What Can An Editor Do For You?

A few days ago I was thrilled to receive the final report on my novel, Blown Red, from my editor, Becky Toyne You can find her at beckytoyne.com

It took her about three or four weeks to review the entire manuscript, a total of almost 120,000 words.

Despite the positive reviews from all my wonderful readers and my agent, Anne McDermid, I still had major misgivings. There were several significant areas where I thought the novel fell far short of the mark.

My biggest hope was that Becky would not pull any punches, that she would point out the weak parts and offer suggestions as to how they might be fixed.

The result was better than I could ever have hoped. She picked up on every crack, crevice and  loose end. Her comments were direct and to the point. She certainly pulled no punches and when the situation called for it, used humour to highlight a particularly funny plot mistake. (Like the heroine taking a long, soapy shower after coming home to find the man who has betrayed her sitting at her kitchen table. Only in slasher movies, as Becky so adroitly pointed out!)

The report was about seven pages long. She says this is a typical length. She addressed areas such as plot, character, timeline, pacing and technical details. She also provided a one page synopsis of her results written in a very straight forward yet supportive fashion. She also sent back the original manuscript with even more specific editorial  comments scattered throughout.

She gave me excellent insight into how a crime/thriller novel must be structured. The problem must be revealed in the first chapter and the protagonist must drive the action, chasing after a solution to the problem with the reader following breathlessly behind.

She pointed out how I had missed this opportunity - the real problem showed up way too late in the narrative and the heroine ended up reacting to events rather than proactively moving forward. I spent far too much time developing characters and not enough showing the characters solving puzzles and rushing toward a hair raising ending.

DING!! DING!! A bell went off in my head and the blinkers fell from my eyes. I could see EXACTLY what she was saying and where I had gone wrong. That one simple comment addressed all the weak areas that had been bothering me since the beginning. 

And best of all she concluded that I had everything I needed to fix the problem - I just needed to rearrange the sequence of events and spend less time try trying to change the tough heroine into a moody anti-hero or for that matter, a man in a dress. I needed to get out of her way and allow her to be the strong, volatile, quick thinking woman that she is. In order to do this I simply need to remove some of the showy scenes where I attempted to illustrate her inner misgivings, lack of self-esteem, etc and just 'tell' the reader how she is feeling always ensuring that she stays strong and effective in her actions.

Add a few more twists and turns to keep the reader guessing and voila! A Thriller is born.

I feel like I have made a great leap forward in terms of my writing skills and I think the book is going to be one hundred percent better as a result.

A good editor is a MUST. If I have any advice for budding authors it is to seek out the services of a good editor BEFORE sending your baby off to an agent, a publisher or the e-publishing world. Not only is your book more likely to sell but you will end up a better writer in the end and what could be better than that?

The one down side to this whole process?

The THIRD DRAFT!!    Waaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!