This happens not to be the case. Every writer has some kind of blind spot; it’s just that for most of us, it’s something that’s not quite as obvious up front, something more minor than “action” or “dialog,” and we learn to dance around it or compensate for it fairly quickly. It’s more difficult when the blind spot is something central, like description or action, but it’s still possible.

The biggest difficulty, in my experience, is usually figuring out that one has a problem and exactly what the problem is, because of course the salient feature of blind spots is that one can’t see them. Often, the stuff one writes looks perfectly fine to the writer, and it’s only when the crit group or beta readers get at it that the writer begins to suspect there’s something wrong.

Unfortunately, at this point many writers decide that what’s wrong is the readers, not the writing. It always astonishes me when a writer’s first response to “I didn’t understand this bit” is “But it’s right there, see?” If somebody didn’t get it, then they didn’t get it; the question at that point is to figure out why and do something about it.

And yes, sometimes the problem is with the particular reader – but for a writer, that really needs to be the last possible conclusion, and never a final one. Because if you start from the assumption that the problem is always with the reader, you will never find and fix anything that you didn’t notice on your own, and there’s really no point in being in a crit group or having beta readers at all.

Even when you’re pretty sure that this particular reader has a bee in her bonnet about dialog or description or whatever, it’s worth reconsidering her comments from time to time, because as one’s writing improves, one generally gets better at spotting real problems, so it’s possible that in six months or a year or five years, one will look at the story and smack one’s head and think That’s what she meant! Why didn’t I see this before? And then one can proceed to actually fix the problem.

Because the very first thing to remember about fixing anything is that if you can’t see the problem yourself, it is practically impossible to fix it without mucking up everything else. This is what makes dealing with blind spots so extraordinarily difficult; by their very nature, one can’t see them, so how can one fix them?

Reader and crit group comments can alert one to the fact that one has a blind spot – that one always seems to start the story a chapter ahead of where it needs to start, or carry on three chapters past the actual end, or never say what the main characters look like, or never describe anyone’s thoughts/emotions, or whatever.

The next step is to learn to see the problem for oneself…and decide whether it’s a charming stylistic eccentricity, or a serious problem that needs to be fixed. A character who constantly “sings out” instead of calling or shouting may be fine for one book, though it can become a really noticeable and tiresome tick over a multi-volume series. On the other hand, if there are no action scenes at all (because the kidnapping, rescue, barroom brawl, chase through the ravine, and final shootout all take place offstage), that’s probably a very large problem unless you’re doing something meta and literary and know exactly what you’re doing.

Teaching yourself to see a problem happens in two main ways: by reading other people’s stuff and paying conscious and deliberate attention to seeing what they’re doing that you aren’t, and by going over your own stuff in revision and doing the same thing. This can be extremely difficult to do alone, though it’s not impossible. Sometimes, though, what’s needed is for you to go over the passage in someone else’s book, looking for the action (or description, or dialog tags, or whatever), and then have someone else go through the same passage and highlight it so you can’t miss it.

Once you learn to see when something’s there and when it really isn’t, and have decided that the book you’re writing will be improved by including it, you go to your own stuff and look. This is even harder, especially if whatever-it-is is something that’s missing (like action or description), rather than something that you’re doing too often. It’s relatively easy to go through a manuscript and highlight every spot where someone blinks or rolls their eyes; it’s a lot harder to mark places where there could be action or description or emotions, only there isn’t.

For most writers, especially if they’re still in the early stages of learning to write, this is second-draft and revision stuff. My personal experience has been that going through a manuscript and carefully deleting all the eye-rolls or overused “verys” and “reallys” and “managed tos” is painful enough that after doing it once, I remember and avoid doing that particular thing during subsequent first drafts…but that hasn’t stopped me from making new and different mistakes, which then need to be discovered and corrected. It’s a never-ending journey, but it’s the only way I know to keep improving.

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.

Revising a first draft is one of those things that sounds as if it’s easy to talk about until you try…and then once you start digging into it, you start wondering how it’s even possible to do, let alone define well enough to talk about.

