LEE? That’s Let Editor Edit. And it’s what used to be done all the time in publishing, back in the days when editors dared to edit. There was a great article about this in Publishers Weekly last June. Apropos of that, I’ve been writing for several decades now, and for the very first time, I have an editor who loves editing. Her name is Phyllis Grann, and she has a vision for my work, in general, and for each book I write for her, in particular.
Let’s talk about those particulars. I’ve already told you that when I turned in Family Tree to Phyllis, the manuscript was nearly 450 pages. By the time she was done with her red pencil, we had shaved off nearly 100 pages.
Is this good? Some authors would say no. They’re the ones who don’t want an editor touching their work. They’re also the ones whose books you start to skim after a while, because there's so much flab. Personally, as a reader, I want to be gripped by a book from start to finish. If my mind wanders over excessively wordy or unnecessarily repetitious segments, I’m not gripped. As a writer, I want my reader to be gripped.
So I believe in belt-tightening. Mind you, it isn’t easy. It isn’t fun when your editor summarily Xes out a sentence or a paragraph that you spent hours writing. But it is a joint effort, which explains the “we shaved off” I said above. The final word is mine. It’s always my choice whether to put her edits onto my disk or not. Occasionally, I veto a suggestion and stick with my original. But Phyllis is good. After I worked her suggestions into my Family Tree file, I read the book through. It moved. It was stronger for the cutting. If anything was lost in the process, I didn’t miss it.
I have this thing about learning. I’ve written lots of books and could easily rest on my laurels. But where’s the excitement in that? I want to grow. I want each book to be better than the last.
So, after Family Tree, I tried to find a pattern in Phyllis’s edits. There were several. I kept them in mind as I wrote The Secret Between Us, and I thought my writing was greatly improved.
At least, that's what I thought. And I did do better with Phyllis. This time, rather than cut 100 pages, we only cut 50.
Let me give you two examples of the kind of cuts we made. If you haven’t read the first two chapters of The Secret Between Us and want to, click here. If you haven’t and don’t want to, I’ll set the scene. It’s the morning after the accident, and Deborah is just beginning to see how upset her daughter is.
My original sentence read as follows: “She had barely returned to the office after making two more home visits, phoning the hospital for an update on Calvin McKenna, and, in the wake of that, feeling several moments of what she wished was sympathetic morning sickness for her sister but knew to be raw panic, when the school nurse called to say that Grace had thrown up in the girls’ bathroom and needed to go home.”
After cuts, the sentence read, “Deborah had barely returned to the office when the school nurse called to say that Grace had thrown up in the girls’ bathroom and needed to be picked up.”
Much better. Clean and to the point. I had described Deborah’s work day for the reader in prior pages. There was no need for repetition.
A second example comes from a scene in which Deborah is sitting in a wingback chair at her dad’s house, thinking how lovely it is to be contained by the blinders of the chair, so that she can think of only one thing at a time.
My original paragraph read, “Pushing the last three from her mind, she focused on Cal McKenna, reliving the accident for the umpteenth time, trying desperately to see something she might have done differently. She relived her time in the woods with him, wondering whether she might have done more then. She relived her talks with the police and, later, with Grace, but here there was no second guessing. Grace was her daughter, suffereing from her parents’ divorce and at a challenging time in her life. She was a hard-working student, a dedicated runner, a caring sister, a good daughter. She was also a good driver. She didn’t deserve a punishment that could limit her choices in life. Neither, given the facts of the accident, did Deborah. But she would gladly take it to spare her daughter. Parents did that, particularly ones who had caused their kids grief.”
Phyllis’s margin note said, simply, “Repetitive.” And she was right. Sure, Deborah might have been thinking all those things. But the reader already knew them and didn’t need to hear them again.
So the after-cut version became, “She relived the accident for the umpteenth time, trying desperately to see something she might have done differently. She replayed her talk with the police and, later with Grace, but here there was no going back. Grace was her daughter and she deserved protection. That’s what parents did, particularly ones who had caused their kids grief.”
Some difference, huh? Again, we have something that is cleaner and more to the point – and this happened throughout the manuscript. Once I finished my part in the cutting, I read through the whole thing as I’d done with Family Tree, and found it to be much, much better.
So now I’m writing While My Sister Sleeps, which will be out in early 2009. And I’m trying to incorporate Phyllis’s lessons. But it’s a process. For every two sentences I write, I cut one. I’ve probably written 200+ pages for my current yield of 100+ pages. Still, the final product is good. I like what I read, and, if I like it, my readers will, too.
Polishing a novel is like polishing a gem. You have to chip away at the detritus (how’s that for a word?) of the raw piece. You have to whittle away at anything that can detract from the finished stone. You end up with something that shines. Something that glows. Something that, in book terms, readers think is the very best you’ve ever written.
Right? Let me know …
