I struggle with critiquers having a mind set of ‘just the facts’ style of writing, paring the story down to the bare bones, but maybe that’s not the writer’s ‘true style’ and the critters can’t see that, so even when the mss. is whittled down to its essence, there still seems to be something missing–it lacks life, character, voice, whatever you want to call it. Especially troubling to new writers who haven’t found their voice yet. My sense is that it takes that proverbial ‘million words’ to even begin to find one’s voice. If that’s true, I’m not even a fifth of the way home …so back to work. —Chris

It sounds like you’ve got two problems going on at once, Chris.

One is that peer critiquers can’t really guide you in learning your craft. They don’t know any more about it than you do. So you really, seriously need to take their advice with a grain of salt. Half of it will be good, and half will be bad, and until you’re more accomplished than they are you can’t tell which is which. They more or less cancel each other out.

The advice to write in scenes rather than exposition is good advice, and there are important reasons for it. If there’s something missing when you whittle your ms down to its scenes, write more vivid scenes. Think up more intense events for those scenes—not violence, but internal struggle. And keep in mind that if you haven’t yet learned to detach from your work, you’ll assume just because your early drafts came out of you in one form that means they can’t live in any other form. They can, and they will.

Exposition is a tool in the writer’s toolbox, but it’s a tricky and, actually, not essential one. You need to get really good at writing scenes before you try to get really good with exposition. The one leads to the other.

The other problem is that it sounds like you’re struggling with voice and prose pretty early in the game. Don’t worry about it in first drafts or even at this stage in your writing life. Just write clean, clear sentences full of detail recording what you see your characters doing. Go out and take notes on the real world to practice seeing the details that are there. Go home and pay attention to your characters—make lists, draw diagrams, doodle their names all over your margins.

But don’t pressure yourself to develop a voice. As Christopher Isherwood said, just be a camera. All else flows from there.

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The quality debate is of course the biggie. If the legacy publishers are already dumbing down expectations, and new writers are self-publishing too soon with inferior quality products, what chance of quality works being found? Or maybe, just maybe, I need to rethink what “quality” writing is. Is “quality” writing something that only appeals to a minority educated enough to appreciate subtle Latin phrases or passing quotations from Shakespeare’s lesser know works? Or is that just elitism? Can a “quality” piece of writing not also engage the masses simply by being a gripping, or at least, entertaining story written in simple, engaging English?
—Mark Williams

Vintage pulp: in its time considered garbage in/garbage out by the literati reading Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, James Joyce, and the Post-Moderns like Paul Bowles, Flannery O’Connor, and Donald Barthelme who followed in their footsteps—it wasn’t genius-level gorgeous and even experimental. It was just good, gripping, well-written, exciting storytelling.

And, by today’s publishing standards, it was of a towering, monumentally-high quality.

The language is clean, clear, taut—there’s no flab, no lazy exposition, no cliches. There’s no pussyfooting around. The writing is meant solely and entirely for telling gripping stories.

The characters are three-dimensional human beings—not necessarily T.S. Eliot’s despairing barfly listening to the women cry, “Ta,” to each other, mooning over his beer wondering what’s up with Lil even as civilization settles slowly, miserably, gorgeously down on his head in perfect rhythm and reverberating, heartbreaking, word-by-word beauty—but Eliot’s fellows bellied up to that same bar, with their own griefs and lost dreams, their own blue-collar jobs (something Eliot didn’t have to worry about, with his career in banking), their own secret passions driving them to keep on living the day-to-day struggle of just living, in spite of the overwhelming darkness of life.

The stories are extremely solidly structured. (Much of vintage pulp presages the unexpected crack of the whip that represents the only acceptable Hooks of today.) The catastrophes are vivid and startling, the Climaxes inevitable and inescapable. By the time you reach the Climax of an Erle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason, you know exactly what those characters’ worst nightmare is, and you know Gardner’s going to deliver it to you on a silver platter.

Did regular blue-collar joe readers read this stuff? Were they attracted to its familiar but exciting content, entertained by its rollercoaster context? Did it sell?

Heck, yes, it did! That’s why publishers invented dimestore paperbacks, and why we have them (well, their more expensive equivalent) to this day. Those babies sold like hotcakes!

And there’s no law that says we can’t still write like that. All we have to do is study those books—they’re out there, you just have to look for them—and use the secrets and techniques they all knew to create our own hot-dog rollercoaster stories.

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Dear Editor, Galley Cat had an interesting twist for your hotel room: “According to the New York Post, Midnight’s Children author Salman Rushdie will be selecting ten American classics to be featured in the guest rooms at New York City’s Standard Hotel.”

I’m wondering: Which classics would you include for the average hotel guest, which books would you stock in a room for your clients/readers, and which books would you wish for your personal reading pleasure? Rather than ten books each, how about two or three for each, and one in common?—John Elicker

Wow, ten? John, you’re talking to someone with probably 1500 books in her office, not counting the ones I share with my family on the bookshelves all across one end of our living room. When I die, it’s going to be from Book Overdose.

Can I give you a list assuming those hotel guests are all aspiring writers? This is not to say these are the only excellent books I have on writing—they’re just the cream of the crop.

On writing, for writers from beginners to adepts:

1. Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott

Both funny and kind, Lamott’s book is a classic mainly for its warm, self-deprecating voice. “If I can do it,” Lamott seems to be generously assuring the reader, “you can do it.”

2. Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg

A landmark book when it first came out, in it Goldberg has the audacity to suggest writing is about the magical craft rather than the market and then include dozens of wonderful little exercises for sinking ever-deeper into the experience.

