Stein on Writing (36 page)

Does that mean you’re finished? You are never finished rewriting until you receive galley proofs. You will still make essential revisions, but professionals try to do all the revising they can
before
the book is set in type (the cost of “author’s alterations” beyond a minimum is borne by the author). When you’ve completed triage and then a general revision, you still have work to do. You may want to ask yourself, if you were to bring a strong scene forward, would that provoke the reader’s curiosity more than the scene that presently starts the book? Having revised the manuscript, all of it will be fresh in your mind, which will make it easier to identify a strong, curiosity-arousing scene that might be brought forward.

You might consider at this stage whether the ending of your book is a high point of satisfaction for the reader. If not, is there another scene or circumstance that might make a better ending?

After finishing your revision, let the manuscript lie fallow for several days or longer. Don’t rush to show it to a friend or family member. Let it cool down. Go on with other work, then come back to the manuscript and read it with your changes. As you become more expert at revision, you will be a better judge of your work than laymen who love you and don’t know anything about craft.

For your next read-through, work with a clean manuscript in which the changes you’ve made are not visible as changes. (One of the great advantages of working on a computer!) This time, as you read, watch for anything that momentarily makes you see words on the page and takes you out of experiencing the story. You are aiming for the reader’s
total immersion.
You should be able to spot these flaws after you have made the kind of changes I’ve suggested.

If all this checking seems excessive, ask yourself would you fly in a plane in which the experienced pilot felt so cocksure that he didn’t actually perform the checklist that makes flying safer for all of us?

If you’re of a mind to ask, “Stein, do you do all this revision yourself?” I’ll report that
The Best Revenge,
a novel of mine I’ve quoted many times in this book, was turned in to my publisher in its eleventh draft. It was accepted without a single change. Then, on my own recognizance, I did two more drafts.

Reprieve: Revising Nonfiction

H
ow many times in the course of a lifetime do we wish we could relive some conversation or event, do it differently? Revision provides that opportunity. First drafts of nonfiction can be flawed in organization, quality control, interest, and language. Lucky for us writers, this is the one place in life where we get a reprieve.

Perhaps if we did get a second chance in life, we’d blunder right back in and muck things up again. That’s what can happen in revision unless we have a plan of action. I will attempt to provide a plan here.

Attitude is important. If you review what you’ve written and exclaim, “Oh my God, this is awful!” you’ll only dispirit yourself. The experienced writer knows his first draft will be flawed, that he will get a chance to employ his editorial skills in fixing it. During my decades of editing, I met only one professional writer who believed that his first drafts were graced with perfection. And who is to argue with a man’s religion, as long as he takes his manuscript somewhere else?

Just as in revising fiction, the nonfiction writer is in danger of growing cold on his manuscript quickly if he starts revising at the top of page one and goes through paragraph by paragraph to the end. To avoid growing cold, I advocate fixing major things before starting on a page-by-page, front-to-back revision. This will confer two advantages. If you fix the larger problems first, you will in all likelihood make some first-draft infelicities in the new material that you will then catch on your subsequent page-by-page revision. In addition, by working on specific problems, you will not have grown cold on the manuscript when you tackle the read-through.

A good way to begin is to personify your subject matter in an incident involving an individual. Sometimes the germ of such an anecdote is
buried elsewhere in the draft. If so, examine it to see if it has the potential of being made stronger than your present opening.

Also ask yourself if your opening is sufficiently visual to be seen by the reader. You may recall that in Chapter 3, “Welcome to the Twentieth Century,” I explained the differences among the three main components of fiction—description, narrative summary, and immediate scene—and pointed out that understanding the differences could be of immediate help to a nonfiction writer also. Most important, the nonfiction writer who learns to use immediate scenes wherever he can will also find a dramatic improvement in the readability of his work. The ideal place for your first immediate scene is on page one.

Before you settle on a beginning, ask yourself if it provokes sufficient curiosity in the reader. How soon after your beginning will the reader comes upon the “engine” of your article or book, the place at which the reader decides not to stop reading?

If you are writing an article, does it make one point after another on a plateau, or does it build toward a climax? If it is a book, does the end of most chapters point toward the next?

Have you summarized material that would make interesting visual passages if you converted the summaries to events the reader could see? If there are summaries you cannot or don’t want to convert to scenes, can you shorten them in order to avoid losing the reader’s attention? If you want to “jump-cut,” the reader will go along with you.

