Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (36 page)

What you don’t want is for your character to sound like the little maid with the feather duster who opens a play by hopping around the room soliloquizing on the fact that the son of the family, who has been in Australia for twenty years, after a dispute with an older brother, is expected that afternoon. Try for some subtlety.

One of the things I can help an author do is increase suspense. It surprises me how many manuscripts there are in which the detective detects only because a crime has been committed. “Oh, here is the landlady with her throat cut. Of course we must call the police, but let’s solve the crime ourselves.” Unfortunately, the protagonist’s enterprise and curiosity are not enough to keep a reader’s interest.

Suspense comes from the promise of harm. Something must be impending that will make the main character
have
to solve the mystery in order to ward off a looming danger. There must be a
threat
, and it must be nigh. Perhaps another murder is imminent. Perhaps someone we care about is wrongly accused and must be cleared. Perhaps the protagonist is in serious jeopardy. The criminal must be found and stopped or … or what? Something very bad. It’s up to you, the author, to say what, and up to me, as the editor, to say whether it works or not, or offer another suggestion.

One way to destroy suspense is by digression, and I am always surprised
by how often I find even experienced authors committing this blunder. You need momentum in a crime novel even more than in some other kinds of fiction, and you don’t dare stop the action for something that doesn’t either advance the plot, illuminate the characters, or add to the atmosphere. For example, a lot of authors feel for some reason that they must give their readers the itinerary every time their character gets behind the wheel:

I went down Montrose two blocks, then swung a left into South Street. The stretch there up to Second Avenue is usually a pleasant one, but this time I hit four red lights before I could make my right turn into Second …

And so on, until she reaches the suspect’s house or the scene of the crime. Other writers stick in a sex scene or a political harangue, neither integral to the story, that simply stops the action—and the interest—cold. Use any of it—itineraries, sex scenes, political harangues (within reason)—if they have a real place in the story. Otherwise, no.

Well, the author and I hash all that out and usually none of it presents a problem. I’ve found most authors very willing to consider my comments. They mostly agree with what I suggest and when they don’t, they have good reasons. Of course, occasionally there will be some disagreement that we can’t resolve; unless the problem I see in the manuscript is especially egregious, I most often go along with the author, even if I don’t really feel comfortable doing it. I’ve never personally had the sort of disagreement over a very important point that ends, as some do, with the editor saying, “It’s clear that we can’t work together on this book, and I’m going to cancel it and ask for a return of the advance.” That’s a very drastic thing to do, but it does happen from time to time.

Of course, the editor is not always right. Anyone can exercise bad judgment sometimes. And there may not be only one “right.” But if the editor
is
right more often than not, it’s partly because he or she has had experience helping to shape books, launching them into the marketplace, taking note of how they are received by bookstore buyers, readers, and critics. And it’s partly because just about every writer in the world can benefit from a second pair of eyes and a reaction from a second person, particularly one experienced as an editor. As a onetime writer myself, I know perfectly well that weaknesses I would spot in someone else’s manuscript could go unnoticed in one of my own.

With the revised manuscript in front of me, I line edit. This is not copy editing. Copy editors, in addition to looking for infelicities of language that the editor and the author did not catch, must check any facts in the book—dates, numbers, proper names. They must make sure that words that could
have more than one form are consistent—proper names are always spelled the same way, titles are always—or never—capitalized, etc. They fix any grammatical or spelling errors that have sneaked by unnoticed.

Line editing involves reading the manuscript over minutely, smoothing out awkward phrases, querying any minor thing that seems unclear or odd, suggesting a better word somewhere. I do this by making notes in the margin. Here are the kinds of things I write:

It doesn’t take two people to cover some exposed roots. Have one of them watch while the other does the work. That’s also a good chance to show the difference between the two characters.

I’m not sure I get what this is supposed to imply. Please clarify.

Wouldn’t she take the bag out of the trunk
before
she hurried to the porch?

This doesn’t work.

1. They all swore to remain single.

2. They’re supposed to give the members patchwork quilts on their 30th birthdays.

3. “Most got quilts as wedding presents,” you say. Were all of them married at 30? Seems unlikely. And if they did marry, why did they get quilts at all? Please clarify.

This is the first we learn a fact that seems important and that we should have been told at once—that they got the check the day she disappeared.

Not nitpicking, just an effort to get rid of every ambiguity and tie up every loose end—always desirable but particularly important in mystery fiction.

Although the title of this chapter is “Editing Crime Fiction,” I can’t confine myself to an account of working with the author on an acquired manuscript. Acquisition itself is as important a part of an editor’s job as readying the book for publication.

I am often asked a question that I find only marginally less irritating than “Who is your favorite mystery writer?”
*
It’s “What are you looking for?” At least there’s a ready answer for that one: I’m looking for a good book.

I really don’t care whether it’s hard-boiled or traditional, tough or academic or what is annoyingly called “cozy.” I don’t care whether it’s in the third person or the first. (The second person doesn’t work; please don’t try it.) I admit that I myself have a slight, very personal dislike of books written in the present tense, but that’s my quirk, not a condition of sale; every now and then I encounter one that is otherwise so engaging that I’ll publish it anyhow. The book can be humorous or serious, literary or whatever the opposite of literary is. It can have a male protagonist or a female one—straight or gay, black or white, old or young—so long as it’s believable. I’m sure you get the idea; I’m open to every kind of crime novel as long as it’s fresh, compelling, and well written.

My company is one of the few that considers unsolicited manuscripts from nonagented first-time authors. As a result, they pile into the office at a frightening rate. We also, of course, get submissions from a large number of agents and from authors whom we have previously published. There’s a lot to choose from. Do I read them all? I
look
at them all. In the majority of cases, I don’t have to read very far into a manuscript to know that it’s not something I want.

