My
"substantive edit" on my first novel, White with Fish, Red with Murder, arrived from the publisher, Driven
Press, at the beginning
of June. There was an eight-page edit report in which the editors raise
questions about a few things in the story: the characters, the character
relationships, characters’ motivations--questions that they’d like me to answer
in the text.
And there's a “track-changes-markup” of my
393-page manuscript in Word. It was actually pretty daunting when it arrived, but
in general I thought the edit was fair and helpful. And if you’ve been in
writing workshops and critique groups, you’ve seen worse than this.
I went right to
work with the attitude that these people probably want to make money selling my
book, and they might know what they’re doing. Six weeks later, Word tells me I
spent 10,569 minutes (or 176 hours) editing the manuscript. Say I worked 36
days on it; that’s about 4.9 hours per day, which was really something I
needed. I’d been spinning my wheels, losing my writing focus much of the
spring, waiting for these edits and revising “New Billy’s Blues” more often
than necessary.
The edit report
pointed out recurring things in the manuscript they took issue with and some
general writing habits of mine they could do without. —for example, I use a lot
of dialogue tags: ‘he said,’ ‘I said,’ etc. and they prefer fewer. They also
had a list of words they thought I should use less frequently.
But the biggest
problem was that they wanted more of the private eye/protagonist’s internal
thoughts, and I was purposely writing the story with a minimum of interiority.
"could you weave in some of
[Frank's] internal thoughts?"
My personal feeling
about fiction is that conflict, change, and character should be revealed in
action, not in some guy ruminating. However, that was only my first thought,
and as I worked on the manuscript, I found I was already letting some of Frank’s
thoughts come through, just not his ratiocination about the crime.
After the first ten
days, I was ready for a chat with Driven Press to clarify a couple points in
the edit report. One was their lingering question about the exact nature of
Frank and Vera’s relationship. They understood Frank and Vera were friends with
benefits. But did Frank love Vera? Could he? Was he just using her? Or was it
more of a friendship?
“Well,” I said, “I wrote
two sex scenes between Frank and Vera that I cut out of the final manuscript.
Perhaps I could put one back in. Perhaps
it would help clarify what the relationship’s all about.”
“OK,” said the ed.
“But you don’t have to put the whole scene back in. Just pick it up from the
end, after they come.”
I thought that was
a strange thing to say. I wasn’t sure if I heard her right, but I was not
comfortable asking for clarification.
They’re Australian,
and yes, she did have a bit of an accent, but still . . . ;-)
At times I didn’t
think the eds “got” what I was doing, and other times I was just thankful to
have the work and effort of two editors as a resource. I spent the first three
weeks going through the mark-up; then I did “Words You Should Banish from your
Writing,” I went through the list and tried to cut or change as many as possible
to stronger or more vivid words. Some of the culprits—‘Went’—157 times, ‘pull’—87
times, ‘put’—141 times, ‘walk’—82 times, ‘there was’--129 times. The big
villain was “look” which I used more than 300 times! “Look,”
I said . . . swell-looking gal . . .
I looked down . . . she looked me in the eye. This was a tiring
exercise, and by the end of the week, and I needed to take a day off.
For the last two
weeks, I made a second pass to see if I did a good job on the edits. For the
second pass, I hid the track changes and comments and printed a clean copy and
reviewed it. To my surprise, it all still sounds like my writing. I do like
Frank to use a lot of three and four letter Anglo-Saxon words—sat, push, took,
pull, put, etc.—as opposed to Latinate word forms. But it read well. Better
than the original, I dare say, even after losing 150+ instances of the
word ‘look.’
Frank Swiver has
been getting to be a darker character, what with his problems in “Pearl's
Valley,” and his attitude in “New Billy's”. It was good to get back to a more
positive, kinder Frank in White w/Fish.
However, he was still supposed to be a ‘noir’ character—a loser. Doomed. He may
not die at the end but he might be better off dead. When I got to the end of
the book there were three of four consecutive questions from the editors that I
didn’t really understand.
- ‘ Show his thought process.
- What makes him finally dismiss the idea?’
- ‘Didn’t she already try to poison him, and the cat got it instead?’
- ‘Is all of this the truth?
- What is he thinking?’
I showed my wife “Why
are they asking me these questions?” I said.
Tasia read the last
ten pages. “Because what you’ve written doesn’t make any sense.”
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.
