It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to put a shirt on straight. It seemed abundantly clear to me that if one wanted the tag to go in the back, furthest away from one’s face, it should start furthest away from one’s face. This inevitably led to the tag ending up at my throat and having to start again. And somewhere inside I felt that something had gone wrong with physics. Not me. It wasn’t me but the world around me that had failed.
I was a logical child, but I had my own logic.
It was better to do fun things as long as possible before doing chores, even though this meant that my older, more responsible sister got to choose which chores she wanted to accomplish and I was stuck with the leftovers—picking up soft, brown, rotten apples before my father mowed the lawn instead of the hard green ones my sister had already collected.
If a movement was slow enough it would not be noticed. After all, when tigers and leopards crept toward their prey just an inch at a time the prey didn’t see them coming until it was too late. For some reason this didn’t work with my mother, who could plainly see the National Geographic World magazine I’d been reading by the light of my aquarium despite being told to go to sleep as I slid it slowly under the covers. The magazine was taken away and the light on the aquarium turned off.
I wasn’t a dumb kid. I’d thought it through. These methods should work. Except of course they didn’t, because I was wrong about some fundamental things.
If the tag is on the opposite side of the collar when the shirt is lying on the bed, it will end up at your throat when you put it on. The goofing around I did after school while my sister was rushing around like lightning doing her chores meant I had fewer choices and more odious chores to do. I am not a tiger and my mom is not my prey.
People think of childhood as a time when you are constantly adding information to the blank slate of your brain. You’re learning the alphabet and the times tables and the year Columbus arrived in the Americas. You’re learning rules to games and the lyrics to songs. You’re learning how far you can push your parents, your siblings, your teachers, and your friends before something breaks.
But your brain isn’t a blank slate. It’s a complex network of meaning-making connections, and it’s constantly working to make sense of its world. Sometimes it comes to wrong conclusions and revisions must be made. A lot of our thought life as children is spent realizing we were wrong about something and then figuring out how it really works.
You were wrong about how that word is pronounced. You were wrong about that girl you thought was your friend. You were wrong when you told your mom that you’d take care of the dog! You’d feed it! You’d walk it! Just pleasepleaseplease can we get a dog?!!
You were wrong about how to dress yourself.
What does any of this have to do with writing?
I’m glad you asked. As a freelance developmental editor, I usually see manuscripts when the writer has been working on them for some time. They’ve spent years writing, getting feedback, rewriting, getting more feedback, revising and editing and editing and editing some more. They’ve done all they could, all they know to do.
Still, something’s not working. They’ve been querying agents with no luck. They’ve been self-publishing with few sales. But they are so close to the work that they can’t see what’s wrong. They are sure that they’ve got their shirt on straight, but there’s that stupid tag irritating their throat again.
It all seems logical and right to them, but something’s wrong. They can feel it, but they usually can’t name it. And when you can’t name a problem, it’s hard to correct it.
Enter the developmental editor
The developmental editor is part teacher, part coach, part encouraging friend. A good developmental editor is honest about a manuscript’s problems, able to explain issues to the writer that he or she just didn’t see, and adept at offering possible solutions. A good developmental editor also recognizes that this is not their book; it’s the writer’s book. A good developmental editor never takes over a manuscript, insisting the writer do all things the way the developmental editor would.
And while each manuscript is unique, I have found in my years of doing this work that most novel manuscripts by beginning writers tend have the same core problems.
slow pacing
telling instead of showing
purple prose
too much narrative distance
weak character development
unrealistic (or too realistic!) dialogue
too much focus on either the forest or the trees
Over the coming months, I’m going to tackle each of these common problems in a separate post here at Experimental Wolves. All of these posts will be open to all subscribers, free or paid, and I’ll allow comments on all of them in order to allow people to ask specific questions or offer some good advice of their own.
Why would I do this? Won’t it eat into my client base? Isn’t it giving away my expertise for free?
In a word, yes. But hiring a developmental editor is expensive, so it’s better for most writers to be able to take their manuscript further down the road to publishable on their own first.
Trust me, you’ll still want to hire a developmental editor. But if you can get your manuscript in better shape before you hire me or another editor, you’ll get even closer to perfection. Because I can help a writer take a C-level manuscript to a solid B. Maybe even a B+. But if we’re starting at B-level, I can help them take it to an A.
We’ll start next month with pacing. In the meantime, if you have other writer friends you think might benefit from discussing these topics, please share this post with them and encourage them to become a free subscriber so they’ll get the posts in their email inbox.
And thank you for subscribing as well. It’s exciting to see this space grow!
I want to hear from you. What do you struggle with the most when you’re writing fiction? Are there any issues I didn’t mention in the list above that you’d like to see covered?