet much for writing and publishing news to discuss.

So let’s get philosophical now.

What are you doing here? Not here on this planet, but here in the fiction-writing community, thinking about your stories and pressing your hand to your heart.

What does the creation of fiction mean to you?

A lot of people write in order to be heard. I get a certain number of manuscripts every year that are the stories of traumatized children, battered partners, abandoned lovers, just-barely-disguised autobiography cast as fiction. It’s not fiction—it’s real. These are real people. They have really been traumatized, in these very real ways. Their pain is not imaginary.

Most of these manuscripts are in early drafts. The need to be heard is far more immediate than the need to create art. These are the cries of the voiceless injured, channeled into the surface elements of what they’ve read in published fiction. The plodding, often frustrating, interminable, years-long work of crafting words into literature is beyond the pressing needs of these writers. They just want to know their story isn’t a secret anymore.

They write to be released, not immersed.

I also regularly receive more of a manuscript than the amount I’ve been hired to work on. The yearning to be read and acknowledged is intensely palpable. The desire to be recognized by someone in “authority,” a professional in the industry, is so huge that it occasionally wins out over the intellectual knowledge that I don’t have time to read everything, I’m approaching these manuscripts as work projects, not casual reads, and my opinion doesn’t help, anyway, if I can’t add significantly to the quality of the manuscript. Will I love it so much I just can’t stop reading, even when my time is up? It doesn’t matter. I’m not an agent. I can’t get anyone published. (Well, myself.)

And sometimes I get manuscripts of amazing talent, from writers who have already dedicated themselves to this craft for years, who have practiced and practiced and practiced with words, who have sketched and drawn and fleshed-out multiple imaginary worlds of varying themes, varying premises, varying purposes. Some of these writers are serious, no-nonsense, and practical. Some are emotional and easy to throw off balance. Some are a little of both.

My favorite manuscripts, though, come from writers who, no matter what their original agenda or skill level, are no more or less than respectful apprentices. They don’t come to this craft only because it offers them something they need, because it’s easy for them, or because they just want that desperately to come to the attention of a professional and an audience.

They might come to it for any and all those reasons, sure. But mostly they do it because they love fiction and, by god, they’re going to learn how to DO it. To do it RIGHT.

They’re my favorites because I know these people will make it, with or without me. I’m no fool—I know I’m an excellent editor, but I also know I’m not the only one in the world. And I know “making it” doesn’t always mean publishing. It doesn’t always mean earning one thin dime, even if you get published. It doesn’t even always mean gaining an audience.

It means creating the literature you long to create, getting down in just the right words the story that only you can tell.

And knowing you did it.

Myself, I’m a sort of platypus of all the above: a writer who absorbed very young just enough excellent literature to miss it when I overlaid it with a blanket of terrible crap in my teens—the type of writer who’s teetered precariously for decades between hiding my nose in the entire history of English literature and daydreams of what I’m going to spend all my loot on. I have not yet written the novels I long to write. But I’ve discovered that all my years of professional writing and editing and the intense analysis of literature have given me this wonderful ability to help others do exactly that.

What kind of writer are you? What do you want from fiction?

Why are you here?

This is worth breaking the Weekend Silence for: I just got an extremely cool recommendation from Dave Kuzminski of Preditors & Editors ™:

“The only thing Victoria doesn’t reveal in The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual is the secret handshake. Otherwise, a lot of authors are going to improve their writing just by reading and using the advice in her book. Buy it. I recommend it.”

Thank you, Dave!

“Hey, Mom! I just got done planning a book about relativity. I outlined 20 chapters, and I’m going to write them all. I even came up with chapter titles. And you’re going to love it, because it’s full of faux resolutions.”

Now I’ve just realized my last post on working with an independent editor was back around NaNoWriMo, which is kind of silly. That was a really long time ago.

So let’s talk a little about working with an editor. You guys want to do it. I know you do, because you keep writing to me.

But the cost.

I know. It sucks. I am so on board with you about that. And I had a brilliant idea last night over the dinner table that if there are grants out there to help out people like you hook up with people like publishers, and I could qualify in helping you do that, then I could offer rates you might realistically be able to afford. Like $5/hour or something.

Okay, I’m probably not going to be able to drop my rates that far. But I AM going to talk to Mira over at Mira’s List about it and see what she’s dug up. Because I didn’t get into this originally to discover the next Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Kerouac, but damned if I don’t accidentally keep doing it. Not them, personally. (They’re dead.) But really amazing writers doing fresh, exciting, gorgeous work, who just need a good, experienced editor to help them make it read professionally.

However, you know what one huge, overriding characteristic of most literary novelists is? That’s right. They’re BROKE.

Yeah. Me, too.

So until most aspiring writers get someone to help them out a little financially—like a publisher; or a rich parent—they’re stuck cleaning quarters out of the couch cushions and skimping on their lunch money and generally emptying their lives of anything that costs anything at all, and still only being able to afford a few precious hours of editing time.

