Patricia, what is the dividing line between editing and meddling? The retitling of one of the Harry Potter books comes to mind.- Gene Wirchenko

There are a lot of flip answers I could give to this question, because it’s based on a fundamental misconception about the publishing process:  the idea that editors and publishers commonly make changes to an author’s work for which the author has no input and no recourse.

The reason for this misconception is that the editor’s work is invisible to everyone outside the process. The final book does not contain labels stating that this phrase or paragraph came from the editor, or that this scene or that was added or deleted due to editorial demand. So anyone who does not actually have an “in” to the business is guessing about just what parts came about as a result of editorial intervention, and what parts didn’t.

And what does the average reader or critic base these guesses on? Generally, it is the complaints they’ve heard authors make about the horrible things editors have done or have made them do. And the reason for this is that it is considered deeply unprofessional for editors to complain publicly about the work they put in for their authors, so they mostly don’t, resulting in an extremely one-sided picture.

On top of that, you have the situation with movie and TV scripts, where it is very rare, from what I’ve seen, for a script to have only one author, and it’s unheard of for any of the authors to have absolute veto power over the input of any of the other artists involved in what is, after all, a gigantic collaboration. Stories and complaints from this venue get folded into the realm of novel publishing – it’s all writing, isn’t it? – and it seldom occurs to people that the processes and basic assumptions for writing a screenplay are very different from those for writing and publishing a novel.

So, getting back to the original question: I would say that meddling is when an editor deliberately makes changes to an author’s work that the author does not have the chance to review and refuse.

In the case of the first Harry Potter book, 1) it is exceedingly common for foreign editions to be completely retitled; changing one word is really pretty minimal. (“Dealing with Dragons” was published in the U.K. as “Dragonsbane,” a much more significant change, and nobody, including me, thought anything of it. Some of the titles on the translations are even farther off, though that’s often as much a language problem as a marketing one); 2) changing the title is nearly always a marketing decision, not an editorial one, meaning that the editor frequently has nothing to do with it (aside from conveying the news to the author), because it’s the marketing gurus who make the decision; and 3) Rowling was consulted at the time; I believe she later said she regretted allowing it, but hindsight is always 20-20 and at least she had the opportunity to argue about it if she wanted to. (Admittedly, many first-time authors do not feel confident about arguing with a publisher over something so minor, especially when said publisher is paying them large sums for foreign rights.)

By my definition – changes to the work made without my input and with no recourse – I would say that I’ve never once had this happen to me in over thirty years of being published. That “Dragonsbane” thing? Hazard of selling foreign rights, and no big deal; certainly not meddling with my words (since “Dealing with Dragons” was the publisher’s suggestion in the first place).

Most of the stories of truly egregious editorial meddling that I’ve ever heard date back to the early-to-mid-twentieth-century (Horace L. Gold had quite a reputation for it, I’m told). The very few more modern instances I know of (and they are very few) are all, to the best of my knowledge, either instances where something slipped through the cracks (a particularly unfortunate last-minute change by a copyeditor that they forgot to run past the author before the book went to press, for instance – i.e., a failure of procedures, not deliberate meddling) or else are cases involving miniscule amateur presses, of the sort where everything from acquisition to production is handled by one person who has never actually worked in the publishing industry and who is therefore operating on the same misconceptions about “what editors do” as your average reader.

Note, please, that I said “the few stories” of editorial meddling – meaning that even among small, miniscule, and fan presses, it is highly unusual for an editor to change an author’s work without the author having the means and opportunity to change it back, should they desire to do so.

It is not meddling when an editor covers a page in little red circles and writes at the bottom: “You have seventeen semi-colons on this page, and that seems to be about average. Does your husband know about this love affair?”  It is not meddling when an editor changes “we went out” to “we left” and notes “You said ‘the candle went out’ just above; change to avoid echo and confusion.” Nor is it meddling when the editor says “You have this great action scene that your POV character is only told about. You need to have her be present for it” and then you have to write 10,000 new words in order to put the scene in. (And yes, those are actual examples.) It is especially not meddling when the author gets to see these (and all the other editorial changes and comments) before the book goes to the typesetter…and then gets another chance to go over everything when the page proofs come.

It is also not meddling when my editor and I disagree about a particular change, or set of changes, and I lose the argument. And that does happen, now and again. Yes, I could be one of those my-every-comma-is-golden authors who insists on winning every time…but the point isn’t to win all the arguments. The point is to make the book as good as it can possibly be.

If an editor suggests a change that I think is wrong-headed, or that I think will fundamentally change what I want the book to be, I object. Strenuously, sometimes. But I have to recognize that I am not always right, even about my own story. Being edited is a learned process. It is seldom comfortable, but the right editor can teach a writer a lot about humility and objectivity and taking the story to the next level.

