THE NEXT CHAPTER – Revisions
Changing your story from the ground up
"…in a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." – T.S. Eliot, from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
We've gone into some of the business and social aspects of the toiling novelist's writing life over the past few weeks, so I thought it would be restorative to get back to some discussion of craft. In particular, I am finally addressing my developmental editor's editorial assessment of a manuscript that I've been rewriting off and on for about twenty years.
The Raw Material
Why does one keep coming back to a manuscript after 20 years and skatey-eight drafts? For me, it was, first, that the idea came out of left field after the horror of 9/11/2001: examine the effects of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing on a group of immigrant workers in Brooklyn. I talked with people from different backgrounds, cultures and birthplaces to dig into experiences clearly outside my own and do them justice; empathy and research are fine, but formal sensitivity reading will be required before any actual publication.
The other impetus was that my late, dear friend and mentor Rick Pearse believed in this project, telling me repeatedly "This will be your breakthrough."
Unfortunately, with all the drafts, all the characters and sub-plots added, removed, and combined, I have never been able to get the word count over 56000, too big for a novella, too small for a novel, oddly with too many points of view and subplots that wandered far afield. There remained a core that I knew was good, but its proper cultivation was eluding me.
My most incisive and trusted reader gave me a lot of good guidance, which helped refine the story, but I knew that the next round had to be with a professional.
Developmental Editing
A professional developmental editor is someone who gets paid for her expertise. The work to be done is specified by you the author to an editor who should be experienced in and receptive to that genre. The editor will then assess the outline of the project and come back with a proposal for the cost, time frame and work product to be delivered. If agreed, a downpayment and delivery of the manuscript get things rolling.
So what does a developmental editor do that is different from, say, a copy editor or an acquisitions editor? It's really a question of focus; here's my understanding of these roles (and please, if you have a clearer or more accurate definition, do comment):
A copy editor is the one who edits the copy, that is, making sure that spelling, punctuation, essential grammar and other readability standards are reflected in the text and consistently applied. This is fine detail focus, and usually comes after the heavy lifting on plot, character and action.
An acquisitions editor is essentially a gatekeeper at a publishing house who gets pitched by agents (at smaller presses, by authors as well) and is charged with determining whether a work makes sense for publishing by the house, or what changes might make it so. This may or may not be the editor who actually brings the book to market. One wants to present a book in its best possible form here, because editors at large publishers often don't have the time to do a lot of actual editing.
A developmental editor is retained by the author to advise on getting the work into its best possible form. In the job description for my request, I asked for plot and character development guidance, and suggestions on how to expand the story. I supplied book details – basically the query, target market, and main characters – to inform my editor's offer and quote.
The dev editor will (or should) specify what will be included in the analysis, whether for a specified portion (such as the first 50 pages) or the entire work, and whether query materials are to be critiqued as well. In my case, in addition to an editorial assessment of core elements such as plot, structure, character development, pacing, POV and the like, the proposal included notes on commercial viability and unlimited written communication on revisions and next steps, including second review of a defined section to assess progress in revision.
Editorial Assessment
The document from my editor consisted of nine pages with the following headings, each containing sub-headings classifying points of detail:
What's working well: 1 page.
What could be improved: 7 pages (well, 6½).
Points to clarify: 1 page.
Pretty grim, eh? Well, not really: this is what I signed up for. It was good to see, in the first part, that my themes and characters resonated. These elements are what kept the project alive all these years. But the real payoff for me was my editor's discussion of addressing each main character's central conflicts, refining the points of view and thus cleaning up the pacing. This provided a key for how to go deeper into selected characters to provide a fully fleshed-out novel in which to house them.
Processing
Having first taken the time to clear my decks for what I knew would be an engrossing project, I am now well into the new draft as of the start of this month. The first week I focused on a color-coded chapter analysis, breaking out for each (a) whose POV it was, (b) what occurred there, and (c) how it drove the action overall. I actually wound up cutting two characters way back and removing two subplots, but removing about 10,000 words actually cleared the air for my primary characters to stretch and make clear what their concerns were and how they'll go about dealing with them.
I've actually done free-lance developmental editing. It is a demanding discipline, requiring deep reading and understanding of character motivations and development in conjunction with the plot, pacing, and language of the work. As a dev editor, you must be able to express organized critique at an appropriate level of detail in a way that will encourage and assist a writer in getting to the best in the story. That's what you have control over as an editor.
What an editor cannot provide is the creativity and discipline of the author in crafting a finished manuscript. Editors can provide guidance as to principles of storytelling relating to the work, but cannot write the words that will make it shine. That's our job as writers. And for us, there isn't much that's better than finally getting it right.
Keep on,
Andy