Inside the Deep, Dark, Mysterious Brain of an Editor

Most of you know that I have been editing books and journals for over thirty years. One of the several books I’m editing at this time is actually my husband‘s. This is his fourth book, and the fourth one of his that I’ve edited, and I am pleased to report that we are still married. He gets to make things difficult for me by writing about ideas that are hard to understand, and I get to enjoy myself by writing nasty comments in the margins. A great time is had by all.

I thought it would be instructive to show you exactly what goes into editing a book. I am of the strong opinion that an editor is a better writing instructor than another writer. An editor sees things from above, and from a much broader perspective. And it’s easier for an editor to be objective.

When working on anything, a good editor will constantly be thinking two things:

1. What exactly is the author trying to say?
2. Will the reader be able to understand it?

I’d like to take you behind the scenes with my husband’s (nonfiction) book, and show you how I am editing it. I believe that you, as a writer, will be able to glean some important writing techniques from this exercise. And I might even show you one of my nasty comments.

Don’t use a lot of adverbs and connective words

A lot of writers want to pad their ideas with adverbs and other boring words. Trust me: you don’t need to introduce every thought and every sentence with one. Just write. I know every teacher you’ve ever had told you to use “transitions” at the beginning and/or end of every paragraph/new thought/word (just kidding about word). Let the sentences themselves move your prose along, not a bunch of I-am-a-lazy-writer words.

Here are a few naughty words hubs has begun his sentences with, sometimes three or four times in a paragraph. I have deleted most of them. And yes, of course you can use them sometimes. In fact, I’m using one now. They are listed in increasing order of pompousness.

• and
• but
• however
• yet
• nevertheless
• incidentally
• interestingly
• of course
• therefore
• obviously
• in any event
• on some level
• in fact
• true
• thus
• hence
• granted
• indeed

Don’t take 47 words to say something that can be said with 3

Many non-fiction writers – not my husband, I might add – enjoy hearing themselves talk; I mean, write. They would do well to abide by Stephen King’s wonderful piece of advice, which goes like this: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, kill your darlings.” The King of Horror knows about killing things, whether darling or not.

Here’s my favorite excess verbiage from yesterday’s editing session:

“It is true that the above notwithstanding, this event may have been one of the most important…”

Huh?

I fixed this by chopping off that first, unnecessary clause and simply beginning the sentence with “This event may have been one of the most important…”

Here’s another one:

“The book gives several answers to try to explain the connection”

Any time you come across “to try to” or “to try and,” you are in trouble. There is usually no reason for these three words. Get rid of them. And while you’re at it, get rid of a couple more as well.

Here is how I edited the sentence: “The book offers several explanations for the connection.” Everyone knows that the job of answers is to try to explain, so why do you need to remind your readers?

Say it loud and say it proud, but say it only once

(image courtesy of stockimages for freedigitalphotos.net)

This is the bane of an academic editor’s existence. Scholars generally spend the first third of their book/essay/chapter – usually all three – telling you what they’re going to say, the next third saying it, and the last third telling you what they said. Do not do this.

Here are some danger signs that you are repeating yourself, or at least suffering from diarrhea of the keyboard:

• As mentioned above
• Before we conclude our discussion, we should note that
• Let us now return to
• As noted
• In several of the preceding chapters
• We just mentioned that
• We are now ready to go back and better understand the idea
• But first we need to
• Before we go further
• But even before looking at
• In order to answer the question, we need to first
• There are two answers to this question. The first is that

If you are guilty of using a loquacious-laden phrase, you can either delete it and just get on with your point, or you can use it as a cue that you might be starting (or continuing) to repeat yourself.

Here’s the nasty comment I promised

You’ve been so attentive that I feel compelled to share one of my especially pungent notes to hubs. In fact, I’ll give you two:

(image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono for freedigitalphotos.net)

“Can you stop with all the double negatives when you want to say something positive?”

“Can you say this in three words or less?”

♥♥♥

Special thanks to hubs for allowing me to share his book with my tribe.

And one more thing: I’m much nicer to my non-spousal clients. 🙂 Check out my Work with Me page.

Okay, now I want to hear from you. Do you think editors make better writing teachers than writers? Why or why not? Let me know in the comments below.