One of the not-so-much categories comes in the form “If you (the writer) do X, the reader will also do X.” For instance, if the writer likes/dislikes the characters, the reader will dislike the characters. If the writer loses track of the plot, the reader will lose track of the plot. If the writer is having fun, the reader will have fun.

The trouble with this kind of pronouncement is that it confuses product with process. On the most basic level, there’s the matter of time. Most writers spend months or years producing a manuscript; most readers buzz through the same manuscript in days or hours. It’s relatively easy to remember the key hint or the bit of foreshadowing in Chapter Two if you read it within the last day; it’s not so simply if you wrote that bit two or three months ago. It’s even worse if you wrote it four months ago in Chapter Ten, moved it to Chapter Eight a month later, deleted it entirely when the front end of the story got reshuffled a week after that, then changed your mind and decided it needed to go in somewhere and tried it in three or four places before settling on Chapter Two as the right spot (for now) a month ago.

By the same token, the writer has to live with the characters – and their quirks – a lot longer than the readers do. The protagonist who was charming and fascinating at the start of the series can start to feel old and stale after the writer has lived with him/her for four or five years…but the readers, who’ve only had four or five weeks of the character over those same four or five years, frequently still find the character fresh and appealing.

In other words, what works in fiction that is read over a relatively short period – say a week – does not necessarily have the same effect when it is spread over months or years. What works for the reader may well not work in the same way for the writer.

Conversely, what works for the writer (or what the writer thinks is working) may not work for a reader who hasn’t been steeped in the story for weeks and months. Things a writer thinks are blindingly obvious (because he/she has been pondering the character’s motivation or the series of plot twists) may be totally opaque to most readers because the writer forgot (or didn’t think it necessary) to put it on the page. Things a writer thinks are just the right level of incluing may strike the reader as being beaten about the head and shoulders with hints (because the hints that the writer put in weeks apart, the reader is running across within minutes of each other).

Which brings me to the second part of the product-process confusion: the writer and the reader are not looking at the same thing. The reader has a finished product; the writer is working with an unfinished product, right up to the very end.

A story that’s in process is frequently very different from the final version. Not only does it change, it keeps on changing. As a result, the writer’s relationship to the story is very different from even the most dedicated and fanatical reader’s relationship to the story. The reader is looking at a porcelain teacup, finished and glazed. The writer is looking, at various times, at a lump of clay, a lopsided bowl that has to be squished down and reshaped, a mug-like cylinder that’s closer but still too tall, an unfinished cup that still needs to be fired and painted and glazed but that’s at least the right shape, and, eventually, the finished teacup…which may be a lovely and pleasing teacup, but which is nothing at all like the water pitcher the writer had in mind when she sat down with that lump of clay at the beginning of the process.

For writers, it’s as much about the journey as it is about the end result.

“There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” –The Naked City by Malvin Wald

The thing about those eight million stories is, they’re all different from each other. And trying to make them be the same is a mistake.

This is something that a lot of people – readers, writers, and editors alike – tend to forget a lot. In online blogs and forums, in writing workshops, in how-to-write books, in reviews and reader discussions and recommendation lists, you find comments that boil down to the same thing: do it this way, not that way; do this kind of thing, not that kind.

These recommendations are particularly insidious – and confusing – when they focus on one specific aspect of storytelling to the exclusion of everything else. Because while characterization, plot, and worldbuilding are important to all stories, the balance among them does not need to be the same for all stories.

What set me off on this was a rant I read recently from a reader who disliked science fiction because it was “too technical” and didn’t pay enough attention to characterization to suit that particular reader. There were some good points made, but by the end of the rant I was left wondering why on earth this person wanted to read SF at all; it seemed to me that his/her taste would be better suited by mainstream or literary fiction.

The gadget story and the idea story have been staples of science fiction from the very beginning, and yes, in many (though not all) cases, doing justice to the worldbuilding, the idea, and the extrapolation may not leave enough room for the author to do detailed, nuanced, in-depth characterization (especially in a short story). Obviously, if you demand detailed, nuanced, in-depth characterization in your stories, you won’t find these stories as satisfying as less idea-heavy stories that use the extra space for characterization.

But there are plenty of readers for whom the in-depth characterization that the ranting reader loved is something that gets in the way of the stuff they love – the ideas and extrapolation and worldbuilding. Or the slam-bang action plot.

What I don’t get is why the plot-lovers and the action-lovers and the idea- and gadget-lovers can’t happily read the action-plot books and the idea-centered books, while the character-loving readers read the character-centered books. Instead, you see people ranting at each other because “science fiction needs to return to its roots in hard-science-based stories because science is what real science fiction is about” or “science fiction needs to pay more attention to character arcs because characters are what makes a story satisfying.”

