Margins
It used to be that I got back my manuscripts covered in Post-it notes. My editor would scrawl in the margin or slap a Post-it. Not a lot of notes, generally. Maybe every two or three pages. Sometimes they are asides, "HA! loved this" or "I cried here." I like getting an inside view of a reader's head AS they are going through the manuscript. For years, that's what I did as I edited other people's books. I wasted a lot of trees. The whole publishing business did.
Along came Track Changes. Some editors use it. Some don't (largely depends, in my experience, on whether they have long commutes when they work on the train and hence paper is a better fit). Same thing . . . comments in the margin. Sometimes I use them now when I edit . . . sometimes not (with my writers' group it's 50-50 since we talk through stuff during the meeting).
Here's what I notice lately.
If there are a lot of questions about motivation . . . a scene is sunk.
Now, I have been giving this a LOT of thought. In fact, I thought about it during Law & Order last night. You see, in each show, they are trying to solve a case. And when the detectives leave a scene, after, say, questioning the matriarch of a powerful family, there will be something not quite right. Detective A will say to Detective B, "Did you notice how she never even ASKED how her grandson was doing?" Detective B will say, "Cold-hearted." And we, the viewer, know what our takeaway lesson is supposed to be, though really, we figured it out, it's for those who missed it and apparently need a cheat sheet.
But . . . and here's my takeaway, the scene CAN ALWAYS work on its own. What do I mean? There is not much about the scene that's hugely off. The dialogue COULD work on its own. The scene isn't one between two detectives and someone whose dialogue is literally off the wall and with huge noticeable gaps. The scene works. What is UNSAID is subtle and the astute viewer will pick it up (and if not, Detectives Goren and Eames will fill you in because hey, they only have an hour to solve this thing).
Move this to writing. It's okay to plant red herrings. It's okay to leave clues in the unsaid. But each scene still has to work. Readers cannot finish a scene, scratch their heads, and go "huh?" When I edit something now, and have seven or eight "huhs?" in the Track Changes, I know a writer's scene is in trouble. If the writer responds to me and says, "Well, you are going to find out what this means on page 180," I have news for them. The scene did not deliver. The scene and dialogue HAVE to work without enormous problems where it is. And those who master this--in thrillers and in mysteries, and in fiction of every type--are writers to learn from.
Keep your margins clean. :-)
Thoughts?
16 comments:
It's always interesting--and disconcerting--when readers miss things. Someone will say, "I liked it, but I didn't understand why John did that." And I'll want to say, "You missed the sentence or two where I say that John was attacked by an alligator when he was 10?"
But the truth is, I'm better now at realizing, if the reader/editor/whomever missed it, then it doesn't work. Yeah, you can argue that the reader just wasn't paying attention, after all, I DID put the information in there. But still, it didn't work, so I've got to figure out how to make it work. I might just want to emphasize the alligator attack more, or change it, or show it rather than mention it, or...
I'm thinking of John Scalzi's excellent novel, The Last Colony. There's a few scenes where the colonials on the planet come into contact with some primitive but deadly natives, and it doesn't really seem to be resolved and sort of goes away.
Scalzi's follow-up book was Zoe's Tale, which essentially tells the story of The Last Colony from the point of view of Zoe, the colony leaders' 16-year-old daughter. And really, they're both excellent books. But Scalzi commented that he thought he had resolved the primitive natives issue in The Last Colony, but a lot of people had e-mailed to ask him about it, so apparently he wasn't as clever as he thought he was. (He wasn't. I thought the same thing and so did my son, but neither of us e-mailed to badger him about it). So he made it perfectly clear in Zoe's Tale and yes, it's satisfying.
Hey, it happens. And most of us don't have a chance to re-write the same novel from a different POV (or inclination, I would guess).
Mark:
Sometimes the info is there. Sometimes not. I think, for me, it all depends on whether the scene stands on its own without being too puzzling or giving me pause. I am willing, on page 180 or 250 or whatever, to have my "ah-ha" moment . . . but the payoff better be there.
E
I understand what you're saying regarding the scene from Law and Order. What I took from the additional comments by detective A and B is redundancy and passivity. It's as if the writers were depending on a lazy audience, like they couldn't figure out that the person was cold-hearted.
It's probably just me, but I like to participate while I watch a TV show and read a book. I like to decide if the character is cold hearted or not. But to have it pointed out with dialog ("Oh, she's a cold hearted bitch), gives me the feeling that the writer thinks their reader is an idiot.
Mamma din't raise no idiot... ;)
Kath:
Totally agree. The show just serves as a demonstration . . . in writing, yeah . . . I would hate to think readers need it spoon-fed. But I think Mark raises a good point. If astute readers don't see it, and in particular, if editors, who have a background in trying to develop scenes and so on don't see it, perhaps the writer was TOO subtle. It's a fine line. I do think it again boils down to the scene itself. If it feels SO off and unnatural . . . my guess is it's too ham-handed.
E
Erica, I held my breath through this entire post, waiting for you to say something that would make me tear my hair out because it means my MS is not ready. It didn't happen.
*exhale*
I've read a lot that individual books in a series still need to be able to stand on their own, and this is just a more focused variation of that. It makes sense to me, although I'm okay with having a few questions at the beginning -- how else are you supposed to get people to read past the first couple pages?
Melanie:
I agree. It's a question between . . . curiosity versus confusion.
E
I loooove Track Changes.
Sarah:
Me too. Like a lot of long-time pub people, it took me a while to adapt to paperless, but now I love it.
E
I see what you're saying now (and Mark's example was awesome!). The "fine line" is so hard to see at times, especially for us visually challenged. ;)
So what you're saying is, don't barf it all up, yet, don't make it too invisible, right? (You need to conduct a workshop on this stuff...hint-hint.)
Track changes was a new thing for this ol' gal, but I love them now. lol. Before, it was paper all the way. Just glad I actually "got" it since the editors I've come across actually use it.
I absolutely hate "track changes". It makes it hard to make several changes to the same sentence when I'm editing a text.
Loving the track-changes feature... and finally openoffice has the changes located in the margins like word does. I can finally stop paying microsoft a small fortune and have a free office suite that works.
I agree about the standalone chapter/scene statement. I once wrote a long poem to tell a story. Each stanza was an individual haiku and each had to stand alone as a haiku and be able to flow with the rest of the poem. It was really hard, and I'm still not convinced that it all came out well... but it was a great challenge.
LaDonna:
As I posted . . . mine are still about 50-50 on using it. I like them now . . .
E
FF:
Depending on how much editing you're doing, it can get unwieldy.
E
ewoh:
That sounds like torture. LOL! But I've done unusual things like that too. :-)
E
I've read that a lesson in one of Donald Maas' books he has people throw the manuscript pages in air and randomly pick up a page from the floor and make sure Something happens on Each page.
Which sort of goes along with this since you have to clearly understand what is happening on each page.
Just a bit harder to pick up from the floor with Tracker Changer. ;)
And Kath C. :
I've heard that comment Sooo much in my family - Mamma din't raise no idiot... ;)
I've had to modify it a bit tho' -
If she did it Wasn't Me! ;-D
[I'm just sayin' - so it's clear ;) ;-D ]
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