I do what I can, working longer hours on their manuscripts than I claim I do (and I can’t tell you how many clients have admitted, much later, that they almost didn’t hire me because my rates were so low they thought I couldn’t possibly know what I’m doing), offering Free Edits, almost killing myself with that Workshop Month from Hell last fall—which, as you might have noticed, has vanished from my blog. I’m hustling. And not because I’m making very much. (That noise in the background in my husband laughing uncontrollably.)

But because. . .

I LOVE FICTION.

And I know how to edit it. I can polish diamonds-in-the-rough to reveal what the writer has really done, the fiction in there that they don’t even realize they’ve created. And I love that.

This is such a great job. Really—working with these fun, creative, interesting writers I’ve gotten to know and made friends with over the past year, watching their manuscripts grow and develop, and being able to show them where their plots need tightening (or loosening) and rearranging, what’s implied in their characters that can be brought out in specific ways in specific scenes to really flesh-out the imaginary people living in their heads, how to keep their stories focused, always, always focused, on their premises so their climaxes become inevitable, extraordinary, unique. . .their own. And if they can afford Copy & Line Editing, the sheer joy of seeing those sentences clarify and blossom into strong, streamlined, professional literature. If I didn’t have a child who also needs my time and attention, my husband would probably never even see my face.

But I do have a child. And a husband. And the hours I take away from them I have to make worth it in some way that’s tangible to them.

Also—and this is really pertinent—people value stuff they pay for more than stuff they get for free. And you know what? This work I do on manuscripts is valuable. Heck, yes, it is. I don’t have even the slightest interest in doing it for people who are going to then dismiss it as trivial because I didn’t make them pay through the nose.

So I charge $50/hour, which is 50-100% less than the going rate of $75-$100/hour. However, my per-word and per-page charges look high compared to the going rates. How come?

Because I DON’T SKIM.

I did some research the other day and found that a lot of independent editors are charging both $75-100/hour AND $.02-4/word at around $6/page.

You can do the math. That averages out to 12-16 pages/hour, which means spending 3.75-5 minutes on each page. I don’t know about you, but I can spend several minutes just absorbing a page for analysis, much less editing it, analyzing it, and writing out seriously useful advice on how to improve it. Even at $50/hour, the surface cheap rate is still only 7 1/2 minutes/page, or an hour and fifteen minutes to do the whole works on a ten-page chapter. Try it. That’s not very long.

Skimming can be a real hazard in this industry, when you’re struggling to make a living wage. These cheaper rates, whether they’re called copy-editing or just “editing,” could only mean very light copy-editing.

I don’t do that.

But I have just re-vamped my Services page today. So if you’re out there hoping to find an editor you can trust to work on a manuscript you’ve lavished so much work and heart and love on, please feel free to check it out. (But be forewarned: my proofreader is busy working her real job today, and I’m brain-dead from checking and double-checking the math, so today’s draft might be full of typos.)

And if you’ve been through that couch a dozen times and still only come up with a handful of loose change, feel free to check out the Art and Craft of Fiction magazine, where I’m writing on the craft and working with broke aspiring writers every week to get them the help they need as cheaply as humanly possible.

And if you can’t even afford that, stick around.

Next month we’ll be publishing The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual, which is my old posts on the craft from last year before I went private with the magazine—all cleaned up and edited and organized to make writing fiction as intuitive as possible. WITH brand-new extra essays on topics I forgot to cover last year!

I’m doing everything I can for you guys. I swear to god.

You’re like my kids.

J.D. Salinger has died at the age of 91.

I’ve always admired Salinger for his unshakable dedication to craft rather than publication. I love the line quoted in this article: “There’s. . .peace in not publishing.” Read that full quote. Read it and understand it. Read it and apply it to your allegiance to your own life. Read it and make your peace.

Salinger was a craftsperson. He created living, breathing, three-dimensional characters moving and speaking in a real world not because he thought those were the characters that would sell, but because that’s what made him happy. He wrote because he loved to write. And he certainly lived to regret the publicity that came with accidentally striking a nerve with his readership.

I have a theory about Salinger’s work and his desperate determination to guard his privacy. I think Salinger loved a man once, a brother-type (he had no brothers), someone he looked up to who taught him a little about philosophy and life and meaning. Someone who died young.

I think he wrote his books as an expression of his love for that man. And I think he guarded his privacy to prevent the media from discovering who it was and defacing that man’s memory.

Salinger gave every indication that he continued to write long after he stopped publishing and even granted his heirs permission to publish what he was writing—earn whatever they wanted from it—so long as they waited until he was gone.

We can be pretty certain the next few years will not only see a goldmine of Salinger stories hitting the market, but I believe we’ll also learn who the model for Seymour Glass really was, how Salinger knew him, and where he died.

My opinion? I have no doubt this all happened in France, a very long time ago.

So, my sys admin just got back from Community Leadership Summit West, a conference for online community managers. That’s what he does. He manages an online community. That’s actually what I do, too, except he gets paid.

This is important to writers because of the way the publishing industry is morphing from a long-time traditional model—you give us your books, and we’ll edit, publish, sell, and promote them for the lion’s share of the profit—to a new, largely-undefined model—you do whatever the heck you want, working your butt off and spending your own money to do our job for us, and we’ll go spectacularly down the tubes, as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s parent company, EMPG, is doing this very minute.