From where I sit, these statements are equally nonsensical. What makes a story satisfying to that second reader is the character arc, but quite obviously, what makes the story satisfying to the first reader are the ideas and the scientific extrapolation, the “gosh-wow” factor. Or, to restate a writing truism, you can’t please everyone.

This debate has been going on for decades, but I think it’s entering a new phase. The advent of the Internet and the growth of ebooks makes it possible (not easy; possible) for work to find an audience even if it is not “commercially viable” (i.e., that won’t make enough money to be worth the time of a major publishing house). That’s the good news. The bad news is that the Internet also makes it possible for a small number of readers with decided opinions about what constitutes “good” books or “real” science fiction to browbeat authors and especially would-be authors into believing that whatever standard they’ve set is the One True Way, and that they can’t write without doing X (whether X is hard-sf developed ideas, character arcs, action-centered plots, or whatever).

Ideally, of course, one would have it all: ideas and worldbuilding and plot and character growth and a hero’s journey and chocolate cake with ice cream and sprinkles. But sometimes, that’s not the story you’re telling, and something has to be left at the bare minimum standard. Or to put it another way, every story has to have as much plot, as much background, as much characterization, as much symbolism, as much dialog, as much action, as much description, and as much of every other possible story element as that story needs. And sometime, a story doesn’t need much of one element at all.

Putting in things – even really basic story elements – that a story doesn’t need is a good way of ending up with a jumbled mess that nobody will enjoy reading. Figuring out exactly what things a particular story needs and doesn’t need is, of course, not easy. A lot of it is a matter of practice and taste, and chipping away every part of the stone block that isn’t an elephant (or a duck, or whatever it is one is carving).

There are hundreds of SF novels published every year; why insist that all of them do the same things in the same way? I don’t see any value in trying to turn the eight million stories into eight million versions of the same story. It kind of defeats the purpose of having eight million stories in the first place.

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

-W. Somerset Maugham

I’ve had at least four questions from people in the last week or two about that hoary old piece of advice “show, don’t tell.” So even though I just did a post on it a few weeks ago, I decided to do another, somewhat different one.

Most of the questions boil down to “Where is the line between showing something and telling it? Does this or that count?”

To which I can only sigh, and shake my head, and respond, “IT DOES NOT MATTER.”

Neither readers nor editors keep a running mental checklist of how much an author “shows” versus how much she “tells.” Even if they did, their results wouldn’t be the same because a) people have different taste, b) there is no standard definition of “showing” vs. “telling” that everybody accepts, and c) the whole thing is something of a false dichotomy anyway, since on the most basic level everything in every story is being told to the reader by the author.

Most of all, though, whether something is “showing” or “telling” does not matter, because it is the wrong question. Labeling a sentence, paragraph, or scene “showing” does not make it an effective way of getting that information across to the reader in the context of the particular story the author is telling, any more than labeling it “telling” makes it ineffective.

Or to put it another way: the line between “showing” and “telling,” and the “best ratio of showing to telling,” are not matters of empirically defined, unchangeable fact like, oh, the speed of light or Planck’s constant; they are matters of art which (to the extent they can be pinned down at all) change from author to author and book to book. What matters is not whether an author can write some pre-defined Golden Ratio of showing to telling; what matters is whether whatever the author did works in the particular book she has written.

The answer to the question “How much telling (or showing) am I allowed to put in my book?” is like the answer to “How long should a person’s legs be?” That is, “Long enough to reach the ground” in the case of the legs, and “As much as it needs to make the book work” in the case of the writing.

Microwriting advice of the show-vs.-tell sort is, I think, meant to be of use at the revision stage, when one has a completed first draft that one knows has an as-yet-unidentified problem. One can then, in an attempt to identify the problem, go down the list of common, known problem areas asking “Is this that problem I can’t figure out?” Most of the time, the answer will be “no; I do it, but it’s not why Chapter 3 drags or why my readers lose interest in Chapter 7,” but occasionally one will smack one’s forehead and think “Doh! Why didn’t I see that?” And then one can fix it.

Unfortunately, what too many would-be writers do is turn this on its head. They go looking for problems that aren’t there. They don’t ask “Does this scene work? Does it feel right?” They ask “What’s wrong with this scene?”

Nitpicking what kinds of things constitute “showing” versus “telling” does not get one any closer to answering the real question, which is “Does this sentence (paragraph, scene, chapter) work in this book?” Of course, “Does this work here?” is a question that can only be answered one manuscript at a time; it is specific, not general, and no one can answer it without knowing where “here” is, i.e., without having read that specific manuscript. “Does this work?” is also, to a large extent, a subjective judgment; what works for one reader or editor will not work for another.

The things that work change from book to book and author to author…and from reader to reader. You have to develop your own feel for it, which is generally done by reading a ton of different books and noticing, on some level, what actually works or doesn’t work, and then by writing a ton of different things and noticing what works or doesn’t work.