Have you created occasional suspenseful interest by raising a question and withholding the answer for a while? Can you recall any place where this might be done now?

Does your work have reverberations of other times or places, of important events or influential people? The most mundane subjects can be given a lift by the use of resonance. There are a number of reference books that go through history, period by period or year by year, giving you the highlights of the time, its influential people, and significant political and cultural events. Browsing through one of these books can sometimes provide you with a few relevant facts that will lend resonance to your work. You can refresh your recollection of other sources of resonance in Chapter 31.

Have you consciously tried to create stress for the reader, some delicious tension? Would it help to look at Chapter 10, on tension for fiction writers, to see if it sparks any ideas for tension in your work? Some of the suggestions can be adapted for nonfiction quite easily.

If you were the editor of your manuscript and it was written by someone else, what would you choose as the weakest part? Look at that
section now and see if you can eliminate it. If you can’t cut it entirely, can you condense it? Is there anything you can add to the beginning of that section that would arouse the reader’s curiosity? Consider your most memorable passage. What makes it so good? Does that provide a clue as to what you might do with your weakest part?

Surprise: If you’ve cut or changed the weakest part, you have a new weakest part. In retrospect, do you know why it is weak? Can you improve it? Can you cut it and stitch together what comes immediately before and immediately after?

When you’ve considered those questions and fixed whatever needed fixing, it may be time for a focused reading, by which I mean a reading of your manuscript in which you read not as a reader but as a hunter for specific errors and omissions as if on assignment to do so. If you wrote the manuscript on computer, I suggest working with a clean hard copy of your manuscript. It will seem fresher to you, and faults you may not have noticed before will be suddenly apparent.

Is there something visible on every page? If you are reviewing what you wrote in hard copy, pencil a V in a lower corner of every page that has something visual, and on pages without a V, see if you can create something visual, even if it is a leaf falling from a tree.

Have you eliminated most adjectives and adverbs, and the unnecessary words we call flab? Go after them as an editor, not as the writer.

Cut every cliché you come across. Say it new or say it straight.

Can you spot any similes or metaphors that show signs of strain and should now be cut?

If you’ve never done this before, you may find it difficult to look for all these things at the same time. If so, you may need to check the following list every once in a while until you are used to the process:

• Add something visible.
  
• Cut most adjectives and adverbs.
  
• Cut clichés.
  
• Replace or cut similes and metaphors that don’t work.
  

As you work along as an editor, do you see any places where the author might have padded the manuscript with unnecessary digressions, overly extensive patches of description, or anything else that strikes you as filler? You always strengthen text when you remove the padding.

As to the last, an anecdote. At a New York party long ago, a nonfiction writer whom I knew by reputation but had not met came up to me,
well into his cups, and asked could he come see me with a manuscript he had kept secret from everyone. One hears things like that at parties. They seldom mature into appointments. This writer phoned for an appointment and showed up with a large scrapbook under his arm. What was the “secret” manuscript with which he had intrigued me?

The writer published regularly in a magazine that paid him a generous monthly advance against his articles. The advance, much like an account at a company store, was paid down at so much per published word. The scrapbook contained his articles in the magazine. In each he had bracketed in color the many sections of padding that he had added in order to produce more published words and thereby to decrease his indebtedness. He was now interested in publishing a book of his pieces minus the padding. For reasons lost to time, I no longer remember why this project did not proceed, but its lesson about padding remained in my mind, as I hope it now will in yours.

Now that you’ve fixed the larger problems and hunted and killed the smaller ones, take some time away from the manuscript and then read it as a reader, not an editor. But keep an editorial pencil handy, just in case.

Where to Get Help

Where to Get Help

BOOK DOCTORS

Some decades back if your work was talented and thought to be eventually publishable, your book could be bought and an editor assigned to work with you on any necessary revision. As bottom-line management took over most publishing houses, detailed and especially prolonged editing was viewed as not cost-effective, and agents were expected to submit manuscripts that were as final as possible. That change occasioned the development of a new profession, book doctors, mainly individuals who are experienced editors or writers or both who evaluate and work on manuscripts, helping the authors bring them up to speed. That help does not come cheap, but the hourly rates are a lot lower than, say, lawyers charge. Many book doctors charge by the assignment, whether it’s an evaluation, a long memo of recommendations, or actual line-editing of an entire manuscript. Some book doctors advertise in
Writer’s Digest,
some do not advertise anywhere. I can only refer writers to the small number of book doctors whose work I know. Readers of this book can obtain a list of them, with addresses and phone numbers, by phoning (914) 762-1255 during business hours eastern time and asking that the Book Doctor List be sent to you. It’s free.