The first problem is that “first draft” means different things to different writers. Among the professional writers I know, first drafts range from something that looks more like a collection of notes and dialog bits (which needs massive work just to get to the point where someone else can read and understand it), to a “talking heads” thing that reads a good deal like a screenplay, to an almost-clean manuscript that needs only a little polishing.

And just as there is a range in what the first draft looks like, there’s a range in what’s wrong with it. Some writers are brilliant at the word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence level – the microwriting stuff – but have serious problems at the macro level – pacing, plot, structure, all the big picture things that affect the story as a whole.

These two things don’t necessarily match up. That is, the writer with the extremely clean and nearly-polished first draft may actually be the one whose microwriting needs more work, while the writer whose first draft looks more like an extensive plot outline than a manuscript draft may be the one with the structural or plotting flaws that need attention. Or in other words, the stuff that looks and feels as if it comes easily may be the places that need the most work.

Or they may not. This is where it helps for writers to be able to back up and take a clear, objective look at themselves and the work they’ve done…and if one can’t manage that, one needs to have critiquers whose judgment one trusts, who are able to point out that yes, the sentences are clunky again or that no, the plot doesn’t make sense. But a good critiquer also has to be able to roll her eyes and remind the writer that he always gets paranoid about the plot being senseless when really, it’s just fine and it’s the microwriting he should worry about (or vice versa).

This alone can drive a writer crazy. You need to have confidence in your work, but you also need to see its problems; you need to believe in your critiquers, but you also need to know when not to follow their advice. It’s a constant balancing act.

But then we come to the second problem, which has to do with keeping the revision balanced. The writer has to stay aware of both the micro and macro levels at once (or at least remember to look rapidly from one to the other). Because it is remarkably easy to focus so much on one half of the revision process that, in the course of fixing something, you mess up something on a different level that was working just fine before.

What I mean is the sort of thing that can happen when one or two words in a sentence get fixed: that’s enough to wreck the rhythm of the sentence, but one doesn’t always notice that it has unless one rereads the whole sentence with conscious attention. And even if the revised sentence works as a stand-alone, the new rhythm may throw the paragraph off. The fastest method I know of for finding this stuff is fairly time-consuming: read it aloud.

The other, related thing to look at (besides sentence rhythm) is the flow of the story. This can be difficult — the writer already knows what the sequencing is supposed to be and how all the pieces are supposed to fit, so it’s harder to see where there are missing or overlapping bits than it would be for someone who is not so immersed in the story. Rereading helps; reading aloud helps; practice helps; being aware of the problem helps; “cooling off” periods help.

Developing this kind of awareness is especially important when one is moving paragraphs or scenes or chapters around. It is perilously easy to develop continuity problems at the macro level because one added a phrase to a clunky sentence to make it flow better without realizing that one had already said almost the same thing three paragraphs earlier…or worse yet, one cuts or moves something without realizing that it established some information that’s used later, and now it doesn’t make any sense when Character A refers to it on the next page, because whatever-it-is hasn’t happened yet.

Awareness is the main thing. You can’t fix a problem that you can’t see, and you are unlikely to see it if you don’t look for it at all.

Revising is a separate skill from writing it down in the first place — related, but still different. And like writing it down, revising is a skill that gets better with practice. By the time one gets to the end of the first draft, one has definitely had a novel’s worth of practice at getting the words down on paper, and a lot of writers expect this to translate into ease of revision. If you haven’t been revising-as-you-go, however, it is highly unlikely that your revisions skills will be up at the same level as your first-draft skills…and an awful lot of writers cannot revise as they go without killing the story.

One could, of course, try revision someone else’s terminally bad piece of prose for practice and hope that the techniques one figures out will be applicable to one’s own work. It’s not hard to find examples of bad prose on the net; the trouble is finding some that makes the same mistakes you do without also making you feel as if your stuff is too horrible to contemplate.