Analytical writers may benefit from breaking down passages that work into pieces and figuring out why they work. I’m not quite sure how intuitive writers train their intuitions, but I’m pretty sure it involves the same amount of reading (and possibly even more).

I suspect this is why people keep asking me about where the line is and ratios and so on – because they want some objective (easy) way of measuring their writing skill. I’d be a lot more sympathetic if I didn’t think that a fair number of the folks who ask are looking for some way to game the system – if there were one specific, desirable ratio or a hard line between showing and telling, then they could twist this sentence a little bit, or use that technique, so that the sentence or paragraph falls on the “right” side of the line and their absolute ratio is correct, and this will magically make their manuscript saleable without actually changing it.

Sorry, folks; this won’t work. There is no system to game, and you can’t please everyone. Deal with it.

One ought never, according to this advice, write something like “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone…a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!” That would be bad writing. Fortunately, nobody told Dickens that, or we wouldn’t have that lovely description of Scrooge.

There are two things one needs to be sure of when this sort of advice is trotted out: first, that the writer receiving the advice understands what the phrase really means; second, that the person so blithely giving the advice understands what it means. When one is clear on both of those, one can then decide how one wants to apply it in one’s current project, and/or whether to take the blithely given advice to heart.

The first problem I nearly always run into when I’m arguing with someone about this is that they don’t understand that “Jake stumbled out of bed, shut off his alarm, and sleep-walked through his morning routine” counts as “showing” just as much as saying “Jake stumbled out of bed in the general direction of the alarm. He got the alarm shut off after three tries, then shuffled into the bathroom. He turned the shower on and brushed his teeth while the water warmed up. He had time for a longer one than usual this morning, which almost made the damned alarm worthwhile. He was contemplating, in a groggy sleep-soaked fashion, whether to shave or pretend for the rest of the day that he was growing a beard, when the scent of coffee penetrated to the bathroom.”

The two descriptions have different levels of detail, but they are both “showing” what Jake is doing in the morning. The “telling” version is “Jake had a hard time getting up in the morning.” In other words, “telling the reader” means giving the reader the conclusion they would draw, without giving them any of the actions or thoughts or descriptions that would lead them to that conclusion.

None of those examples is inherently “better” or more desirable than the others – not the first, short dramatization; not the longer, more detailed dramatization; not the “telling” version that skips the whole boring getting-up-in-the-morning description. They are only more or less desirable in the context of the particular story the writer is telling.

And context means the whole context: pacing, characterization, plot, setting, theme, etc. If Jake having trouble getting up in the morning is eventually going to be important to the plot, the writer would probably choose one of the dramatized version – letting the reader come to a conclusion by observing the character in action is almost always more vivid and effective than just summarizing things. If the pace has been headlong and a breather would be welcome, the writer might choose the longer version; if the pace needs picking up, the writer might choose the “telling” version and look for a place later on to confirm the judgment by dramatizing Jake getting up some other morning. If it’s not plot-critical but adds to the theme or atmosphere in some important way, the shorter dramatized version might work best (assuming pacing considerations don’t enter in). It depends on context.

“Telling” the reader something is most obviously important when the writer needs to move lightly over a long period of time. “The long, dangerous trip to Byzantium took them six months, and they were nearly captured by pirates twice, but they arrived safely at last just in time for the coronation” lets the reader know that a) six months have passed, b) they were probably fairly eventful months, but c) the events aren’t particularly important to this story. Telling is also highly useful for background and plot-related exposition where there’s so much necessary material to get through that doing it all in dialog would be implausible, would slow the pace to a crawl, and would take far too many pages.

One of the first places people go wrong in applying the “show, don’t tell” business is in making it an absolute blanket “rule” that can never be broken…meaning that these writers use much less effective methods for certain things in order to avoid the evil expository lump. So once you have decided that what you are doing is, in fact, “telling” or exposition, you then have to decide whether it is a) necessary in this place, and b) effective in this place. If it is neither, then yes, it should probably be cut or rewritten more dramatically. But if it is merely ineffective-but-necessary, then what it needs is to be fixed, not to be cut.

I blinked at him a couple of times and then quoted Watt-Evans’ Law of Literary Creation (There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently-talented writer can’t get a good story out of it.) and Feist’s Corollary (There is no idea so brilliant or original that a sufficiently-untalented writer can’t screw it up.) 

In other words, it isn’t the idea that has to be meaningful and full of depth and resonance; it’s the finished story that needs those things. Of course, he didn’t want to believe me, but it got me thinking.

How do I get from the stupid, hackneyed idea to a reasonably decent, interesting story?

Well, I start by looking at the parts of the story that aren’t included in the idea. Ideas, by their nature, need to be developed and expanded in order to become stories. They aren’t complete in themselves, or they’d be the stories we make them into. So whatever the idea is that one starts with, it’s missing something.