I’ve been talking to author Ania Vesenny about blogging as a writer’s promotional tool. Does it really work?

Well, that’s hard to say, since the one overriding quality of the Internet is its extraordinary capacity to facilitate LYING. I just read a fascinating piece by Dilbert creator Scott Adams last night on whether or not online reviews should be made illegal.

He uses as an example a book of his based on his blog posts, which some offended readers panned in revenge for him removing the posts and turning them into a book. That handful of people reviewed him over and over and over again to give him ratings of 1 so they could artificially drag his overall rating down and discourage potential buyers. Adams cites other instances in which fake reviewers are known to abuse the opportunity to review in order to market or reverse-market. He suggests that online reviewing is routinely abused now to the extent of making it meaningless.

In the comments on Adams’ article, reader after reader says, “Yeah, I worked for a company that always asked the employees to vote for its products in order to artificially inflate the ratings.”

What does this mean for the average blogging writer?

Well, for one thing the chances are you’ll never tangle with the issue personally. In order for someone to want to discourage fans, you have to have fans to be discouraged, and as Copyblogger recently observed, “No One is Reading Your Blog.”

So something online community managers are wrestling with, in this context, is numbers. For a long time it was all about numbers. How many thousands of hits does your site get? How many thousands are following you on Twitter? If you calculate commenters as 1% of your readership, how many comments does your site have to receive in order to imply the necessary thousands of readers it takes to attract advertisers or, on the other hand, book buyers and, by extension, a traditional publisher?

Take note of that word “imply.” I was, needless to say, shocked when my sys admin remarked recently in a conversation about site hits, “People lie.”

“What do you mean, lie? Aren’t there counters to prevent them from doing that?”

“Counters can be tweaked.”

“Are you kidding me? People lie about how many hits they get? Like, by the thousands?”

“Sure. You can’t stop them. You say, ‘How many readers do you have?’ and they say, “Ten thousand,’ and there is no way on earth to verify or not verify that.”

“Huh.” I was nonplussed. “So all those other sites out there—”

Man, am I naive.

And since the Internet makes it possible to lie about your hits, the only way to guess at a blogger’s real numbers is to look at their comments and extrapolate a formula. Which is still, actually, guessing. This is compounded by the fact that the Internet also makes it possible for you to lie about whether or not you are, in fact, your own commenters. There’s even a term—”sock puppet”—for faking your identity online. Lying about who you are.

And the motivation to lie is proportionally increased based upon what you can gain by lying. People, for all their presumed savvy in this Digital Age, are still quite easily manipulated by the herd, even when it’s imaginary.

It’s kind of touching, really.

So someone came up with the term “kwanzas” to describe sites without the gargantuan numbers, sites where a small handful of people read, comment, shoot the breeze together. . .form human connections. This is now all the rage: focus not on numbers, but on participation. Quality, not quantity.

Well, that’s nothing new. In fact, the dichotomy of quality over quantity has been an issue ever since the rise of advertising and its demon offspring marketing created the potential for false assumptions about quality based on quantity. We’re talking the entire twentieth century.

So what IS the purpose of a blog? And how well does it fulfill it?

For a writer promoting a book, the purpose is to bring in potential buyers. But given that the numbers you read about when you listen to social media ‘experts’ are simply not the numbers you, personally, experience, how does that affect what you hope to achieve with your blog?

Back up.

Because before you can determine what you want out of your blog, as a writer you must first determine what you want out of your book.

And marketers and social media ‘experts’ aside, what you want does not entirely determine what you get.

What is your purpose in being a writer? Are you writing because you love to write? Are you writing because you want to be read by other people (e.g. strangers)? Are you writing to get personal validation from agents and editors and publishers (“You’re better than those other losers who are always trying to get our attention”)? Are you writing to make money? Are you writing to make a mint?

All of these things do not add up to the same thing.

If your goal is to get personal validation from heavy-weights in the publishing industry, well, all I can say is good luck to you and about two hundred thousand others exactly like you. Blog to impress them that you’re willing to do your own promotion. They’ll look at your numbers.

If your goal is to be read by others, hey, throw it out on Lulu and see what happens. Blog to attract the interest of folks out there who are also interested in your subject matter and/or writing style and/or attitude. (Do not underestimate attitude. Blogs that succeed wildly do so to a large extent on their attitude.)

If your goal is to make money, you’re simply going to have to get a real job. But you would have had to do that, anyway.

My goal has been since I was about 18 years old to play with words and language and storytelling and description and dialog and characters, plus fonts and page layout and books and more words. I wanted to open a book and see my own stuff looking exactly the way I designed it to look. And that’s what I’m working on now.

It didn’t turn out right the first time around, with a traditional publisher.