Happy writing,

Deena Nataf
www.BulletproofWriting.com
Deena@BulletproofWriting.com

I just finished reading a novel on Kindle that I got for $1.99. It’s called Vintage, and it’s written by a practicing lawyer named Susan Gloss. The book as a whole was pretty good; I’d give it a 3.5 out of 5. However, I can’t stop thinking about it, as the author did many smart and unique things. Frankly, it’s a pity that smart and unique are what separates a good book from a mediocre one, because in my opinion all fiction should be smart and unique. 

Spoiler alert

I need to give a basic story line as well as reveal a few things in order for you to understand why this book spoke to me so much as an editor and the owner of a writing blog (but not so much as a reader), so I apologize at the outset.
The book explores three women: a pregnant eighteen-year-old whose boyfriend just broke their engagement, a thirty-eight-year-old divorcée who owns a shop selling vintage clothing, and woman in her late fifties whose marriage might or might not be falling apart. Their lives intertwine and they end up helping each other grow.
Now here’s the thing: the story line is not unique at all, right? Pretty stock-like characters, no? How many novels have you read where people are struggling with relationships? Where a group of strangers are thrown together and end up making an impact on each others’ lives? Where boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back? No doubt you have concluded that Vintage is typical women’s fiction, or as I refer to this genre, “good trash.”
So how did Gloss take this overdone, boilerplate-of-a-storyline and make it unique?

1. She chose something she knew and used it as her backdrop

Just because you aren’t a) a pregnant teenager who had a clinically depressed mother, 2) a childless divorcée with a tattoo, 3) an Indian immigrant with a super-American daughter, or even 4) a woman, doesn’t mean you can’t write about it. How can you ever hope to grow as a writer or explore anything outside the four walls of your home if you don’t stretch your boundaries?
On the other hand, you must make your book sound authentic, and you must create a unique backdrop into which to drop your boilerplate story line. Here is where you should go with what you’re familiar with. Gloss, for instance, aside from being a lawyer, has a lifelong fascination with vintage clothing and in fact runs an Etsy shop to sell her finds. She also lives in Madison, Wisconsin, which is the setting of the story. This is how she made her story different and convincing. We could see, hear, and smell downtown Madison, and none of the vintage clothing details felt artificial.

2. She didn’t give in to clichéd situations

And believe me, she had many opportunities. Here’s one: The vintage store owner’s ex is an alcoholic, and he breaks into her apartment one night. And then of course her new significant other shows up in the middle of the confusion. Can you get more clichéd than that? Gloss steered clear of three typical outcomes:

• He starts beating her up and the new SO gets there just in time
• He tries to rape her and the new SO walks in on them and thinks she’s two-timing him
• She decides to give her ex another chance

Instead, the woman and her new SO put the guy in the car, take him to a motel, and dump him. The next morning the ex trashes her store. Love it.

Here’s another one: when they’re driving home from the motel the new boyfriend asks calmly, “Is there anything still between the two of you?” And he actually believes her when she says no, and that’s the end of it. In fact, the couple, are, refreshingly, totally open and honest with each other. The conflict, which by the way must exist in any novel, has nothing to do with a misunderstanding that almost ruins everything but is righted just before the point of no return. Nice one, Gloss.

3. She kept a bit of mystery

The pregnant teenager is obsessed with finding out whether her mother’s death was a suicide. We never really find out because the daughter realizes she herself will never be sure. By keeping the answer to the suicide question a mystery, Gloss not only turns a “formula” story line on its head, she forces us to focus on a different issue: whether it matters. The daughter receives reassurance, but not of the type she thought she needed in order to move on. The result is that we gain a different perspective on “need to know.”
Does the shop owner have more heartache from her ex? Does the Indian woman’s marriage sew itself back together? I don’t know, and neither will you. And that’s fine, because neither do the women themselves. And that is real life.

4. Her dialogue is character-specific

Gloss has the rhythm and tone of each of her characters down. She was able to give each and every one a completely unique voice. This is no small feat. The dialogue felt authentic.
The Indian woman, for example, has the exact cadence and uses the exact diction of someone from that region of the world. I could literally hear her in my head. Think The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. (Gloss thanks two Indian women in her Acknowledgements, i.e., she did her homework. Being authentic sometimes requires serious research.)
Did I like the shop owner’s potty mouth? No, but if she sounded like Tinkerbell I wouldn’t have believed her character. (Gloss gave it a nice touch, however: she has the character reminding herself not to use language in front of her customers. Now that’s realistic.)