A lot of the ideas that get lumped into the “stupid or hackneyed or clichéd” category are plot ideas: the orphaned hero turns out to be the lost heir to the throne, for instance. What’s missing is characters (by which I mean “specific people with names and individual personalities,” rather than just roles like “orphaned hero” or “smart-mouthed sidekick”) and setting. Some of the “hackneyed or clichéd” ideas are the characters who’ve been around the block too many times: the spunky young girl, the thief with a heart of gold, the mustache-twirling villain, the noble hero who’s good at everything. What they’re missing is plot and setting. And of course Generic Fantasy Setting #2,349 needs a plot and characters.

So I look at the cliché “orphaned hero is lost heir” and I think about just who that orphaned hero/heroine is. Somebody different; somebody unexpected. Maybe she’s a Goth girl with no patience whatever for the rules of the court she’s suddenly thrust into. Maybe he’s an emo poet, or really, really, really wants to play major league football, and to heck with this being a king stuff. Maybe she’s the absolutely perfect ideal the court has been hoping for…too perfect? How’d she get that way, when she didn’t know she was a princess? What’s she really thinking, underneath all that perfection? What if my orphaned hero is a gang member (or equivalent)?

Or I look at the cliché and I think about where it could take place that would be interesting and different. Aliens. Insectoid aliens…maybe something like bees, where the new queen has to destroy all her competitors? Or merpeople – I could combine the “lost heir” with one of the selkie legends about the selkie maiden who was trapped by the fisherman and forced to live as his wife until she found the sealskin he stole from her. That’s certainly one way for the True Heir to get lost.

Telling a familiar story from the point of view of a normally-minor character often works well – the maid or valet, the coachman, the cook, the captain of the guard, all can bring a fresh perspective to a familiar tale…or sometimes spin off it sideways into stories of their own, for which the familiar “main” story ends up being no more than something happening in the background.

Ultimately, though, it comes down to execution. You can make anything sound horrible and clichéd and stupid in a summary, without even trying much. (“The Lord of The Rings” is about a short guy with hairy toes who throws a ring in a volcano.) And if you boil things down far enough, there aren’t any original plots…that’s why Heinlein could claim that all plots are variations or combinations of only three fundamental types. It’s the final product – the total impression made by 90,000+ words of novel – that’s going to be meaningful and inspiring and interesting and deep. Not the log-line.

Unfortunately, when it comes to writing, price often drops out of the equation completely, because how much the editor pays is determined in contract negotiations that are generally unrelated to deadline. One thus ends up with “You can have it fast, or you can have it good, but not both.” This attitude has been around so long that it has percolated down to the reader level, leading to lots of grumbling when a writer puts out books “too fast.” Often, the grumbling gets done by people who haven’t even read the book…and who refuse to do so on the grounds that “anything written that fast can’t be any good.”

As usual with this kind of thing, there is a grain of truth in it that is being blown up into a zeppelin-sized, wrong-headed rule. The grain of truth is this: Every writer has a writing speed that works for them, and trying to push stuff out faster than this speed results in a drop in quality. This does not, however, translate into “writing six books in a year is too fast; they can’t be any good” applied to all writers, because the “too fast” production speed varies from writer to writer.

I know professional writers for whom taking less than a year and a half to write a novel is “too fast” – it results in a drop in quality. I also know professional writers for whom writing a book in less than two weeks is “too fast” for the same reason…but taking three weeks makes no difference in quality that I can find. Yet the slower writers are admired, while the faster ones are castigated for scrimping on quality.

The really odd thing is that the folks who think that three weeks is “too fast to write a good novel” are often the very same people who proclaim that quality work comes through inspiration – and that when one is inspired, one can sit and write golden sentences for hours on end without effort (though they’ll allow the writer to complain of cramps in their hands at the end). Apparently, writers are not allowed to be inspired for an entire novel’s-worth of material at once, and inspiration is supposed to take time off between chapters and novels so that their publication dates will be properly spaced.

There’s another problem that arises when critics, reviewers, and the general reading public make judgments of quality based on the perceived speed of writing, and that is that the number of books a writer has coming out in any given year does not necessarily have anything much to do with how fast those books got written. It can take a long time for a book to work its way through the whole publication cycle, even for a much-published author.

When one works steadily at a book-per-year pace, one can easily end up with three or four unpublished novels in the pipeline. If one is delayed (there’s a printer’s strike, the cover artist was backed up, there were three other books with a similar theme coming out that year and the publisher pushed it back to avoid competition) and one is rushed forward (there was a sudden gap in the schedule because someone else didn’t deliver on time, and this book was done), one can easily end up with three titles coming out in the same year.