So most of us are left with getting to the end of the book, right about the point where we feel as if we know what we’re doing, and then starting over again trying to boot up an entirely new skill (revising). The first step is always, always, always figuring out what the problem is. Diagnosis is key; if you can’t see what’s wrong, and you try to fix it anyway, it’s like trying to fix a delicate piece of electronics blindfolded and wearing oven mitts. Don’t. Just don’t.

Figuring out the problem isn’t as easy as it sounds – after all, if you’d known it was a problem, you wouldn’t have written it that way in the first place. There are various ways of going about this. Some writers lean heavily on first readers and crit groups to point out problems; others swear by the “cold box” method (stick it in a drawer for a couple of weeks or months, until it’s “cooled off” and you don’t remember what you meant to say quite so clearly). Some find that just making the manuscript look different is enough to do the trick, which these days is a simple matter of changing the font and the margins. I have friends who swear that they get this effect from looking at hard copy (as opposed to seeing tings on screen), even though nothing else changes.

Or you sit down and analyze. This means approaching the work coldly and intellectually, looking for places that don’t work and (even more important) for why they don’t work. It means avoiding the trap of getting lost in the fun, brilliant bits that you just love, and equally avoiding the trap of deciding every word, every comma, is trash and utterly without merit. It means learning the difference between fixing a problem and second-guessing a decision.

A word about this bit: the common advice to “murder your darlings” does not mean that you are supposed to go through your manuscript and take out every single thing in it that you actually like. If you don’t like what you write, why should anyone else like it? What it means is that if the only reason a particular sentence is in there is to show how clever the author is…take it out. You can save it for some other book if you like, somewhere that it will add to the characterization or the plot or the setting or something story-related, rather than author-related.

When you’re analyzing your own work, you generally need to look at both the macro and the micro level. The macro level is stuff like structure and pace and flow and tension. First you look for where things seem to be not-working; then you look for why they’re not working. In the first draft of The Far West, for instance, I had three scene in a row of studying a critter in the lab, followed by three scenes in a row of reunions with old friends/family returning from elsewhere. I hadn’t noticed when I wrote them; once I saw the problem, it was obvious that I needed to move things around so that I had some critter-studying followed by a reunion followed by more critter-studying, instead of having my heroine do the same thing over and over with different people.

Sometimes it’s not the content of the scenes that’s the problem. Sometimes it’s a lack of transition between two bits, or the fact that something wasn’t set up properly two or three scenes or chapters earlier. Sometimes the macro fix is down at the micro level. The first editor who saw Talking to Dragons told me that the pace was too slow (a macro-level problem); I fixed it by cutting roughly 5,000 words…two or three words at a time. (Basically, I figured out that I needed to cut three lines per manuscript page, and then spent three weeks going through the ms. a page at a time, crossing out words and rephrasing sentences so they’d be shorter, until I got three lines out of each and every page. It was a horrible job, but I learned a lot.)

The micro-level revision is down at the scene-to-sentence level – getting rid of ambiguous phrasing and tongue-twisting dialog, spotting the places where you over-use a particular sentence structure or a particular word. (I recall one ms. in which the student had learned to use partial parallel repetition to emphasize a point. Had learned it too well. Had become vastly fond of it. Had used it over and over. Had driven me crazy with the particular tic…which took forever to make her even see, let alone fix.)

The micro-level is where one sometimes has to dismantle and reassemble a paragraph or a scene, or rewrite it wholesale. Sometimes several times. Occasionally, a sort of reverse-layering technique is useful here, especially if there’s a scene where one can’t figure out what the problem is. You take the scene and hide everything except the dialog, so it’s just talking heads, and then you look at the flow of the dialog and whether it makes sense as a conversation without all the emotion and internal dialog and stage business that it has in the scene. Then you do the same thing with the physical action, and then the descriptive bits. It’s a bit tedious and too labor-intensive to use on every scene, but it can be really useful when one hasn’t a clue where the problem is.