DICTIONARIES

If you’ve come this far, you know that the quality of a written work is in large measure dependent on the precision with which words are used. The more words I learn, the more I use a dictionary. Over the years I have become increasingly impatient with writers for whom the approximate word will do. The serious writer is addicted to the precise meaning
of words in his own work and admires
le mot juste
in the work of others. For him, the approximate word is never satisfactory, and he delights in the tools that enable him to be as precise as possible.

I suggest keeping at least two dictionaries handy while you work, a desk dictionary for convenience, and a larger dictionary on a stand or on top of a chest-high bookcase for easy turning of the pages. Page-turning ease is not a light matter. Many writers will use any excuse not to lift a heavy tome and riffle through its pages. (I refuse to use the two-volume Oxford unabridged dictionary I own because of the inconvenience of tracking its minuscule type with a magnifying glass.) I no longer need to resort to my Webster Unabridged because of the excellence of
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language,
which I now use more often than any other, not only for my writing but also to look up all the medical jargon physicians use to communicate with each other in reports that their victims are not supposed to see.

LITERARY AGENTS

The most comprehensive listing of agents with useful commentary can be found in a large-format paperback book,
Literary Agents of North America,
available from Author Aid Associates, 340 East 52 Street, New York, NY 10022, Phone (212) Plaza 9-4213. The Fifth Edition is $33, plus $7.50 for priority mail delivery in the U.S. They accept checks or money orders but not credit cards. An extensive listing of agents can be found in the
Literary Market Place,
the huge annual directory better known as the
LMP,
published by R. R. Bowker.
The Writer’s Handbook,
edited by Sylvia K. Burack and published by The Writer, Inc., has a smaller listing. Several other paperback books on the market contain evaluative material on a number of literary agents, but some of the important agencies decline to be listed. A free copy of the brochure “How to Get a Literary Agent to Represent Your Work” by Sol Stein is available by sending a business-size (#10) stamped and self-addressed envelope to free agent booklet, The WritePro Corporation, 43 South Highland Avenue, Ossining, NY 10562.

SOFTWARE

While I have taught writers at universities on the coasts and in the Middle West of the United States, the advent of the computer and its almost universal use by writers have enabled me to clone myself in sev
eral computer programs. As a result, writers in thirty-eight countries are now able to plug me into an ear, as it were, while they write and revise their work. In these quasi-interactive programs, I function not only as teacher but also as editor, guiding the user step by step. Those programs, thanks to supportive reviews in over a hundred newspapers and magazines and to distribution by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild, have reached a great many writers I have not had the opportunity of meeting in person.

All the programs have a two-minute, automatic installation process, come with their own built-in word processor, and save everything you write automatically so that you can concentrate on your writing and not on computing.

The first, an award-winning program called WritePro®, is a tutorial program to which I direct beginners, though it has been used successfully by experienced and published writers. The author of some nineteen novels said in a review that he used the program to remind himself of all the things he didn’t know he’d forgotten. I want to call your special attention to two things. You cannot get writer’s block while using WritePro, a great help to beginners. Steve Bass, who is president of the Pasadena, California, IBM Users Group as well as a journalist who reviews software, wrote that his “absolute favorite” function was the Flab Editor™, a copyrighted computer software invention that enables the user to strengthen his writing by highlighting individual unnecessary words on a page under guidance, and with a keystroke make them disappear so the writer can see how much stronger the text is without them. The words can be brought back at will or deleted with a keystroke. The Flab Editor™ is in WritePro’s Lesson 5, but the technology is usable in all WritePro lessons.

You can obtain a free WritePro lesson by phoning 1-800-755-1124, 9-4 eastern time weekdays, or by writing to The WritePro Corporation, 43 South Highland Avenue, Ossining NY 10562. They charge only the nominal shipping and handling cost. The lesson on disk, with the manual, is free if you tell them you own
Stein On Writing.
Be sure to specify whether you want the DOS, Windows, or the Macintosh version. The people at the same number and address can also provide you with further information about the lessons. If you wish to purchase the lessons, tell the order taker you own this book and you will receive the highest available discount.