3. Screenplay, by Syd Field

If you want to write stories readers want to read, you have to know how to structure them properly. Field’s the king.

4. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, by Renni Browne & Dave King

When I discovered this book shortly after it came out in 1993, I immediately called my new agent up and interrupted her in a meeting with another author to tell her about it. Indie editors decades before publishing became what it is today, Browne & King are still active in the indie editor community.

5. On Becoming a Novelist, by John Gardner

Who hasn’t read Gardner’s classic work? “It is far more satisfying to write well than simply to write well enough to get published.”

6. Mystery and Manners, by Flannery O’Connor

I refer back to this one more than any other writing book I own. (And I own probably fifty over a hundred.) Charming and profound, O’Connor’s advice on writing just gets wiser and more meaningful the more often you read it.

On being a writer:

7. The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler, edited by Tom Hiney & Frank MacShane

Read it for Chandler’s wonderful spoof on Hemingway, if for nothing else. This is the inside of the mind of a dedicated, brilliant novelist. (Don’t bother with the shallow early draft-ness of the not-really-Gothic Romance he was working on at the end of his life—he’d been wrecked, by that time, by the death of his wife.)

8. Journal of a Novel, by John Steinbeck

Again, the inside of the mind and daily life of a brilliant novelist with such beautiful words on being a writer I posted a whole article for my online magazine once made up entirely of quotes from it. “I don’t care how long it takes. . .You can’t train for something all your life and then have it fall short because you are hurrying to get it finished.”

9. The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard

Lovely, truthful talk about what it means to be a writer, especially the chapter describing the morning her typewriter erupted lava. Over and over, throughout the years, I hear Dillard’s six-year-old neighbor’s words in my head, “Did you really write that story? Or did you type it?”

10. The Notebooks of Henry James

I can’t leave this one out. It will teach you exactly how to think like a great writer.

Of course, John, you’re more than welcome to use my books on writing, The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual, , The Art & Craft of Story and The Art & Craft of Prose.

Such an extraordinary craft this is, to which I’ve had the honor of dedicating my life.

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Currently, I serve as first reader for an acquaintance/internet friend. She’s been published a couple of times by POD/electronic firms. I know, from having asked her, that her Very Favorite Writer (Formative Years division) has produced an entire shelf full of well-aged mulch. I wasn’t going to call it that, but my Internal Editor, who was looking over my shoulder when I tried to read the stuff, refuses to apply any other printable label.

So my question is this: as an editor, how can I tell when I’m editing somebody, as opposed to attempting to make their fiction over in my own writing’s image? I don’t actually believe this to be possible in my friend’s case, as our VFWs are so very far apart, but it would be useful information to have when I get enough of my novel complete to go to a critique group. But if I am doing that to her, of course I need to stop.—R.F.

Well, for one thing, R.F., if you want to model yourself on Dorothy L. Sayers, you”ll do great stuff, but your ego will have to be ENORMOUS. She thought more highly of herself than anyone else did, either before or since.

Just had to say that!

You’re a mystery reader, eh? Such a fabulous genre. I’ve reviewed books by all those you named on Goodreads earlier this year and have most of Sayers’, Tey’s, and MacDonald’s books on my vintage mystery shelves. And I just finished reading John Dickson Carr’s The Blind Barber last night. Joy beyond joy! What a fun writer.

Now, my advice to you is going to sound like a cop-out, but it’s really not: I strongly advise you, as a peer critiquer, not to Line Edit at all.

Line Editing is the most intuitive part of the editing craft, one of those things that takes eons to learn how to do properly, distinguishing between decisions as a matter of good writing and those as a matter of the writer’s voice. It took me decades of working professionally to learn to do it well. That’s decades. So I couldn’t tell you in a nutshell, “Do this and not that,” and really be any help. The possible techniques are numerous, and each one has its own strengths and weaknesses, its own aspects to be considered within the greater work as a whole.

Line Editing also has a lot to do with developing your professional ear, and if you don’t have that ear yet you might very likely make things worse.

When I Line Edit clients’ work, I have to be able to explain clearly and logically why I’ve done what I’ve done every single place I’ve done it. There are myriad reasons to alter copy, but only the right reasons actually improve the work. All the rest is playing with someone else’s dynamite. My clients listen to me (usually!) because they’ve paid me for my professional expertise. It’s simply a different kettle of fish. (And sometimes they do kick—which engages my professional expertise as a handler of writers.)

Peer critiquers are really best as companions and supporters rather than editors. You don’t have the authority to tell your acquaintance how to write, so if you try you automatically run the risk of alienating someone you get along with otherwise quite well. I mean, is she going to Line Edit your stuff to read like her own VFWs? Really—it’s such a slippery slope.

Talk your characters over together, ask penetrating questions about what they want and need, what they fear, where their story might be going. Be the one to say, “But if that’s the decision they’d hate to be faced with most in the world, that makes it your Climax, doesn’t it?” It’s so easy, as the writer, to cringe away from the obvious catastrophe, and sometimes you just need someone with less feeling for your beloved protagonist to put their finger on the hot button.

Help each other think of ways to add internal conflict and surprise. Help each other solidify the structure of your novels along classic structure, practice plotting together, get Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and give each other writing assignments. Discuss really good books on writing to inspire yourselves with your work. Hold your heads and moan, side-by-side, when the Self-Loathing Phase of Revision gets you down.

But leave the Line Editing be. Basic Developmental Editing can be learned by anyone, as can be Copy Editing. Line Editing others’ work, though, is simply too complex to tackle unless you’re already a professional.

What is this Line Editing of which I speak? And why do I keep speaking of it?

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