5. She created unique supporting players

There are several more minor but pivotal characters in this novel. One noteworthy example is a soccer mom who gave up an acting career in New York City in order to get married and have kids. Total cliché alert. Gloss chose not to create an embittered has-been. This woman is happy with her life. If I were to typecast, I’d say she’s one of the two fairy godmothers in the book. Her spunky kindness, her love for her family, and her mini-midlife crisis combine with Gloss’s unique plot to make her an extraordinary character.

6. The characters don’t get everything in the end, and if they do it’s because they themselves made it happen

When Ms. Shop Owner and her beau break up, it’s for a well-thought-out reason on the part of the former. As I said above, there are no angry misunderstandings here. She gets on with her life, not expecting to get back together with him, and leaving things fully in his court.
The Indian woman, too, goes about her business with integrity. She might or might not go back to her husband, and she has created new rules. This feels so much more real than taking back the rapscallion who has seen the light and is groveling and weeping before her on one knee, begging for another chance. And by the way, she created an atypical wandering husband, too. Bonus points.

***

Keep these devices in mind and you too can craft a unique story even out of an overdone formula. Because the truth of the matter is: how many different story lines are there — ten? Twenty? I doubt there are even six. The trick is to use what you know, combined with outstanding research about what you don’t, and produce something that is entirely new.

How many formulas can you come up with? I’m interested to know how many we can come up with together. Start brainstorming, and put your offerings in the Comments below.

I’ll start you off with one: Coming of age. Now it’s your turn!

Happy Reading,

Deena Nataf

www.BulletproofWriting.com

Deena@BulletproofWriting.com

Hi, everyone!

Ever hear a joke and have the teller explain the punch line? Or worse, have the moral of a story spelled out, like you’re too dumb to get it — or the speaker is worried you won’t?

That’s how a reader feels when you misuse description.

Description: An Essential Building Block of Prose

There are several reasons you need to use description in your writing. Think of these reasons as goals you want to accomplish:

• To make your readers feel a particular feeling
• To draw an accurate picture of your character
• To convey mood
• To show time and place
• To give context

Done correctly, your readers will feel all the right things, have sympathy or antipathy for all the right people, and understand the point you’re trying to get across. Done incorrectly, you will either bore the daylights out of them or cause them to put away your book, article, or blog.

Now don’t get me wrong: you’re allowed to somewhat manipulate guide readers into feeling what you’d like them to feel, or into understanding the point of your story. But as with almost everything in life, moderation is the name of the game.

What One Brilliant Paragraph Can Teach Us

Here’s an outstanding example of an opening-page description by one of my favorite authors, Anna Quindlen, from Still Life with Bread Crumbs. See if you can pinpoint where Quindlen has met many of the goals of description outlined above.

We have learned several things from just three beautiful sentences. You’ll see below why I’m color-coding them:

1. Rebecca is living in a mountain cabin that is falling apart.
2. She’s not too savvy about country houses.
3. She has a problem that she doesn’t quite know how to solve — and wouldn’t it be great if it could just solve itself?
4. Things aren’t going quite so well in her life right now.

How to Bore Your Readers to Death in One Easy Lesson

Now let’s learn the same information in a blander, more “telling” way:

Rebecca lived in a broken-down mountain cabin. It was situated in a hollow halfway to the top. The cabin was totally falling apart: the kitchen floor was uneven, there was a loose step out to the backyard, and there were no electrical outlets in the bedroom. City girl that she was, she hadn’t noticed these things until two days after she moved in. She had no idea what time it was because she couldn’t plug in her old alarm clock. Rebecca’s life was falling apart, just like the house.

It’s not a great paragraph, and it’s certainly not as interesting and nuanced as Quindlen’s. (Ever notice how interesting and nuanced often go together?) It has four times the amount of “to be” words as Quindlen’s paragraph.The facts are just stated, and they are told instead of shown. And it’s kind of boring.

