I’ve been on the record forever as stating that a book must
have a professional editor. As my friends have said all week, the author is too
close to the story to catch everything that might need revision, or to think of
some cool twist that resolves a plot issue or even to see a plot issue
sometimes. I absolutely will not release a book that hasn't been through both my developmental editor (our primary topic here) and a professional copy editor. I hire my developmental editor to review my novellas and short stories for anthologies as well.
And
the editor does need to be a professional, not just someone who likes to read books
or who is good at grammar. Ask those people to be beta readers perhaps. Your
editor should understand your genre and the tropes and traditions of that
genre. Even if you’re writing something you think is genre-busting, it helps to
have a second, knowledgeable eye. Also, you may have fallen into a few lazy
writing habits that the editor can check you on. Sometimes if you read enough
books by an author you come to know all their heroines will be named Mary and
have red hair. Or that there’ll be certain lines that get used verbatim in
every book, for example.
I
learn from my developmental editor’s comments and now avoid some mistakes I
used to make every time, although I suspect I’m probably developing new ones. I had a bad habit of kind of skipping over parts I wasn’t too interested in writing (to get to other parts I was very excited about writing) – in Mission to Mahjundar
there’s a dramatic escape across a raging river, which takes up almost an
entire chapter in the finished book. It was one sentence in the manuscript. “They
crossed the river and rode on.” My editor very properly gave me a hard time
over that and basically demanded I flesh that episode out, which I did. In two
of my ancient Egyptian novels, the early drafts pretty much said “they sailed
up (or down) the Nile for two weeks” at a certain point in the narrative. What is
it with me and rivers??? At any rate, the editor refused to settle for that and
gave me suggestions, which I then enlarged upon and ended up writing quite a
bit of hopefully interesting plot that shed more light on the characters and
their motivations. In Warrior of the Nile
her ideas really upped the stakes and the tension.
Nowadays
I catch myself when I realize I’m about to skip writing some portion of the
story and I go back and ask my Muse what I could add to the tale at this point.
The
other thing which is also a joke between me and my editor is what we call “slime
trails.” In an early draft of Escape From
Zulaire I wrote this really cool, shape shifting alien and then in what I
thought was a further amazing burst of late night creativity, I had it leave a
slime trail when it moved. Uh duh, if the alien has shifted into the shape of a
human for example, won’t the other humans in the vicinity think it a mite odd
(and disgusting) that ‘Sam’ leaves a slime trail LOL? I did a similar thing in
another story idea that hasn’t been written yet where it was tactfully pointed
out to me that if I included cool plot point X, I’d be undoing the entire
established history of my worldbuilding. This is why I don’t write time travel.
I think some authors have the mistaken thought that if they have an editor, then
they must follow that person’s inputs blindly, that it isn’t entirely their own
book any more…maybe that’s how it was in trad pub. I can’t say because I never
was traditionally published. My two books with Carina Press were the closest I
came and I loved my editor there. She gave me great feedback but – leading to
my key point here – I did not accept everything she suggested. A few things I
felt were ‘wrong’ for what I wanted with the book and a couple of others I
said, “Oh, okay, not exactly this but
maybe I can do that instead,” and we
were both satisfied.
On Star Survivor
my editor felt I could cut out a couple of scenes with Nick and Mara (the lead
characters in the first book, Wreck of
the Nebula Dream) but my instinct was that my readers had been waiting
about five years for this book and would feel cheated if they didn’t get to
spend some meaningful time with the couple, even though this book focuses on
Khevan the assassin and Twilka the interstellar celebrity. So I left both
sections the editor suggested trimming and I have had reader feedback and
reviews about enjoying the chance to catch up with Nick and Mara, and see them
in action. I think she was probably correct about the scenes not being
absolutely necessary to the plot but I stand by my final judgment that they
were necessary to fully satisfying the readers.
It’s always going to be your
book, you call the shots as an independently published author, but you want to present
your readers with the best story possible. A strong, professional editor can
and will help you polish that diamond to its brightest sheen.
(Award winning Escape
From Zulaire is free by the way, if you want to see what happened to that
alien and its slime trail.)