But now I’m spending my days editing and polishing essays on my all-time favorite subject matter, the craft of fiction. I’m writing new pieces to cover aspects I forgot to cover before, playing with typefaces, putting my stuff into Page Preview, and paging through it admiringly. I’m sitting around scratching my head over things like action scenes (how do you analyze them? dissect them? write them?) and word choice (to adverb or not to adverb?) and Bookman italic and bold and what less-technical terms I can use for section and subsection, since I don’t want my book to read like a technical manual.

My book isn’t even published yet, and here I’ve already achieved my lifelong goal!

Oh, BOY.

Happy New Year 2010 to you all! I hope you had as peaceful a New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as we did here at our house, ensconced by the fire by a lovely (dying) tree all lit up, towers of new books next to everyone’s chair, sleeping cats on every lap, and Billie Holiday singing “A Fine Romance” over the rumble of an electric model train chugging industriously around and around under the tree.

While I was tipped back in my rocker with my chocolate and Brandy Alexander (thanks to a book called, appropriately enough, Happy Hours by Indian author and columnist Bhaichand Patel—take note of the reference to the novel he’s working on at the end of the interview in the link and ask yourself, “I wonder who he’ll get to edit it?”) reading all five hundred pages of the first ever full-length detective novel, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (published in 1866 and still RIVETING). . .as I say, while I was doing all this, other more dedicated bloggers than I continued to come up with fascinating stuff about writing, which I will re-direct you toward today.

First and foremost, Mira points out on Mira’s List that from now on the IRS is going to be casting a much more jaundiced eye in your direction. Yeah, YOU. I hope every spec of your taxable writing income is all recorded and properly filed, because they apparently feel you guys have been less than utterly and trustingly transparent in your dealings with them in the past. God only knows why.

Cory Doctorow gave a speech in November on the digitial ownership of books, partly transcribed and posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “How To Destroy the Book.” I don’t necessarily adhere to all Doctorow’s theories on copyright, but he’s doing some very heavily-promoted work in the realm, and I’m interested in seeing how it pans out. We’re all groping blind right now—the ground keeps shifting under our feet—but light is being cast more and more on the issue from different angles by some very smart people. (Except for what he named his daughter. That was kind of mean.)

Wil Wheaton wrote a stirring piece on self- (excuse me, “independent-”) publishing with Lulu. This is important to you, personally, because independent publishing is beginning to earn some real spurs in the industry. This past year has seen in the change, and traditional publishers are now looking more and more to independent publishing as the front-line testing ground for salable books. It is a great idea? It is properly executed? It is WELL-EDITED? And is the author 100% personally invested in marketing it, so that sales are already hefty before a traditional publisher ever has to shell out dime? Of course, like Wile E. Coyote, the next thing they’re going to notice is that if all this is true, independently-published authors don’t actually need traditional publishers. But we’ll keep our lips zipped and let that one be a special little surprise.

This is also important to you because. . .drum roll. . .we are going to independently-publish my first book in 14 years, The Art & Craft of Fiction—that’s all the old in-depth blog posts on writing that you miss so much and wish were still posted, edited into a book! Yay! It should go up for sale on this blog sometime in February or earlier, as soon as I finish getting it cleaned up and writing a few extra pieces to round it out. I looked into shopping it around to agents and, by extension, publisher’s acquisitions editors and, by further extension, publishers and, by even further extension, readers, and compared that to the amount of editing, marketing, and promotions work authors are now expected to take responsibility for even if they get past all those hurdles, and, well. . .you remember the special little surprise.

And on the subject of author marketing, Alan Rinzler re-posted (or else it came to me in a dream) an excellent post from 2008 on what criteria a traditional publisher uses in determining what advance to offer an author, with some eye-opening advice about email “direct mail” and speaking to your Kawanis Club.

Speaking of websites (yes, I have been, a LOT), George Revutsky and Dustin Kittelson of the soon-to-be-launched online marketing company MyNextCustomer gave an interview on—not the demise of Search Engine Optimization, as I originally quoted the headline—but the state of online search issues and social media marketing.

On a more casual note, Lauren Leto has analyzed readers by their favorite authors and posted this exhaustive list for those of you too lazy to do it yourselves. Are you on it? I don’t necessarily agree with all of it—I’ve never even heard of some of these authors—but it does appear I should be reading more Jorge Luis Borges. I will be starting my own list for all of us here to contribute to (I think I’ll put Kathryn in charge of the YA section), but not until I get through the rest of my chocolate.

This has nothing to do with writing, but it does demonstrate beautifully that it’s the juxtaposition of essential details that creates action and dimension.

This also has nothing to do with writing, but it does provide a nice excuse for why novels are so much harder to write now than they were ten thousand years ago.

Also, as you’ve probably noticed, we here at A. Victoria Mixon, Editor, have re-designed the website. We have plans—big plans.