If the writer has been working on spec (that’s “on speculation” for freelance fiction writers, not “to specification” as it would be for freelance article writers), and has had to submit a series project a couple of times before it sells, it’s easy to end up with even more new titles coming out in one year. And then there are those “trunk stories” – the ones written ages ago that just didn’t find a market, and that have been sitting in a trunk (real or metaphorical) for years until a random conversation with an editor suddenly results in a sale. On occasion, I’ve heard readers complaining about a “too fast” writer because they didn’t realize that the books they were complaining about were a big chunk of the writer’s backlist that had been written and published years before, and were being reissued to a new audience.

And then there are the books that the writer has been thinking about, and sometimes researching, for years or even decades before sitting down to put them on paper in a white-hot rush. Again, the assumption seems to be that no one could possibly work on more than one novel or story at a time, even though author’s papers are freqently littered with bits and pieces of not-yet-written stories, partial manuscripts, and various other scraps that were obviously produced at a time when the author was supposedly concentrating on some other, now finished, project.

What this means is that readers can’t tell how long it took the author to write a book. There’s not much point in explaining all this to them, though it can be fun to mention (if you know it) that the literary masterpiece about which someone is currently waxing lyrical took a grand total of six weeks to write from the first typing of “Chapter One” to “The End.” The point is that if you happen to be a really fast writer, don’t worry about it…and don’t let anyone tell you that you have to slow down in order to write well. If you happen to be really slow, the same caveat applies in reverse: Don’t let people tell you that you have to speed up. There is no One-Size-Fits-All process. Figure out what works for you, and then keep doing that.

The first, most common reason for this is that the author didn’t actually have any idea what was going on to begin with, and when they start having to explain all their mysterious hints and ominous warnings, whatever they come up with just doesn’t measure up to the menace in the early chapters. It’s as if they’ve had livestock go missing and a field mysteriously burned, and everyone’s muttering about legends of dragons, and then they find out that the livestock was stolen by gypsies and the field caught fire when two kids were careless with the cigarettes they were smoking back behind the barn. It’s a let-down.

Obviously, one cure is to stop doing this – that is, first come up with the dragon, and then figure out what mysterious hints to drop to get there. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for folks who’ve already fallen into this trap and don’t want to throw away a perfectly good set of three-to-ten-chapters. What they need to do is come up with a problem that lives up to whatever level of threat they’ve established at the beginning. Better yet, come up with something that’s even worse than the opening implied.

My experience is that the most effective way to do this is to turn off your Inner Critic, sit down, and make a list of at least twenty things that could be the Big Problem. Gypsies, cigarettes, bandits, infiltrators from over the border, dragons, human sabotage, enemies setting a trap for the king or lord or Our Heroes, a new Fire Lord rising…twenty things, minimum. The first three to five will be the easy choices, the stuff that’s at the top of your mind. Mostly, they’re unlikely to develop into a particularly interesting story, but sometimes one of them is just the thing you want. After the first three-to-five, the ideas usually start getting more unusual and unexpected – dragons, traps, etc. – and you can pick one or more of those to use or combine into something that will live up to your opening. That’s why it’s a list of twenty things: to force yourself to come up with possibilities that aren’t obvious.

The trick to this is not to judge your ideas as you’re coming up with them, or think too hard about how they’ll twist the story you thought you were telling. There’ll be time for that when you have the list. Once you have the list, cross off the easy, obvious choices at the beginning and look at the rest of them. Maybe some can be combined for even greater impact – those infiltrators from over the border may be setting a trap for the king in preparation for starting a war, or perhaps the dragon is merely the servant of the rising Fire Lord.

The second reason for the falling-apart problem is that even though the writer has what’s supposed to be a huge problem facing the protagonists – the dragon – it seems much too easy once everyone finally figures out what’s going on. Missing livestock, burned field, dragon legends…ah, right, so there’s a dragon. So we call in the army with lots of cannon support, they set out some fat sheep for bait, the cannons blow the dragon out of the sky, and bob’s your uncle. This tends to happen either when a) the writer is much too eager to get to the Grand Finale and the confrontation with the dragon, and so skips over any problems that might occur on the way there, or b) hasn’t thought everything through (i.e., as in, not realizing early on that an army with artillery could take down the dragon fairly easily, as soon as they know there is one).

The fix for this one is similar to the brainstorming I just described, but instead of coming up with a list of ideas for what the Big Problem could be, the author has to come up with two lists. The first is a list of What Could Go Wrong from wherever the beginning ends. We know there’s a dragon now, so we’ll send a messenger to the king to get the army and the cannons. But: the king won’t send the army because he doesn’t believe in dragons, the trail up the mountain is too narrow for the cannons, the dragon eats the messenger so the king never hears, the cannons were built by the cheapest bidder and explode, the dragon is one of a larger flock and the cannons can’t take down twelve dragons at once, etc.