Some writers find that their prose hardens into concrete at some point, and chipping out the rough spots leaves visible seams. There are two approaches to this problem: one, get to the revisions soon, before the prose sets up (for some writers, this means the same day it gets written); two, figure out how to either delay the hardening-up or soften up the prose once it’s gone hard. One writer I know with this problem prints out her ms. formatted the way her page proofs look; since she’s used to fixing things in page proof, she can see and fix them on the printout when she can’t on the screen. Another writer is fine as long as she doesn’t print out the final draft of a chapter – as long as it’s all pixels, it stays workable for her. Still another has to set aside the written scene and re-imagine the whole thing from scratch, then write a whole new version. It depends, as usual, on how your particular mind works.

Say, what?   

This particular bit of misinformation is officially categorized as an urban legend. I call it a writing myth as well, because, while it is not a myth about writing, it is typical of a particular class of background misinformation that gets some writers (and occasionally editors) in trouble.

Specifically, the class of things that one is so sure of that one is positive one doesn’t need to check them out. Things “everybody knows,” or things that one learned from some supposed expert or authority figure. So the writer doesn’t check, and the misinformation gets propagated further. If the writer is lucky, the copyeditor will fact-check the assertion and point out the problem. If the writer is unlucky, then either a) the copyeditor will not check, and the writer won’t find out about the mistake until the story is in print, at which point the writer will learn about it from the most obnoxious fan at the convention, at the worst possible time, or b) the writer will have based a key scene or plot point on the misinformation, necessitating rewriting large chunks of the story when the copyeditor catches the mistake.

And then there are the things you find out that are verifiably true, but you can’t use because “everybody knows” something different. When I was writing Mairelon the Magician, I discovered that the use of “pig” as a vulgar slang term for the cops dates back to the 17th century. I thought that was really interesting, but there was no possible way I could use it in a novel set in an alternate 1814 England. After all, “everybody knows” that calling cops “pigs” dates from the 1960s. Similarly, there’s no way I would use the term “gay” to describe something bright and cheerful in a book set in the 1890s, even though that was what the word meant then. The word has been very thoroughly repurposed since then, and it’s too difficult for most modern readers to make the mental shift.

Once in a while, it’s worth the effort to fight to correct a particularly egregious and common “everybody knows,” but most of the time, trying to make it clear within the story that this is neither an accidental mistake nor an ill-informed invention on the writer’s part just throws the whole story out of balance and puts far too much emphasis on a minor bit of information. What this means is that sooner or later, someone is going to come up to you after the story is published and explain that you have gotten things wrong – that the word “telegraph” was not in use until after Samuel Morse invented the electric telegraph in the mid-1840s; that women can’t ride stallions; and so on. Almost invariably, these people inspire a deep desire in the writer to commit violence; equally invariably, there is no point in arguing with them. Experience shows that even if one says “The Oxford English Dictionary has four citations of the use of telegraph in the 1790s,” (sorry; mine’s a paper copy, so I can’t post a link) the person will simply blink and reiterate, “Yes, but there were no telegraphs until the mid-1800s.”

In other words, getting the facts right will not protect you from the terminally misinformed. Every writer I know who’s been around for more than a book or two has run into someone like this, and none of us enjoy the experience. (Even worse are the people who have confused their personal convictions and opinions about the past with historical fact, and who are perfectly ready to go on for hours or pages about their pet topic, whether that is a JFK-assassination-conspiracy theory, what the primary cause of the American Civil War was, or whether Ares and Aphrodite were considered lovers by the Ancient Greeks.

This nearly always prompts someone to say, “Well, if people are going to think it’s wrong anyway, why bother with all that research?” And some writers do adopt this attitude. Me, I’d rather be criticized by people who are provably wrong in their claims (go look at the OED; there really are four cites for “telegraph”, from 1794 to 1798, and a bunch more in the early 1800s) than by the people who actually know what they are talking about. Especially if a plot-point depends on it.

“Oh,” I said, “you want somebody who is really anal-retentive for that position, right?”

He thought for a minute, then shook his head. “Not quite. I need somebody who is anal-retentive about the right things. Somebody who can tell when ‘just good enough’ is good enough, and when it’s time to get picky about even the tiniest flakes of dust.”