• A new interview series, beginning with literary agent Donald Maass and independent editor Lisa Rector-Maass, followed by the second half of my interview with Carolyn Cassady (in which she talks in-depth about making the movie Heart Beat with Sissy Spacek), and then an interview with Guggenheim-recipient, Yaddo artist, five-time O. Henry award-winner, and biographer of both Jane and Paul Bowles, as well as dual-biographer of Isadora Duncan and Mary Cassatt, Millicent Dillon—just to start.
• A new Free Edit event, like the novel HOOKS event of last August, in which I will do Free Edits of your novel CLIMAXES. I hope to start that later this month.
• A secret parallel universe for griping, for those of you who like to gripe, on all subjects relating to fiction, including but not restricted to best sellers that should be lining bird cages, authors who should not be allowed near keyboards, and publishing horror stories from those of you with the scars to prove it. It’s not up yet, but if you keep your eyes open you’ll notice when it does go up.
• More in-depth discussion of the state of the publishing industry, leaning heavily on the way licensing and copyright have already played out in the computer industry, what’s happened in the music industry, how online communities, networking, and marketing are developing even as we speak, and the secret assumptions that lie behind a lot of the opinions being pushed out here regarding what aspiring writers should do to succeed and where and when and how and why.
• And an exciting way to get you some of those old posts back on this blog in a new less-easily-lifted format. They won’t replace the book, but supplement it, as it were. And, as an added bonus, you’ll get to see where I keep my rejection letters.

Finally: the New Year marks the end of my first year of blogging on the craft of fiction.

Thank you, all of you, for reading. Thank you for commenting! Thank you to all the great people I’ve met in this past year. Without you this blog would have gone the way of so many—six months of excitement and then sudden amnesia—but because of you I’ve leaped the abyss from a dead technical-writing career to doing the most fulfilling work in the world (can I still use that word in this decade? yes, I can, because I’m in California): editing gorgeous fiction, discovering amazing unpublished talent, working with dedicated writers who have completely given me back my faith in literature as a living, breathing, life-changing art in this day and age. And you know the condition of modern published fiction.

It’s a miracle!

Thank you—in all sincerity, from the bottom of my heart. Out of the zillions of blogs begun every year, you’ve made this one a success. You guys are my hope and joy. And you’re going to usher in a new Golden Age of Literature.

Dona Nobis Pachem.

NaNoWriMo has come and gone, and there are now millions more written words in the world than there were a month ago. Aspiring writers all over America—all over the planet—are sitting in front of their masterpieces wondering what they have to to do to them before they can start querying agents.

How do you know when you’re done?

A client asked me this recently, saying, “I write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, and every time I think I’m finally finished it turns out I have to rewrite again. This can’t be how Stephen King does it.”

Here’s the short answer: You’re done when your editor tells you you’re done. That’s how Stephen King does it.

Here’s the long answer: training, practice, and time. Truman Capote recommended a year between rewrites. A year? Yes, a year.

How much patience do you have?

The way professional writers (you know them—they’re the ones agents and publishers ACCEPT) do it is:

1) Plot. Come up with a truly gripping story.

What would be an amazing thing for someone to do? Hunt a vicious white whale across the seven seas? Ride a raft down the Mississippi with a runaway slave? Help an escaped convict, in terror of your life, when you’re only seven years old?

AND. . .what would be another amazing thing that could happen at the same time? The whale hates your guts and is determined to kill you? Your raft is highjacked by a couple of confidence tricksters? You’re hired by an insane old woman to help her “educate” a wealthy girl to hate poor boys?

And how could these two stories finally collide in a shower of fireworks? Against all odds, you actually FIND the whale? Your partner, the runaway slave, is “sold” by the confidence tricksters? You come into money from a mysterious benefactor—the escaped convict from long ago—which enables you to impress the young woman you’ve grown up loving?

2) Character. Spend approximately ninety-nine years locked in a small windowless room daydreaming and writing notes and backstory and scenes about your protagonist and main characters. Go outside and write down everything interesting you see about everyone in the world. Give your characters paralyzing internal conflicts—two desperate needs they can’t possibly satisfy simultaneously—along with a hellfire-&-brimstone motivation to satisfy them. Then give them a time limit, and make it short. Not only MUST they satisfy these opposing needs, they must do it NOW.

3) Language. Spend another ninety-nine years reading voraciously only the best literature and studying and practicing incessantly the art of constructing beautiful, simple, straight-forward sentences full of telling details (and only the telling ones!) in a steady, reassuring rhythm to rock the reader into a state of hypnosis that prevents them from seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, or even tasting anything in the real world around them. Then learn how to shock them with sentence construction and when and why and where.

4) Editing. Learn to wrap your legs around the back of your head and do the Charleston, which is prerequisite to the extraordinary feat of getting enough distance from your own writing to be able to edit it objectively.

5) Patience. And wait for the years to do their work on you. Because all of this takes time, lots and lots and lots and lots of time, time to well up from your subconscious, to get out of your fingers onto a page, to sink into the writing-skills part of your brain, to become an aspect of your very personality. Fiction writing isn’t something you spend a few years earning a degree and then just go get a job in, like real paying careers. It’s something that takes your entire life to grow into.

That’s how you find out when you’re done.

OR.

There is one alternative.

Instead, go find another writer who already knows how to come up with gripping plots, complex characters, and driving internal conflicts and is willing to help you. Someone who already knows how to write simple, straight-forward sentences in a hypnotic rhythm and can identify the beauty and hidden strength in yours. Someone who not only knows how to do it, but knows how to teach, guide, and mentor others. Someone who’s already completely objective about your work, even without the Charleston. . .

