Thursday Writing Advice

Workweek Observations from an Editor

Thursday Writing Advice: Submissions, Editing, and Published Books

---

As is typical in the week of an editor, I’m reading books at all stages of the publishing pipeline. I’m reading submissions from literary agents, which are books at the very start of the line (there are obviously steps before this but editors aren’t all that involved in those typically); I’m editing drafts of yet-to-be-made-public books; and I’m reading published books for the intermingled reasons of pleasure and work. In all instances, I am looking for what works and what doesn’t work in terms of line-level writing, structure, and emotional effectiveness (Is the book fun to read? Is it convincing? Is it dull? Is it harrowing?).  

This week I’ve decided to pull three observations from each point in the publication process: submission, draft, and published work. I won’t quote directly from any of the books I’m critiquing for reasons of confidentiality—and I’m currently reading multiple submissions, editing multiple books, and reading multiple published books so there’s no way to triangulate me (not that anyone would bother). Instead, I had some fun making up my own sentences and examples that approximate the issues I’m talking about, and saving myself from naming names.

1.     Action Without Emotional Stakes (Submissions)

Everyone has heard the adage that the opening lines need to grip the reader. Classically, in genres like mystery or thriller, but also in many literary novels as well, a gripping opening is meant to shock the reader and get them interested by having something exciting and consequential take place in chapter one. Often, that means a character is going to be killed. And if it is not murder, there are a cadre of other default shocking actions that writers usually go to—fights, chases, robberies, etc. The issue with picking what are legitimately shocking actions (if experienced in real life) in modern literature, is that the modern reader has already seen hundreds of bodies, brawls, car chases, and thefts. Let’s demonstrate:

“They ran as fast as they could. Leaves and small branches of the trees caught in their hair as the forest gilded by. Reaching the river, they could tell how deep it was but had no choice but to wade in. Instantly the water was nearly up to their shoulders. The currents attempted to pull them down. The footsteps of the man in pursuit echoed behind them.”

Nothing is particularly wrong with these sentences, they’re declarative and urgent. Something bad is happening that you might want to know about. If these sentences shifted gears quickly, they might end up working fine, but the reality is that if this paragraph continued in in this mode, they would become rapidly uninteresting. Everything about them is fundamentally generic in the grand scheme of storytelling in the 21^st century—we’ve read too many books and watched too much TV (the bigger culprit). Someone getting chased isn’t de facto intriguing or surprising. Action always, but now more than ever, needs emotion attached to it in order to be effective. Who are “they” in the above paragraph, why are they running away together, what is their relationship to “the man” chasing them? At a certain point, even if the writing is good, you give up on these kinds of scenes and novels if the emotional story doesn’t escalate in lockstep with the action. Additionally, pages and pages of action followed by pages of pages of backstory explaining the emotional stakes doesn’t quite cut it either.

I’m publishing a fantastic thriller called Kill for Me, Kill for You by Steve Cavanagh next spring and the first page of the novel is a perfect example of immediately imbuing consequential action (much in line with the ones listed above) with emotion:

“Amanda White lifted the lid from the electric baby bottle sterilizer and stared inside at the .22-caliber revolver. It looked like the gun was sweating, its steel frame and barrel beaded with balls of hot condensation, the steam rising gently from the base. Turning away, she found her soft leather gloves, put them on, and carefully lifted the weapon clear. 

The gun had to be clean today. No fingerprints. Last night she had the idea of using the sterilizer to remove any prior trace of her DNA from the weapon. It seemed fitting somehow that one of Jess’s things should have a part in this. She was surprised that the sterilizer still worked. It hadn’t been used since Jess’s first birthday, when she’d switched her to sippy cups. She and her husband, Luis, had decided to keep the sterilizer, though, in case Jess ever had a baby brother or sister down the line. 

None of that could happen now.”

Now here you want to know what happens, in fact the act itself (the murder) might not be the most tantalizing question, because the why of emotion has imbued this typical scenario in a thriller—someone is setting out to kill someone—with even more mystery and higher stakes than the pure action.