For the most part, the manuscripts I reject (at St. Martin’s, we use the kinder, gentler “decline”) are not really “bad.” Many are at least respectable. But I buy only a few from the pile, perforce. Of the rest, it’s impossible to tell an author why I am returning the manuscript—even if there were time to do it, which there isn’t. Authors are looking to be told about a distinct flaw that they can then remedy; they’d like me to say, “I am not buying this manuscript because the murder takes place in the boatyard and that’s hard to believe.” Whereupon they will shift the scene of the murder to the conservatory and have a publishable manuscript. Alas, it doesn’t work that way.

The real story is that there’s just about nothing to say. When a manuscript is really bad (one of my colleagues, reporting on a submission she had been asked to read, said, “I’ve read a hundred pages. If I read any more of it I’ll break out in a rash”), one can’t send a letter saying, “This is awful. You can’t write. Get into some other business.” So we use some polite, if meaningless, phrase—“It isn’t right for us,” or “It doesn’t fit our list.”

About the competently done and ultimately tedious stories, there’s also very little to say. There’s no distinct flaw to put one’s finger on. Everything is set up, thought out, if I can’t praise the writing I can’t actually fault it, the characters move and walk and talk like human beings (if dull human beings), and nothing is very original. The manuscripts are derivative; there is no freshness, no individuality, no spark. Nothing to make me want to read on. Especially when they are compared to the occasional gem that turns up as I sit reading in a more or less empty office on a gray Sunday
afternoon. So—“It isn’t right for us,” “It doesn’t fit our list,” says it all, because that’s really all there is to say about the merely ordinary.

I frown on an author’s trying to tailor a story to fit a trend. Every so often some media person, stuck for a story, calls me (and my counterparts in other houses who are free to take the call) and asks about trends. They are never very imaginative; nine times out of ten they’ll ask me to comment on “the new trend for hard-boiled female private eyes.” I don’t know when a trend stops trending and becomes established, but the hard-boiled female private eye is a result of the changed status of women, was featured by the originators of this kind of book and their many imitators for many years now, and is here to stay. It is no longer a trend; it’s as much of an institution as the hard-boiled male private eye, the intellectual university professor sleuth, the put-upon city cop, and so forth.

I do see from time to time more authentic, or more current, trends; elderly sleuths, for example. But it’s foolish for you to write about anyone or anything other than what you really have in mind just because you think it’s popular with the public. Good books are always popular with the public. From a purely pragmatic point of view, consider how long it will take you to write that trendy book, how long to sell it, how long to edit and revise it, how long it will take to get it into the stores. By that time, your trend may have evaporated. The fickle buying public may have forgotten that last year or two years ago they liked elderly sleuths. Psychiatrist sleuths might be in fashion, or even mimes.

By all means write a book that happens to fit a current trend if that’s the kind of book you really
want
to write. But don’t write it
because
it fits. Your lack of genuine interest will show through clearly enough to turn off a mystery editor.

Authors with some kind of specialized knowledge are indeed lucky. If they are enterprising or savvy enough, they’ll build that specialty into the novel or even use it as the framework of their crime fiction. Among the books I know—either those I’ve edited or those I’ve just read—I’ve encountered sleuths who are, variously, an escape artist à la Houdini, a radiologist, a Navajo policeman, a forensic anthropologist, an astrologer, an arson investigator, an antiques expert, a tarpon fishing guide. And many more. These special elements give your story additional color and interest and help set you off from other crime fiction writers. The cliché “Write about what you know” is good advice, especially if you know something off the beaten path. But it must be authentic knowledge. No cheating. You’ll get caught out.

I’ve said earlier that it’s hard to tell an author how to create good characters, but in my view, good characters are so important to a manuscript
and so influence me when I read a submission, that I’m going to put down a few things that may be somewhat helpful:

Take a tip from the dramatist:
It’s always better to show than to tell. A playwright doesn’t have the prose writer’s option of describing a character to the audience. “He was often moody, and sometimes near deep depression, wondering whether his life had any meaning at all.” You can’t do that in a drama. A playwright has only three ways to convey character to an audience: by what the character says, by what the character does, and by what the others say about that character. A prose writer is not forced to abide by those limitations, but it doesn’t hurt to remember them.

Be observant
. I can’t overstress the importance of this for any writer. Note how two different people will voice the same thought differently; each person’s way of doing it gives an indication of what sort of person the individual is. (You see this if you have a chance to observe jury deliberations.) If possible, keep a journal of sorts, in which you write what you notice about people. Try to figure out how their words and actions define them. Getting back to writing for the theater a moment—it’s a very demanding craft and consequently one with valuable lessons for other writers—a very old play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber,
Stage Door
, has a huge number of quite minor characters, young women who have no more than one or two lines in the whole play. In a student production, the director was short of female actors and, as is so often done, he doubled the parts, giving one actor two characters’ lines. It was a revelation to discover that the playwrights, pros both of them, had so fashioned each speech to the fictional person, never mind how minor, that it had to be changed before it could be given to a different character.

Some authors find it helpful to base characters on real people they know—or more often, on a kind of composite of several people. This can be effective, but be careful. If you are too conscious of the real-life equivalents of your characters, they will remain at a distance from you, whereas if you have actually created a person on the paper, you know more about him or her than you could about a friend or relative or lover.

What all these tips and suggestions come down to is that the editor aims to get from the author a book that lives up to its potential. Its plot is logical. It has suspense and interest and freshness, and its characters are real and human enough for the reader to care about them, whether “care about them” translates to love or hate or amusement.