Find a really great editor. And let them tell you when you’re done.

NOT ONLY THAT. Find an editor other writers have test-driven before you and get their opinions. Someone with time on their schedule this year or this season or this month and reasonable rates. Someone willing to show you before you spend a fortune what they know and what writers get for their money.

I can hear you now: but how could this be? What possible motivation could someone really great have to make room for you on their schedule right away (when there are so many professional writers out there, who also need editors) and not charge you the moon and the stars?

Well, someone has to be one of their early clients in this phase of their career. Really great editors come to freelance work from previous writing careers, and they all have to start freelancing somewhere. Someone has to be the one who gets in on the ground-floor before their schedules extend into the distance and the rates go up to the standards set by other editors who have been freelancing for longer (or who just set higher rates).

That someone could be you.

You know how publishing writers say their success is a combination of determination, patience, and being in the right place at the right time?

6) Be in the right place at the right time.

Last Friday we were going to link to Stephen King’s review of Carol Sklenicka’s new biography of Raymond Carver.

But it was a holiday. So we’re doing it today.

If you don’t know who Gordon Lish was, you will learn. Take note, all ye aspiring writers who someday hope to be edited: Lish did it WRONG. Wrong, wrong, wrong. He was famous and influential, and his name is known throughout editing circles. But he was WRONG.

If you don’t know who Raymond Carver was, go find out. But please don’t try to imitate him. The best lesson you can learn from him is: write what you know. Drinking and smoking and being broke and divorced was what Carver knew, and he created literature out of it. It wasn’t just there waiting for him. It’s not just there waiting for you, either.

And if you don’t know who Stephen King is. . .naw, just kidding!

Do you ever wonder exactly what a full Developmental Editing letter looks like? How the conversation starts when you hire an editor to work over your plot with you—to make sure it tells the story you want to tell, in the most gripping possible terms, to keep a reader completely seduced by your imaginary world up to the last page?

Xavier is an imaginary client composed of a whole slew of real clients. His novel does not actually exist. But if it did exist, and I was just starting work on it, this is the letter he’d get:

Dear Xavier,

I have finished a preliminary read-through of THE DECEIVER’S WIFE.

THEME

First, let’s talk about your theme, because it’s a profound one, it’s complex and intricate and full of enormous possibilities, and it matters a lot to a huge number of potential readers. Plus, you’re doing terrific work with it—extraordinarily slow movement (so much material in single scenes!), but so rich in detail and significant character development that it just pulses.

The parent-child relationship between adults is something every adult in the world deals with in one way or another. And the fractured parent-child relationship between adults is something that resonates deeply with the vast majority of them. Very few adults have their ideal relationships with either parents or children. This makes your target audience extensive and, more importantly, in great, sincere need of illumination and reassurance.

Lembarto is a wonderful father figure: he’s sick, he’s powerful, he’s smart and charming and vulnerable and emotional, and he’s HIDING THINGS.

Rachel is a great foil for him: she’s psychically strong, she’s deeply wounded, she’s her father’s intellectual equal, what she lacks in age (and experience in playing this parent-child game) she makes up for with sheer charisma, and she, too, is HIDING THINGS.

There’s a terrific deadline urgency to their situation in Lembarto’s illness.

And here comes poor, innocent, wunderkind Elwood with his butterflies and statuary and treatise on Freud. How can he possibly avoid getting entangled in this familial duel? How can he NOT cast his lot in with them, considering his own white-washed background and the whining, trivial, superficial secrecy he’s been raised to consider family norm?

So, okay, your premise is gripping. Your set-up is already teetering on the brink. Your characters are hot out of the gate on page 1 and moving at a fantastic clip.

HOOK & BACKSTORY

The first issue, then, is the placement of their backstory.

It is a very common issue to want to get all your backstory into Chapter One. But it doesn’t belong there. It’s so hard to tell—when have you given the reader enough? when have you given them too much?—and this is what I, your editor, can tell you: hold your fire.

The character indications you give in the foundation scenes in Chapter One provide plenty of information to hold the reader until Chapter Two or even Three. What you don’t explain (never explain! only illuminate!) just serves to draw the reader forward.

Why do Lembarto and Rachel talk to each other like this? (Great cross-purpose dialog!) What’s behind their sudden switch to a united front when Elwood begins to ask his questions?

This is all fabulous, tantalizing material. Let it do its work, weave its spell on the reader.

Have faith in the characters of Lembarto and Rachel to intrigue both the reader and Elwood simultaneously. They’re rich and well-developed. The extensive background work you’ve done on them is clear in the telling details you use in just the opening scene: Lembarto thumping his cane over the words he doesn’t want her to say, Rachel walking behind his chair to pretend she can’t hear him interrupting her, the way both their heads swivel when the door opens and Rachel puts her hand on his head as if to reassure him but really to control where he looks. . .all subtle, powerful stuff.

Let it stand on its own. It has the strength to.