Deconstructing Brilliance

Here’s Quindlen’s paragraph again, color-coded to match the information we listed above:

She had no idea what time it was. When she had moved into the ramshackle cottage in a hollow halfway up the mountain, it had taken her two days to realize that there was a worrisome soft spot in the kitchen floor, a loose step out to the backyard, and not one electrical outlet in the entire bedroom. She stood, turning in a circle, her old alarm clock in her hand trailing its useless tail of a cord, as though, like some magic spell, a few rotations and some muttered curses would lead to a place to plug it in. Like much of what constituted Rebecca’s life at that moment, the clock had been with her far past the time when it was current or useful.

I have chosen three of Quindlen’s description techniques, which you can use in your own writing to make it more effective and to get, as it were, more bang for your buck:

• She conveys more than one fact or idea in the same passage. For instance, in the second sentence, we learn that Rebecca used to live somewhere else, that the place she moved into is falling apart, and that she must be a city girl if it takes her so long to figure out the house is in serious need of repair.
• She makes use of tools such as metaphor and simile while describing a character. Take a look at the passage in green. What is Rebecca doing? Is she “standing up and looking around for an outlet, hoping to find one”? Well, yes, but see how the words and techniques Quindlen chooses teach us so much more about her personality while she’s looking for a place to plug in her clock.
• She uses industrial-strength verbs and adjectives, nouns with nuance, and nary an adverb. 1) There are only two “to be” verbs in this entire 126-word passage. 2) Look how much we learn from a hard-working adjective such as “ramshackle” tacked on to the unexpected noun “cottage.” Wouldn’t you have expected “cabin,” or even “house”? Doesn’t “cottage” usually summon up coziness, gentility, order? 3) With words like these, who needs an adverb?

You too can develop description skills. Just keep your goals in mind as you write. Take advantage of meaning-rich words, but don’t get dramatic or overuse metaphor and simile.

You are walking a tightrope between pungency and nuance. Subtlety is the key here. Don’t shove anything down your reader’s throat.

The Challenge

Try writing a paragraph about a seventeen-year-old girl and a bicycle. Send it in to me and I’ll post the three best on my Writer’s Clinic page.

Happy writing!

Deena Nataf
www.BulletproofWriting.com
Deena@BulletproofWriting.com

Let me guess.

You are new or not so new to writing, and you keep hearing about this mysterious “Show, don’t tell” rule. Everyone’s talking about it: bloggers, authors, writing instructors. Doesn’t it seem like the be-all and end-all of writing?

But do you have any idea what it means?

Neither did I.

A caveat: “Show, don’t tell” has nothing to do with Ramona Quimby bringing her doll Chevrolet (named after her aunt’s car) to kindergarten.

Crime and Punishment

If you ever saw The Untouchables (back when Kevin Costner was at his most gorgeous), no doubt you remember the scene where Robert De Niro, as Al Capone, is striding up and down the boardroom lecturing about loyalty when he suddenly stops, takes a mallet, and bashes a man’s head in.

That’s how I used to imagine writers will be punished for not obeying the “Show, don’t tell” rule. Imagine a room full of senior editors and gravelly voiced literary agents sitting around a long, rectangular table deciding which writer’s head to bash in (or whose book to reject) for the crime of telling and not showing.

How can you tell the difference between showing and telling? Aren’t they the same thing, only different? And who’s checking to see if it’s being done right?

The Show-and-Tell Mystique

Although showing rather than telling is indeed the foundation of descriptive prose for both fiction and non-fiction (and even for content writing, I might add), the key to unlocking its mystery is to realize that it’s not mysterious at all. Basically, it’s just a fancy way to say “Use active voice, interesting verbs, and all five senses.”

There; that wasn’t so bad, was it?

I think the best way to explain “Show, don’t tell” is to show you through great prose instead of tell you with useless platitudes. Here are three basic techniques to enliven your writing:

1. Make it sensual. Close your eyes and imagine your characters or your subjects. What are they doing, physically feeling, seeing, hearing? Where is the scene taking place? For fiction, how can you use these resources to move the plot along? Ditto for non-fiction: avail yourself of the five senses to describe your subject, to paint a historical or scenic background, or to deliver information. Warning: this doesn’t mean to be overly verbose or flowery (see number 3, below).