The second list is the list of What Else Could Be Going On that Our Heroes don’t know about yet. The dragon is the servant of a new Fire Lord, who will be really annoyed when Our Heroes kill it. The dragon was lured to Our Heroes’ village on purpose, by somebody who has it in for them and who will certainly try something else once they get rid of the dragon. The dragon has a dangerous object in its horde – cursed, stolen, something that possessed people, whatever – and once the dragon is gone and the object is found, they’ll have a whole new problem to deal with. Again, no judging ideas or worrying about how they might fit into the story until after the lists are complete.

The last reason for the falling-apart problem is usually that the writer is paying too much attention to The Rules ^TM, specifically the ones about how the heroes have to make mistakes, make their situation worse, etc. until the Grand Finale. The standard plot skeleton is DEscriptive, not PREscriptive, and it just means that a story wherein things run along too smoothly is seldom interesting to read. The heroes have to face and overcome obstacles, but the obstacles don’t necessarily have to be of their own making.

This particular comment involved a total misunderstanding of verbs, tenses, and voice – specifically, the use of ”was.” The critiquer asserted, among other things, that “was” is a weak verb, that “was” is always passive (by which, from context, he appears to have meant not merely passive, but passive voice), and that every use of the verb “was” could and should therefore be cut or rephrased so as to use some other, presumably stronger verb instead. Like “is.”

This is complete nonsense, even before I point out that “is” and “was” are the same verb, just different tenses.

The verb “to be” in all its forms is not an action verb (like swim or climb), but it isn’t weak. It simply does a different job, grammatically. Action verbs tell you what something or someone is doing. A string of action verbs can imply a whole scene without adding any other words at all (Sneak. Steal. Hide. Trip. Scramble. Run!). To be is a linking verb; without a subject and an object, it doesn’t imply much of anything (Is. Was. Am. Are. Huh?). It doesn’t do the same job as an action verb – and while it is true that sometimes you can phrase a sentence either way (“His voice was a whisper” vs. “He whispered”), sometimes you just can’t (“Marley was dead, to begin with.” “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”)

Moreover, “to be” functions as an auxiliary verb in a number of different tenses. Denying a writer the use of the progressive tenses and the perfect tenses cripples the prose. For those who aren’t sure about the difference (and I had to look up the names repeatedly for years and years) the tenses work like this:

You can’t replace “He was dying” with “He died” just to take out the “was.” The sentences don’t mean the same thing. “Was” isn’t in there as a stand-alone verb that you can remove or change; it’s part of the grammatical form. Yet over and over I meet people who want to tear through a manuscript crossing out forms of “to be” on principle, without paying any attention to what the writer is saying, how she is saying it, or why she said it that way. (This is particularly annoying when the person on the rampage is a copyeditor who keeps changing what the sentences mean in pursuit of some stylistic ideal that eliminates “was,” but that’s a whole different rant.)

Which brings me to the infuriating obsession that some people have with banishing passive voice from fiction. Passive voice is a sentence construction which puts the emphasis and the focus of the sentence on what is being done or the thing that it’s being done to.  “She hit him” is active voice; “He was hit by her” is passive voice. It’s a tremendously useful construction for any writer whose characters are facing a puzzle, because you can leave out the “by whom:” “The necklace was stolen.” Who stole it? Neither the reader nor the detective knows just yet.

Passive voice gets a bad rap because it’s often used in dense scientific papers and badly-done business memos to make the subject under discussion look objective. Instead of saying “I injected the mice with a 2% saline solution,” the scientist says “The mice were injected with a 2% saline solution,” implying that anyone could have done this and the results would be the same. The corporate executive says “The budget was exceeded by $3 million” in hopes of distancing himself from the problem. Unless your viewpoint character is a scientist or businessman, you usually don’t want to do this in fiction.

There are, however, things that one does want to do with passive voice in fiction. Take the sentence “The child, having been abandoned in the corner, cried herself to sleep.” The parenthetical phrase “having been abandoned in the corner” (by whom?) is passive voice; it has to be passive voice in order to have “the child” as its subject. You could rephrase it in active voice, but only by adding someone else to the sentence: “The child, whose mother had abandoned her in the corner, cried herself to sleep.” There’s nothing wrong with the latter sentence, but in a novel or story, it’s probably clear already who it is that’s abandoned the kid in the corner. The second, active version also splits the focuse of the sentence; it’s half about the child and half about the mother.

I’ve already mentioned the usefulness of passive voice in hiding a thief, murderer, etc., but it can also shift the focus to someone or something: “She was murdered by her brother” puts more emphasis on her and on the murder than on the brother, because you could just say “She was murdered” and leave the brother out entirely. “Her brother murdered her” puts the emphasis on the brother. Sometimes, you want it one way, sometimes you want it the other way, and it’s silly to overlook so useful a tool as passive voice for doing this.