And when we cut out all the backstory, piece it together in one chunk, and put it into a subsequent chapter, what we find is that Chapter One reads like the pages are on fire. Lamberto and Rachel are at odds! Elwood interrupts and forces them to collude against him! Their internal conflicts are too much for them—the crack reveals itself—Elwood is sucked in—and the chemical reaction that flares up at the addition of him is suddenly, clearly, the pivotal Hook that sends them all three sliding and crashing downhill through the series of Conflicts that will lead them INEVITABLY (very important) to your Climax. Beautiful!

So let’s focus on that for now. Get all the backstory out, let it be chronologically-ordered (don’t confuse the reader if you can at all avoid it—you need them smart and on their toes or you’ll lose them with a really good plotline), and put it in its own chapter. They’ll follow you there and back into the story again in Chapter Three.

CHARACTER

You have two protagonists: Lembarto and Rachel, but since Lembarto dies, leaving Rachel to the Resolution, Rachel is your main protagonist. Let’s talk about their character development.

You’ll hear a lot about character arcs among those writing about fiction. Narrative arcs. What this means is that a story is about something happening to someone. That’s all. It is not just someone sitting in a chair doing nothing.

Lembarto

What is Lembarto’s character arc? Well, he’s come to a crossroads in his life, the last one he’ll ever come to: years ago he made two decisions—colluded with Fatima—to hide her lesbianism from Rachel and her authorship from the world. And now he’s dealing with the cause-&-effect of that. For every act in life, we deal with the consequences. The consequences of what Lembarto has done are pretty big. Now he’s dying, which is a pretty dicey position from which to cope with big consequences. So this is all wonderful! Readers love characters facing nearly-impossible odds.

By the time Lembarto dies he’s dealt with the consequences of his decisions: he’s helped Rachel reconnect with her mother (he is the only person who can do this), and he’s promised Fatima the secret of her authorship dies with him (not knowing he doesn’t have that power anymore). That’s his character arc, the change he goes through. He has looked both death and his life decisions in the eye, agonized over them, and either reversed or reaffirmed those decisions.

Because he is the secondary protagonist, you can afford to let death take his last action out of his hands.

Rachel

What about Rachel’s character arc? She has not made Lembarto’s original decisions, however she, too, is dealing with the consequences of them. The cause-&-effect of her parents’ decisions forms the decisions she is making now. It’s very important that she’s not portrayed as a victim. Victims are not interesting. Rachel, however, is not afraid to take her destiny in her hands, for better or worse. Readers love that in a character!

At some point in the past, Rachel decided to collude with her father in hiding her mother’s authorship. Why? For love of Lembarto? For fear of learning her mother didn’t love her? For some other reason? Right now this is unclear. But it would be terrific if you could roll that up in her decision to find Fatima—the more internal conflict you give the protagonist, the more exciting the story. And double internal conflict is excellent for a Hook.

Rachel has, at the moment your story opens, now decided it’s time to contact her mother—Lembarto’s terminal illness is the catalyst that triggers her decision. (You see how her decision, not Lembarto’s illness, is the Hook. It’s always best if a Hook involves decision or action of the protagonist; it shows the reader right off the bat this is someone worth following to find out what they’ll do next.)

How she copes with the consequences of her decisions—to hide Fatima’s authorship, to contact Fatima about Lembarto dying—is Rachel’s character arc. Hiding Fatima’s authorship leads her to engage with Elwood, which leads her to internal conflict over her beliefs about love and relationships, which gets entangled in contacting Fatima about Lembarto, the people who gave her the beliefs she’s now in such internal conflict over.

By the end of the story Rachel has faced the two-pronged complexity of this internal conflict, but not completely resolved it (it’s hard to completely resolve anything so complex without simply dying, as Lembarto does) so the Resolution is her epiphany, not Lembarto’s.

Keep this in mind as you work over this novel. This gives you your focus: Lembarto’s decisions and how he copes; Rachel’s decisions and how SHE copes. Whenever you’re confused and wondering where to go, ask yourself, “What does this have to do with Lembarto’s and Rachel’s character arcs?”

PLOT

Next week we’ll look at what you’ve included and what you have yet to include in the outline I’ve made of your current plot:

HOOK: Lembarto and Rachel, in mid-crisis over Lembarto’s terminal illness, meet Elwood, who completely alters their agenda
hook scene: Lembarto and Rachel are arguing when Elwood arrives
conflict #1: Lembarto doesn’t want to tell Rachel where her mother is, but Rachel says she has to know, now, after all these years because Lembarto is—let’s face it—dying. And she’s certain Lembarto knows.
conflict #2: Elwood has scheduled an interview with Lembarto about his great, underground, cult novel of decades before, the 800-page opus, THE DECEIVER’S WIFE
conflict #3: Lembarto and Rachel must collude to keep Elwood from discovering it was Lembarto’s wife, the secretive and now fugitive Fatima, who wrote his novel, not Lembarto at all
faux resolution: Elwood is seduced into buying Lembarto and Rachel’s story of Lembarto’s memory issues due to his illness
climax: after Elwood leaves, Lembarto realizes he has, in the heat of the moment and the twilight of his failing eyesight, accidentally autographed for Elwood the copy in which Fatima made her handwritten notes for the revised and final edition

