Natasha Alexander » editing

to make a long story short…

Natasha — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 13:42:43 +0000

I obviously haven’t been in blog-land much lately. I’ve been editing my WIP and frankly, if I follow much more of the (good) writing advice/models I’ve been reading lately, there won’t be much of the damn thing left for anyone else to read.

Hint Fiction (props to Merrilee Faber for the heads-up on this book, featuring one of her stories) arrived in the same Amazon shipment as Elizabeth George’s book on writing, which I promptly discarded in favor of this little gem. The book design and layout rock along with the content.

According to editor Robert Swartwood, hint fiction is built on the idea that “the very best storytelling was the kind where the writer and reader meet halfway, the writer only painting fifty percent of the picture and forcing the reader to fill in the rest. That way, the reader truly becomes engaged in the process.”

Each of the 125 Hint Fiction stories has, at most, 25 words. A lot of the stories are dark, and the best ones are very dark. I don’t know if that’s an artifact of the form itself or of the editor’s taste. But each one tells a full story and draws the reader in, sometimes farther than I wanted to go. There’s way more emotional depth than I thought possible with so few words.

Hint Fiction is a must-read if you want to see how some writers make every word count. Phew.

So I hit my manuscript with a red pen and started deleting those excess words.

Then, I read Every Word Matters on David Kazzie’s blog, The Corner. Basically he reminds you that every word matters, only he uses a couple more words than that and an example from the movie version of No Country for Old Men. David is the mastermind behind the So You Want to Write a Novel/So You Want to Go to Law School videos and he’s a pretty funny writer.

So I hit my manuscript again with a red pen and started deleting some more of those words that don’t matter.

And then I discovered Austin Kleon, author of Newspaper Blackout. He writes poems by starting with a newspaper and blacking out the words he doesn’t need with magic marker.

His blog post How to Steal Like an Artist (and 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me) is awesomely brilliant, so you should read it. I can’t pick a favorite part, so I’ll just go with the tenth thing that nobody told him:

10. Creativity is subtraction.

It’s often what an artist chooses to leave out that makes the art interesting. What isn’t shown vs. what is… Creativity isn’t just the things we chose to put in, it’s also the things we chose to leave out.

So I’m hitting my manuscript again, maybe with a black marker this time.

If there’s anything left.

No Parknig

Natasha — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 01:02:57 +0000

Some of you know I was an editorial assistant at one of the Big Name publishers in Boston in my first post-college job. Every morning, I’d stop at Dunkin’ Donuts for a large coffee and two glazed donuts, ride from Cambridge to Park Street on the MBTA, spill out with the hordes into Boston Common, and then walk past the Granary Burial Ground and Paul Revere’s grave on my way to my sixth-floor cubicle.

There, I’d pore over manuscript galleys and proofs looking for typos, grammar and spelling errors – and, since this was the old, pre-computer days – broken typeface in a seemingly endless series of mediocre middle-grade literature enrichment books.

If this hadn’t driven me stark raving mad and out of the glamorous world of publishing, I might have had my own publishing imprint by now and be making life-and-death decisions over your manuscripts. But it did, I don’t, and I’m not.

Oh well.

Still, signs like “these” – and they’re everywhere – continue to make me crazy. For years, I couldn’t read a newspaper without a red pen in my hand.

So imagine my shock when I read in Slate last week that I HAVE BEEN COMMITTING A MAJOR PUNCTUATION FAUX PAS MOST OF MY ADULT LIFE. (Over-use of the caps lock key is another, but I don’t want to get into that here.) Farhad Manjoo explained it all in excruciating detail here: Space Invaders: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.

Somewhere along the line, I missed the memo that there is only one space after a period in a sentence. How could that be? According to Manjoo, monospaced versus proportional typesetting rules came into being during a decade that I was not sitting at a desk and worrying about galley proofs. Uh oh.

I’ve spent years since the rules changed cranking out academic reports – and each and every one of them has two spaces, not one, between sentences. Sure, I followed APA or MLA or Chicago or whatever guidelines were called for in a given context – at least I thought I did – but only to make sure my footnotes and references were lookin’ good.

And you know what?

No one died because I inserted those extra spaces. Worlds did not collide. Elvis neither left nor re-entered the building due to the error of my spaces.

Life as we know it has continued.