And then there are the stylistic considerations. Sometimes, using passive voice allows for a more elegant sentence than active voice. “The duke was attacked four times: once by an assassin, twice by bandits, and once by his four-year-old daughter.” reads much better, to my ear, than “One assassin, two sets of bandits, and his four-year-old daughter attacked the duke.”

For those of you who haven’t got a clue, the basic process of selling a novel is simple but frustrating: you make a list of potential editors/publishers; you check it over, collect names and addresses, and look up each publisher’s submission requirements; you send the first one whatever version of the novel they want to see (portion-and-outline, query letter, or full ms.; hard copy or electronic); and when your manuscript gets rejected, you send it to the next publisher on your list. Over and over and over, until the thing sells.

That’s it. There are no short cuts. There is no trick or secret handshake. There is no password that only someone in the business can tell you. You send it out, and you keep sending it out until it sells.

So why are there a bazillion articles, discussion groups, blog entries, etc. on How To Sell Your First Novel?

Several reasons. For starters, while there is no trick, password, or big secret method, there are mistakes one can make that will likely get a manuscript bounced within nanoseconds, and a fair amount of the wordage is just reminding people not to make them. Most are common sense: don’t fax the publisher your manuscript; don’t send a sweet Romance novel to a publisher that only does hardboiled detective novels; don’t badger editors at conventions or workshops; don’t turn a page upside down somewhere in the middle; don’t bring your manuscript to your brother’s wedding because you heard that one of the bride’s relatives was an editor and you thought you’d get him to read your novel during the reception. (Yes, that is a true story. No, the editor didn’t buy it.)

Then there are the specifics of How You Make Your List of Editors, which are pretty much the same as the ones I just laid out a couple of posts ago for How To Make A List of Agents (look at who publishes the books you like; get addresses and editor names from Literary Marketplace or Writer’s Market; google for their submission requirements; check them at Writer Beware and Preditors and Editors; do not pay an agent, publisher, or editor to look at your book). That can pretty much fill up a post right there, but I’m assuming that all my readers are smart enough to look at what I said about finding an agent and figure out how to apply it to finding an editor/publisher.

Those two things – trying to prevent basic mistakes and walking people through the process of making their initial list of publishers-to-send-the-manuscript-to – make up about 98% of the posts and articles by the actual published authors, actual editors, and actual agents who give advice to beginners. Unfortunately, the other 2% get most of the attention. These are the how-I-beat-the-system posts by people who used some non-standard submission technique and got lucky, and who mostly haven’t been around long enough to realize that they succeeded in spite of, not because of, whatever they tried.

Because while there is no secret method, password, trick, or short cut to selling, there is such a thing as luck. The trouble is, you can’t control luck. It happens when it happens. Also, it comes in two varieties, and there’s never any saying whether you’ll get the good sort or the bad. Luck is not something you want to depend on.

Most people know that intellectually. But it’s really, really hard to keep believing that it’s true when the ms. keeps going out and coming back, over and over. And all the stories about how Gone With the Wind was rejected forty times before it sold, or how Madeleine L’Engle was about to give up on writing completely when A Wrinkle In Time came back from the very last publisher (except it didn’t come back, that last time) – those stories don’t help much with the discouragement and frustration.

So people look for a second opinion. And they get it from those last 2% of published authors…and from all the rest of the on-line posts and articles and especially forums and discussions by people just like them who haven’t sold anything yet, and who therefore don’t actually know anything first-hand.

This is where you find the folks who claim that “it’s all about who you know,” that you must do certain things (sell short stories first, have an agent, attend conventions, go to workshops, hire an editor/book doctor, etc.), that you’re better off doing something else (self-publishing; starting with the small presses; e-publishing; putting it on your web site; doing a lot of social networking and/or other pre-sale publicity, etc.), that analyzing form rejection letters will tell you something useful, that gaming the system works.

Reading this stuff will make you crazy. Because people argue very plausibly, and there is the niggling feeling that getting published can’t possibly be a matter of make list, send it out, send it out again, repeat over and over til sold. There has to be something more you can do to improve your chances. Doesn’t there?

Well, no, there doesn’t. Because what it all boils down to is, whether your manuscript sells or not depends on somebody else’s decision. Somebody you can’t influence, because you probably don’t know them, and even if you did, it’s their job to not be influenced. Breaking your brains trying to figure out something else to do is like breaking them trying to figure out a way to guarantee you’ll have good weather for Saturday’s picnic. It really doesn’t matter what you come up with; the weather will do whatever it does, and you’ll just have wasted a bunch of time.

There are, admittedly, alternatives to traditional publishing. But that gets back to what you actually want…and anyway, it’s another post.