The First Step: Write a Great Story. Part 2

As mentioned in my previous post, a key part of preparing your novel for publication is to go through an in-depth developmental edit with a professional editor. If you’re like me, you will receive pages of notes back from your editor with suggestions on how to strengthen your story, as well as specific annotations in your manuscript. It’s a tedious and unnerving process going through a developmental edit, but it’s well worth it when it yields a better, more publishable product. 

Here are some of the comments/suggestions from my developmental editor on my manuscript:

·     Character voices. Some character voices are too similar to tell who is speaking without dialogue tags. This can be confusing to the reader, but also a lost opportunity to portray more character and depth. To fix: do individual passes of the novel, picking out the dialogue of one main character at time and really immerse yourself in how they articulate and view the world. It builds personality and helps them come alive.

·     Use telling detail. Putting in more detail means saying more than the actual words are saying to add insight about characters, setting, situation, mood, subtext or theme. Provides more depth to the story.

·     Avoid passive tense. Replace as many “is”, “was”, and “feels” as possible with more dynamic verbs.

·     Cut down on longer sentences or break them in two. It’s usually better to cut down to essential elements in a sentence than cutting a sentence in two. Also, keep paragraphs short to help the maintain reader momentum.

·     After the first 50 pages in a book, you should hardly ever have to explain the world to the reader. Make a spreadsheet of all explained elements, read through the entire manuscript and mark every page where those things are explained. The explanation should only come once, usually on the first mention. Choose details of explanations wisely to create mood, tension, and reader emotional connection. Overall: watch out for over-explaining!

·     Add sensory data. Emotional connection to characters comes through the character’s sensory data: what does she hear, smell, feel, or taste in the situation and how do they feel about it? Smell and taste seldom described enough.

·     Make powerful setting descriptions and how characters move through and react to their settings.

·     Less telling, more showing. 

·     Add interest techniques to scenes, such as suspense, a twist, a surprise, interesting settings, misleads and reveals, dramatic irony (the reader knowing something the character doesn’t), uncertainty, hope, fear, intrigue, cliffhangers, dilemmas. Dialogue techniques includes a hook (someone says something strange, unusual, or compelling), predictions, foreseeing potential consequences, anticipatory dialogue like threats, warnings, etc.

·      Avoid cliches. Seemed to be a problem with my book towards the end. Specifically, my editor counseled, “Have your characters try things you haven’t seen done in movies or books before. Usually your first idea in having a character solve a problem isa cliché because we pick the idea that’s easiest—which is the thing we’ve seen other characters do in similar situations in other books or movies. But if you don’t stop at thinking of one or two solutions to a problem a character may face, and keep going until you have five or ten, then you’re getting into unique territory. This was the toughest note for me to address, and one I don’t think I was totally successful in implementing, though in a couple of cases I did.

There were many, many specific comments in the manuscript itself, making for a rather uncomfortable few weeks of massive editing. But the result of a lot of hard work is a manuscript that I feel is ready for the world. Or at least ready for submission to agents and editors. And that’s a process that I’ll move on to in my next post.