CONFLICT #1: Rachel must get that copy away from Elwood before he discovers the hoax and Fatima is exposed to Lembarto’s public
hook: backstory about THE DECEIVER’S WIFE (not yet organized)
conflict #1: Rachel follows Elwood to his own territory and tries to trick him
conflict #2: Rachel tries to reason with Elwood
conflict #3: Rachel tries to intrigue Elwood
faux resolution: Elwood is intrigued
climax: Elwood reveals that he’s already discovered Fatima’s authorship

PLOT POINT #1: Lamberto and Rachel now move forward inevitably involved with Elwood

CONFLICT #2: Rachel must win Elwood’s cooperation without falling in love with him, which she is loath to do because of what happened to her parents
hook: Rachel and Elwood have an electric moment (not yet written)
conflict #1: Rachel distances herself from Elwood, dealing with Lembarto
conflict #2: Elwood pursues Rachel, now negotiating about the book
conflict #3: Rachel proposes a wager with Elwood
faux resolution: Elwood accepts the wager (not yet written)
climax: Rachel loses the wager just as she is notified of Lembarto’s collapse

MIDPOINT: The scale has tipped, Lembarto is dying, Elwood must be accepted, Fatima must be notified

CONFLICT #3: Rachel must confront her long-lost mother with her beloved, Honoria (for whom she left Lembarto and Rachel when Rachel was a child), over the deathbed of Lembarto, who collapses before he can arrange an amicable meeting
hook: Rachel, with Elwood in tow, rushes to Lembarto’s side when he collapses
conflict #1: Lembarto admits he knows how to contact Fatima and lets Rachel send a message
conflict #2: Rachel can’t reach Fatima
conflict #3: Rachel reaches Honoria, whom she knows nothing about
faux resolution: Honoria brings Fatima to Lembarto’s bedside
climax: Rachel faces the mother who abandoned her long before

PLOT POINT #2: Rachel and Lembarto must move forward with Fatima

FAUX RESOLUTION: Elwood agrees to keep Fatima’s secret out of love for Rachel, and Rachel and Fatima strike an uneasy truce over Lembarto’s hospital bed
hook: Elwood charms Fatima
conflict #1: Rachel confronts Elwood on his intentions toward Fatima
conflict #2: Honoria confronts Rachel on her intentions toward Fatima
conflict #3: Elwood confronts Honoria on her intentions toward Rachel
faux resolution: everyone is reassured that they are not blackmailing or bullying each other (not yet written)
climax: Fatima confronts Lembarto on his intentions regarding her book

CLIMAX: Lembarto dies, and Fatima in her grief reveals that she never loved Honoria as much as Lembarto, but only ran away with her to prevent Rachel from growing up knowing her mother wrote such a novel of love about another woman
hook: Lembarto, not knowing Elwood has figured it out, tells Fatima that her secret (her authorship, which even Honoria doesn’t know) dies with him
conflict #1: Fatima collapses in grief
conflict #2: Honoria tries to comfort her and is thrown off
conflict #3: Rachel turns to Elwood to assure herself that he won’t blackmail her with Fatima’s secret, to distance herself from Fatima and Honoria, and secretly for comfort
faux resolution: Fatima pulls herself together when she sees Rachel with Elwood and realizes he knows
climax: Lembarto dies, and Fatima goes berserk, revealing the truth of her feelings to Honoria

You see how these sequences of events, especially in the Climax, must be arranged in just exactly the correct order so as to lead the reader to the greatest tension at the very last moment. We’ll talk about this more when we get to that point.

You also see that the real Resolution isn’t included here. We’ll talk about that when we talk about the Climax.

Once we’ve solidified this structure, we’ll talk also about how to layer in the subplot involving Fatima and Honoria, and I’ll show you how their existence repeatedly supplies the cause-&-effect catalyst that keeps Lembarto, Rachel, and Elwood ricocheting deeper and deeper into their crisis, until they fetch up against their Faux Resolution (“Thank god! We’re not going over the edge of the abyss after all!”) and are confronted there by the inevitable catalyst THEY CAN’T AVOID and there they go—over the edge.

Pure fireworks.

Always be thinking in terms of, “How does this story illuminate the basic human conflicts inside these characters? How do these characters illuminate the way internal conflict causes and fuels story? What is the inevitable chain of cause-&-effect that forces these characters, again and again, to make the choices they make, which turn out, again and again, to be the wrong choices, which forces them, again and again, into more choices, worse dilemmas, greater crises on the way to their Climax?”

This is what fiction is: an unending exploration of the eternal predicament of being human, in all its complex, poignant, significantly-detailed glory.

Xavier, I offer a free subscription to The Art & Craft of Fiction Lab to each new client. Feel free to give yourself a login and password, and I’ll approve your registration.

And, whenever you’re ready, send me your thoughts on developing the characters of Lembarto, Rachel, and Fatima, along with Elwood and Honoria!

best,
Victoria