Which leads me to this conclusion about punctuation rules and whether to worry too much about them:

It was a dark and stormy night…

Natasha — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 17:21:17 +0000

…perfect baking weather, in my mind. So I made apricot-orange oat scones and then, since the kitchen was already a mess, cranberry chocolate chip cookies. C’mon over. I just put on a pot of coffee.

I was awake a lot during the night since bands of rain kept slamming the bedroom windows. And of course while I was lying there in bed listening to the wind, voluptuous prose started flowing out of my mind.

Did I get up to write any of it down? Nah. Am I pissed at myself for being a slouch? You bet. Full disclosure: most of the time when I have gotten up to write down those middle-of-the-night pearls, I find they’re not quite so pearly in the light of day. Last night could have been a breakaway point, though. We’ll never know, will we?

I just finished reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. I carried it with me everywhere for the past couple of days so I could pop it open whenever anyone paused for longer than 2 seconds in conversation or I was waiting at a red light. Yeah, it definitely got under my skin.

I’m glad I didn’t see the movie, and I won’t. Too much really nasty stuff happens in the book, and I don’t want to see it replayed in color on the big screen. But it is making me think I’ll keep, maybe even expand on, some of what was making me a tad squeamish during my recent NaNo writing.

It probably goes without saying that NONE of my characters can hold a candle to Lisbeth Salander, the sociopathic main character in the Millennium trilogy. (Tattoo is the first book of the series.) That’s a problem – you’re boring – when you write what you know and you’ve led a fairly low-impact, neutral existence.

Larsson died before any of the books in his Millennium trilogy was even published. On Stieg Larsson came out last week. It includes a series of emails between him and his book editor, Eva Gedin, as they were editing the trilogy. A couple of those emails were printed in this Wall Street Journal article, The Man Who Launched a Blockbuster. I felt a little voyeuristic reading the emails, which of course adds to their appeal. I am looking forward to reading the entire book.

This exchange from the article stood out for me as I read it [possible spoilers but I don’t think they would stand in the way of your enjoyment if/when you got into the series]:

A rule of thumb has been never to romanticize crime and criminals, nor to stereotype victims of crime. I base my serial murderer in book I on a composite of three authentic cases. Everything described in the book can be found in actual police investigations.

The description of the rape of Lisbeth Salander is based on an incident that actually took place in the Ostermalm district of Stockholm three years ago. And so on.

The email went on to describe his thoughts about many of his characters, especially his so-called secondary characters who he believed were as important as his main characters in creating a “realistic universe”.

Larsson led a vastly more exciting personal life than most of us sitting at our kitchen tables pounding out whatever we’re pounding out while eating homemade scones. Even so, he got way outside his own skin to build his characters and his stories.

That’s part of the writer’s struggle, isn’t it, whether your life is exciting or mundane? To get outside your own skin and cast a wide net, troll around for those wrinkles and eccentricities, pick up the flotsam and jetsam of real lives that float in during a storm. Research. Listen. Get up in the middle of the night and write it down. Dream.

Getting outside your own skin. And then putting what you find there together in a way that will get under your readers’.

Still working on it.

The Writer-Editor Relationship

Natasha — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 14:26:14 +0000

I went to a great panel discussion this past week as part of my local university’s annual Writers Week. It featured Jay Varner, a Creative Writing MFA graduate here who just published his memoir, Nothing Left to Burn, and Jay’s editor, Chuck Adams at Algonquin Books. Adams also edited Sara Gruen’s Like Water for Elephants (one of my faves), a book that purportedly got its start during an early National Novel Writing Month.

These guys were both super informative, funny, honest and I wish those of you who read this blog regularly (thanks, ya’ll) and strive toward best-sellerdom could have been there. You would have enjoyed it. Then we could have gone for a walk on the beach together and talked about writing and publishing. Bliss.

But you have the next best thing: my summary. Bear in mind that I’m also cranking out a couple grand for NaNo every day, so this post is not going to be as, er, smoothly edited as some of my blog entries. And it’s too long. If you’re too busy churning out page after page of dubious prose for NaNo, just jump ahead to the really important stuff at the end of the post.

A lot of this is what we’ve all learned from reading about the publishing process, but hearing it from real live sentient beings kicks it all up a notch for me.