FictionMaster™, also selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, enables writers to improve their characters, plot, and dialogue by transferring chapters from their manuscripts to the program and editing them under my instruction. FictionMaster can also be used as an interactive
tutorial on most of the subjects in this book; you master a technique by using it in your own work. Though FictionMaster is the most advanced program of its kind available anywhere and is used by published writers, it is designed so that a smart beginner can use it also. Phone 1-800-755-1124 and ask to receive all of the FictionMaster menus, which will give you a clear idea of the areas covered. They are free.

FirstAid for Writers® also enables the user to transfer his own writing into the program, fix anything in need of fixing with my advice, and transfer it back out to his word processor. In addition to its four modules for fiction, FirstAid for Writers contains a complete module for non-fiction that is used by journalists and nonfiction book and article writers. You can obtain a free schematic map of the more than sixty subjects included in this program from the WritePro office.

TAPES (AUDIO AND VIDEO)

An audiotape that writers find useful is “Dialogue for Writers.” It contains the essence of the twelve-week course on dialogue that I gave at the University of California at Irvine.

Another audiotape, “What Every Author Should Know About Publishing,” is based on my one-day crash course on “Publishing for Authors” given at the University of California.

If you identify yourself as a reader of this book, you can receive a free copy of either tape with the purchase of any WritePro computer program.

A two-cassette video entitled “Stein on Writing” (no connection to this book, though the title is the same) was produced by Mayo Entertainment in Los Angeles in 1992. The first cassette allows you to be a fly on the wall and eavesdrop on one-on-one conversations with more than a dozen of the writers in my advanced fiction seminar, each focusing on a different writing problem. The second cassette enables you to visit the Santa Barbara Writers Conference of 1992 and hear the entire presentation I gave to an audience of about 370 writers that year. To obtain the two-cassette video, call or write to Mayo Entertainment, 1818 Thayer, Los Angeles, CA 90025, (310) 475-3333. The price is $39.95 plus $5 shipping and handling.

THESAURUS

Most writers use computers now. A day doesn’t go by in which I fail to use two different on-line thesauruses, marvels of convenience and speed. A thesaurus does not provide as many words with precisely the same
meaning as it does words with
similar
meanings. The thesaurus that came with my most frequently used word processor is racy and inexact, producing distant cousins of the word I’m looking up. Which is good. That on-line thesaurus often surprises me with a word that I would not have thought of on my own and that gets me thinking in a different direction. I also keep memory-resident
The American Heritage Thesaurus,
which is scholarly and prissy. Checking the two thesauruses against each other is fun and a stimulant to the imagination.

For example, a student of mine had a story in which the word “harlot” was overused. My prissy thesaurus came up with the synonym “prostitute” and that’s all. My other on-line thesaurus came up with no fewer than twenty-one “synonyms”—some near misses and some pretty far off—that enabled my student to add color as well as diversity to her text: seductress, temptress, coquette, flirt, nymphomaniac, siren, tart, tease, vamp, wanton woman, prostitute, whore, call girl, hooker, hussy, slut, streetwalker, tart, tramp, trollop, wench.

The book I favor for synonyms is a paperback called
The Synonym Finder
by J. I. Rodale, published by Warner Books, which is organized alphabetically. You don’t have to look a word up in the back to find out what section up front you might find its relatives in.

WRITERS’ CONFERENCES

My students consistently tell me that they find writers’ conferences beneficial for learning, networking, and meeting other writers. The fact that writers keep coming back to the same conferences year after year attests to that. Writers enjoy the camaraderie of other writers as much as they do the instruction they receive in workshops. If you are relatively inexperienced in the commercial side of writing, writers’ conferences are also a good place to hear agents and editors talk, and to meet them. Lists of writers’ conferences are available in the
Literary Market Place,
published by R. R. Bowker, and
The Writer’s Handbook,
edited by Sylvia K. Burack and published by The Writer, Inc., and in some issues of writers’ magazines. A few of the conferences ask to see several pages of your work ahead of time. It’s a good idea to talk to another writer who’s been to that conference before applying. The conference administration might supply you with the name of someone living in your area who has attended the conference previously. You might want to get your name on the mailing list of conferences that interest you, since the most popular conferences fill up within a few weeks of sending out their annual announcements.