Listen to this account of a slave being whipped in Sue Monk Kidd’s wonderful novel, The Invention of Wings. Pay attention to the senses she uses in these five sentences:

Is that good writing or what? What would it have sounded like had the whipping been merely “told”? Probably something like this:

Which passage would you rather read? Which evokes a perfect picture of the scene? Which evokes more powerful emotions in you?

2. Show the effect, not the cause. Credit for this one goes to Tom Farr, who is a storyteller, blogger, freelance writer, and high school English teacher. In his blog post, he suggests that causes are described by “to be” verbs, whereas effects naturally tend toward action verbs. He’s also an advocate of using the five senses to describe an effect.

Here’s another beautiful paragraph from The Invention of Wings. This time, the slave’s dying owner is being fed soup by his daughter. Pay attention to the diversity and vividness of the verbs Kidd uses here:

I brought cod soup to Father’s room. When he tried to eat it, his hand quivered so violently, spoonfuls splattered onto the bed sheets. He lay back against the bedstead and let me feed him. I chattered about the squalling ocean, about the serpentine steps that led from the hotel down to the shore, almost frantic to divert us from what was happening. His mouth opening and closing like a baby bird’s. Ladling in the colorless broth. The helplessness of it.

What caused all this beautiful prose to happen?

• The father was too sick to eat in the dining room.
• His hand was shaking.
• He was too weak to sit up straight in bed and to eat on his own.
• He was dying.
• He was unable to feed himself.
• The soup was unappetizing.
• He was helpless.

Look at all the “to be” words in this list! Can you imagine reading a paragraph composed of these sentences? It’s enough to make even me want to bash someone’s head in.

Use action verbs, new verbs, exciting verbs, evocative verbs. (But don’t go overboard and don’t get weird.)

3. Make your words earn their keep. Consider Alvin Toffler’s description of modern life in his classic non-fiction work, Future Shock:

As we rush toward super-industrialism…we find people adopting and discarding lifestyles at a rate that would have staggered the members of any previous generation. For the lifestyle itself has become a throwaway item.

Or would you have preferred to read: “As our progress toward super-industrialism gets faster, we find people changing lifestyles much faster than people did in earlier times. For the lifestyle itself has become disposable.”

Not bad, but isn’t “we rush” more concise and descriptive than “our progress…gets faster”? Isn’t “at a rate that would have staggered the…previous generation” much more nuanced than “faster than people did in earlier times”? Doesn’t the power of “a throwaway item” evoke more emotion than “disposable” does? It’s like the difference between color and grey scale.

A Voice of Dissent

I recently read a thought-provoking post by Joshua Henkin, who is both a prolific writer and the director of the MFA program in Fiction Writing at Brooklyn College. He brings up four important points, some of which I have quoted verbatim:

• The phrase “Show, don’t tell” is an implicit compact between a lazy teacher and a lazy student when the writer needs to dig deeper to figure out what isn’t working in his story.
• It’s much easier to write “the big brown torn vinyl couch” than it is to describe internal emotional states without resorting to canned and sentimental language.
• The phrase “Show, don’t tell” provides cover for writers who don’t want to do what’s hardest but most crucial in fiction (i.e., describing internal emotional states).
• The “Show, don’t tell” rule doesn’t mean that a writer should never say a character is handsome or happy, i.e., that he or she should never “tell.”

I like what Henkin says because we can easily get enmeshed in the net of writers’ bromides and well-worn hacks, and our writing will reflect the stiff, overly self-conscious style that comes from constantly looking over our shoulder and rigidly following a set of rules. Our writing would be like shooting an arrow and then drawing the bull’s-eye.

My recommendation? Maintain an uneven balance between Show and Tell in your prose.

Here’s a challenge: take a well-written paragraph from any book you have in your house, and rewrite it as a “tell” paragraph. Then write your own “tell” paragraph and turn it into a “show” one. I’ll publish a few of the results on my Writer’s Clinic page for the next post.

Maybe the phrase “Show, don’t tell” just needs a new name. What do you think? What would you call it? Let me know in the comments below, or shoot me an email. I’ll publish also these answers in the next post.

Happy writing,
Deena Nataf

www.BulletproofWriting.com
Deena@BulletproofWriting.com

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