Confession:
I’m a grammar nerd. That may not shock anyone--I mean, this is a
post about editing. Then again, not all writers are pedantic about
punctuation. I am. In fact, I’m so picky about proper semicolon
usage that I legit got an eye twitch reading a poorly-punctuated
article this week.
Unfortunately,
that doesn’t mean I’m perfect. My friend Abbie, author of The
Guild of the Cowry Catchers, once mentioned that fans of her books
constantly send her emails to point out flaws in spelling or
punctuation, and I know from experience that even her first drafts
are fairly clean.
Copy
editing is the second most important step of preparing your
manuscript for self-publishing, because readers are honestly looking
for any reason not to buy your book (and often, blocked writers and
artists are looking for any evidence that they are somehow superior,
though they have not yet sent their work out into the world, and
correcting someone else’s work scratches that itch). Mostly,
though, it’s because people have shit to do. Read a book with a
careless comma-splice in the second paragraph? Ain’t nobody got
time for that. At least, not the folks who buy your books on Amazon.
Now
you’re probably wondering what the most important step is (or what
I think it is, since I’m not exactly the arbiter of Indie Press
Quality Control). It’s having a fantastic story/book.
Don’t
roll your eyes because you’ve heard that before--we’re still
talking about editing here. Part of having a fantastic story or book
is the messy, painful process of delivering your brain-baby onto the
page (eww). Like a baby, you’re going to be pretty protective of it
for a while. You may want to show it to everyone, but if you do show
your folks the product of your head-womb (how’s that for a
kenning?), they sure as Loki’s got shiny gold horns better say only
good things.
Because
your baby is vulnerable.
Because
you’re one cup of coffee short of a postpartum meltdown and not
quite ready to hear that it’s wrinkly, red, squinty, stinky, and
there’s a penis-shaped birthmark on the back of your thought-baby’s
head. Or maybe it’s not a baby at all. Maybe you wanted a sci-fi
baby and ended up with a changeling dystopian-horror baby without
legs.
Whatever.
Put your baby in a drawer.*
One
of the great things about indie pub is having complete creative
control, but you probably want to have complete creative control over
something that sells enough copies to construct a scale replica of
Gondor in your local park. I mean, I do. For your baby to grow into
that kind of mass-appeal monster, you’ve got to operate on it Dr.
Frankenstein-style (but this is the 21st Century, so get a
second opinion). Before you gnash your teeth about selling out, I am
not talking about writing for the market or for what’s popular. I’m
talking about finding the core of awesome in your story and helping
it achieve its full potential.
For
that, you need the developmental edit. A developmental edit (also
sometimes called a substantive or substantial edit) is content
editing--it focuses on things like structure, worldbuilding,
character, style, theme, pacing, and other macro-level issues. In
other words, this is the type of editing where a beta reader or paid
professional clears their throat and says, “Hey look, your baby
isn’t a sci-fi baby, but it is already a really cool
dystopian-horror baby, you just have to give it legs and get a hat to
cover up that penis-shaped birthmark.”
Not
every story needs developmental editing. Sometimes we end up with
stories that leap from our brains like Athena, gray-eyed,
fully-formed and dressed in shiny, shiny armor. Chances are, though,
if you’ve written a longer story, your brain baby looks a little
more like Hephaestus.
In
a moment, I’ll go over a few ways to go about getting a
developmental edit, but first I’m going to share with you why this
was such an important stage for me in the process of working on
EXORCISING AARON NGUYEN.
After
writing the first draft, I shared it with a few critique partners in
my local group, who had a few comments, but didn’t have a ton to
say about it one way or the other. Something nagged at me, because I
knew I was missing some crucial element that kept it from being
a great story.
I
sent the manuscript to my friend Ian, who is a published author and a
really stellar beta reader. He gave me back about half a page of
comments, but it was one criticism in particular that really hit the
nail on the head: I had set up a murder mystery, and I hadn’t
delivered one. I made that bit too easy.
Partly,
that was because I was resistant to writing mystery. I hadn't really read mystery unless you counted Harry Potter or my early years
reading The Boxcar Children, so I hadn’t felt qualified to write
it. Problem was, he was absolutely right--the murder mystery element
of my story was weak, and that flaw in structure kept the story from
being all it could. So I did some brainstorming with my writing group
and realized that, in order to really make the story awesome, I had
to rewrite most of it.
I’m
so glad I did. I went from having a story I was okay with to a story
I really adore, and that edit not only fixed the issue of the
mystery, it helped me come up with a few characters who articulated
the theme of the story more profoundly in my second draft.
After
finishing the second draft, I was on twitter and ended up winning an
edit from Alice M. (@notveryalice), who was new to YA, but a very
keen eye and even more of a grammar goose-stepper than me. She helped
me focus my characters and clarify the worldbuilding.
So
how do you go about getting a developmental edit? Like almost
everything, it requires some combination of time (yours or other
people’s) and money. Here’s how the combination falls:
Hire
an editor ($$$$, a little time, big reward)
Get
a critique partner (free, lots of time if you’re swapping work, no
enforced time-limit, reward depends on beta reader)
Edit
it yourself (free, but the most time-consuming option, results
depend on your closeness to the material and how good of an editor you
are)
This
last one can be done in a number of ways, but if you’re going to do
it, I recommend using Holly Lisle’s “How to Revise Your Novel”
course. I know she’s closed the course, but you can still purchase
the lessons as ebooks. They were extraordinarily helpful to me in
learning about structure and spotting the problems in my own work.
The
final advice I have for editing your manuscript is to read it out
loud, for an audience if possible. You will hear all sorts of things
when you read your own work carefully, and it can be beneficial to
read your own dialog and see if it sounds like something a person
might actually say. Harrison Ford once famously told George Lucas,
“You can write that shit, George, but you can’t say it.”
I’m
a narrator and voice actress as well as a writer, and it’s amazing
the number of typos, misspellings, and sentence-rearrangement
artifacts get left in published work. I’ve found loads in the books
I’ve narrated, and a good number of them in my own work as I read
it out loud.
So,
when your head-baby has languished in a drawer for a few weeks, give
it another look over and see if you notice anything that needs a
little surgery, then get some content feedback from a beta-reader, an
editor, a course, or the voices in your head. Once you’re happy
with your baby’s basic form, have it copy edited (again, this can
be hired out, begged, or done yourself, but if you do it yourself, I
recommend reading it backwards sentence-by-sentence). Then read that
baby out-loud, give it it’s final Dr. Frankenstein nip-tuck and
send it out into the world to terrorize the locals.
Oh,
yeah. And I’m supposed to do that promotion thing. Read my YA
Paranormal novella, EXORCISING AARON NGUYEN. You will laugh at least
once, though hopefully not at a wayward comma.
Find EXORCISING AARON NGUYEN at:
Amazon
Smashwords