2. Stating What Something Means Before It’s Shown (Drafts)

Redundancy is one of the great scourges of good writing, and it comes in many forms. I once read a submission that started with something like: “He angrily kicked the dirt into the pit below in pure anger.” That’s about as bad as it gets, but even good writers can be prone to saying what they’re already showing. In nonfiction this might mean introducing a quote in a way that is needlessly expositional, for example:

1.

[Imagine the paragraphs before this have given the reader enough context]

Regan cast the Soviet Union as the ultimate enemy on March 8, 1983, “I urge you to beware the temptation of pride–the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.”

2.

[Imagine the paragraphs before this have given the reader enough context]

Regan stood at the podium and said, “I urge you to beware the temptation of pride–the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.”

Regan calls the Soviet Union the “evil empire,” so we don’t need the author telling us that Regan painted them as an enemy. The quote speaks for itself, just let him say it and get out of the way.

In fiction this same phenomenon crops up frequently on the sentence level. Take this sentence for instance:

“Unsure, I put my hand tentatively on the door knob but didn’t turn it all the way.”

Both “unsure” and “tentatively” can be struck from a sentence like this, so that it reads:

“I put my hand on the door knob, but didn’t turn it all the way.”

This flaw isn’t going to make or break a book—the extra lines don’t substantially change the meaning in either case. However, these little filler clauses and words pile up over time and can turn what could be a good or great book into an average one. When you state something before you show it, you soften its impact. Do that enough times and you become diffuse or, at worst, cloying.

An unfinished mural in Atlanta, apropos, no?

3. Straining to Be Poetic (Published Works)

It is no surprise that when we look to published books for writing advice, our critique is a little more subjective...on the surface, at least. In attempts to be original, especially in literary fiction, writers have a tendency to go for metaphors, images, or word choices that separate them from the pack. There’s of course risk in this—which we should applaud our writers for taking. But risk means that these attempts don’t always end well. In my reading this week outside of work I’m coming across more than a few metaphors and ideas that simply don’t make sense when analyzed closely. Correcting these errors is not the easiest thing to do as a writer or editor. Often, a strained sentence is half right and it takes that initial sense that something is off to slow down and correct a faulty construction of semi-poetic prose. Also, by definition they’re poetic and unique, so these kinds of sentences are more abstract by nature. To wit, it took me much longer to come up with a fake example that mirrors the original—it’s like trying to intentionally get a math problem wrong to show students where they might err, it’s easier to just show how it does work. But here it goes, a not-quite-poetic metaphor:

“The renewed emptiness of entering the room and knowing she was gone, an isolation, like an oyster washed up to shore.”

I’ve tried my best. The point here is that this metaphor kind of, sort of makes sense. An oyster washed up to shore is a lonely image in a way, which is related to isolation, the key connective word here that the metaphor is extrapolating on. But pick it apart more closely and one might ask, how exactly is an oyster “empty”? And “entering the room” where, presumably, free will was involved, doesn’t really jibe with the oyster who was forced onto shore by the sea.

Most readers—including myself—may just gloss over this with the old Benefit of The Doubt and compute “loneliness = oysters = she’s lonely, got it.” However, when pushed too far and too many times, straining to be poetic without really doing the work comes off as trying hard to be deep without having any there, there.

“Biggest” News in Books: Acquisitions and Acceptance

---

Simon & Schuster (full disclosure: the company I work for) was bought by private equity group KKR for $1.62 billon. (No comment from Dear Head of Mine.)

In other news, Book Twitter seems to have successful gotten the AI program Prosecraft—which purported to “analyze” the quality of literature by running manuscripts through software—to shut down. The founder apologized to the writing community. There are plenty of objections to how legitimately AI can even analyze art—writer Lincoln Michel does a good job of making that case—but it seems the main problem is that the creator was taking published works and running them through the software without consent. Yeah, the thing you’re going to not want to do to sell writers a service is upload their manuscripts to the internet, understandably they feel that is never okay.