Chuck was asked right off, how does a writer without a platform (i.e., someone who’s not Snooki or an ax murderer) get picked up by an editor like you? He answered that for him, voice is the most important element. While most of the books he picks to work with have come to him via an agent (as had Jay’s book), he also reads queries that come directly to him in email. He is, in fact, currently working with a memoir that he got from email, and he usually gets about ten email queries a day. He reads them all, he said, unless he sees a grammatical error, then he quickly hits the delete key and moves on. You’ve been warned.

Chuck said he liked Jay’s writing when he first read it – sometimes there was a little over-writing, sometimes Jay didn’t get into the subject deeply enough – but the “bones” were there that meant, for Chuck, the book was worth working on and with.

Here’s the thing that bothered me: Jay Varner had just spent THREE YEARS in an MFA program where what he did, eight hours a day, was write. Or read other people’s writing. Or listen to people critique his writing. And then revise it.

So he had a manuscript that I assume was pretty polished when Algonquin signed him on. Then it took another three years until the book was finally published this fall. How much revision can any book handle? How much revision does a book with “good bones” need?

Just wondering…

What does an editor like Chuck Adams want to see, aside from correct punctuation and usage? For fiction, he needs to see an entire manuscript. It’s not enough that a person can crank out a couple of chapters of beautiful writing; he needs to know that you can tell a story.

Non-fiction is different for him. If you have a good idea, and a great voice, you don’t necessarily need to submit a complete manuscript for him to be interested. I’m assuming Jay submitted a pretty complete manuscript. But he also had a compelling hook with his life story: he grew up in a trailer in a small town in central Pennsylvania where his grandfather was a serial arsonist. And his father was the town’s fire chief. I’m interested in reading about his childhood, aren’t you?

Chuck also talked about publishing as a business and the need to publish books that will make money. He had one manuscript that he loved because it was wildly original and when he took it to the editorial board, they asked him to compare it to another book or another author who was currently selling. He couldn’t – it was in a class of its own. They had no way of gauging the likelihood the book would be successful, so they bagged the manuscript and moved on to something they felt would be marketable.

Publishers need to have a buying audience in mind before deciding to publish a book – it needs to be “sort of” original, but there also needs to be something already out there to compare the book to. He gave these examples:

Bad: This book is just like Eat, Pray, Love, only better. (Don’t ever compare anything to Eat, Pray, Love. period.)
Good: Readers who like David Sedaris will like this book.

On MFAs and story telling:
Chuck said that much of the writing that he saw coming out of MFA programs was lyrical, filled with beautifully structured sentences and lush language, but it didn’t often include good story telling. He wasn’t sure whether or not story telling could be taught.

Jay found the benefit of the MFA program was the opportunity to write a lot, to get guidance and feedback. He learned how to think outside his own experience and tie it to something other people could relate to, how to structure his writing: “I just want to tell a good story that’s going to engage readers.”

On structure:
I heard this word a lot during the session, also during the Joyce Carol Oates talk a week earlier. I have no idea what it means, whether it’s story structure or sentence structure, except it seems to be Important in some meta-structure way that perhaps only MFA people can understand. I welcome input here. I mean, I can diagram a sentence and I know about plot points and story arcs – but I think they are referring to something loftier and more organic here. Help me out…

The really important stuff:
These three points from the session are the ones that I’m posting on my bulletin board:
• The real talent is in the rewrite.
• You can’t do everything in every draft.
• There’s a story first that needs to come out.

So stop reading and get back to writing that story.

Rules? We don’t need no stinkin’ rules!

Natasha — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:48:15 +0000

I’ve always loved Kim Carnes’ voice and this song — even though this isn’t the best version of it, it’s the only one I could find on YouTube. And, uh, Kim is 65 years old here and looks, IMHO, absolutely fabulous, so there’s something to be said for breaking the rules.

Which brings me to the main point(s) of this post:

Ten rules for writing fiction: Part One and Ten rules for writing fiction: Part Two. The Guardian asked thirty writers for their writing do’s and don’ts. And here they are.

Thirty writers X ten rules each = 300 writing rules!!!

(Okay, not quite 300 as some of the writers didn’t come up with ten.) I loved reading all of them together to see the different perspectives, similarities and contradictions. I’m going to print out both articles and highlight the rules that spark my muse, see how and if that changes over time.

In keeping with the Six Word Memoir concept (oh, we really should start doing some of these sometime, too!), here’s my distillation of the rules.

Write — for and from your soul.

What do you think?