At which point, it occurred to me that part of the problem with writing is just exactly that: knowing when to be picky about the right things. It doesn’t do a bit of good to polish a paragraph until every word in it shines if there’s a serious problem with the scene or the chapter.

The trouble is, it’s a lot easier for most writers to sort out microwriting problems than it is to find and fix problems at the macro level. To some extent, this is because the only way you can fix a writing problem is on the micro level. The events of the first six chapters may be happening in the wrong order, but a big part of making the fix is changing words and phrases: “February” to “August,” “stamping snow from their boots” to “scraping mud off their shoes” and so on.

This makes it very easy to lose focus – to get so caught up in changing the winter day to a summer one that one forgets why one was changing it. The point isn’t to stuff in as many references to weather and the time of year as possible; the point is to give the events of the particular scene a new context. It’s not about simply changing the venue from February to August; it’s about the way the action flows from one scene to the next, and the way information gets fed to the readers and to the characters.

Some writers do this by alternating rapidly between a close-up focus  (“what words do I need in this sentence?”) and a big picture focus (“how is moving this scene going to change the overall pace and flow of the story? Is changing this sentence going to help or hurt?”). Some writers lay out the big picture very carefully before they start revising, then dive into the microwriting, secure in the knowledge that They Have A Plan. And some writers appear to be multitasking geniuses who can hold both things in their heads at once.

However you do it, the important thing is to make sure that whatever changes you make work on both the microwriting level and the macrowriting level.

When I got my first word-processor, I was immensely pleased by the way it let me go back and tidy up at the last minute. The “search and replace” function was especially helpful for getting rid of words and phrases that I’d overused. The only catch was, I had to know which words I was overusing, in order to search for them.

Over the years, I’ve developed a search-and-destroy list of words and phrases that creep into my rough drafts no matter how hard I try to avoid them. Some are things I’ve noticed; some are things my first-readers have called to my attention enough times that I have to reluctantly admit that what I think of as a charming or evocative phrase has been overworked, to say the least. The list changes a little from book to book, and from viewpoint character to viewpoint character. Daystar had a terrible tendency to overuse “really” (and we won’t even talk about the semi-colons); Eff doesn’t have a problem with “really,” but I have to watch that she doesn’t overuse “a mite” and her sentences sometimes go on for whole paragraphs and need some breaking up.

One of the things I’ve noticed recently is that “search and destroy” is really the wrong name for that list. The words and phrases on it aren’t things that always have to disappear; they’re things that need an extra look. About 80% of the time, I don’t need them, but the other 20% of the time, they’re exactly right.  For instance, the sentence “She seemed to be able to see a lot more from the high window” is a lot stronger and shorter as “She could see a lot more from the high window” (both “seemed to” and “be able to” are fairly high up on my search-and-destroy list; in combination they’re an instant kill).

On the other hand, the sentence “Even if he chose not to answer some questions, she would be able to tell a lot by which questions he refused.” is more ambiguous; here, the choice to change “she would be able to tell a lot” to “she could tell a lot” is as much a matter of voice as it is of over-use. I’d probably change it in most cases, but if I hadn’t used the phrase in a while (a couple of chapters, say) and my viewpoint character tended to be pedantic, I might very well leave it alone. And the sentence “He wondered if he would be able to swim all the way to the far side of the river” is almost certainly going to remain unchanged, because “he wondered if he could” probably isn’t going to imply enough self-doubt for what I want there.

The other thing I noticed is that “destroy” isn’t exactly accurate, either. At least half the time, I don’t just delete an overused word or phrase. Instead, I replace it with something else. “Would be able to see” often becomes “could see,” or even just “saw.” “Very red” sometimes becomes “crimson” or “scarlet,”  if the character’s voice allows it. Sometimes it doesn’t; one of my characters prefers similes such as “as red as my grandmother’s cranberry sauce” to terms like crimson or scarlet, so that’s what I change it to for her.

The point, as always, isn’t really to come up with a list of forbidden words (which won’t be the same for every writer anyway). The point is to make the writing more effective by looking at the standard words and phrases the writer comes up with by default, and then making a conscious decision whether to look for a clearer or more vivid or more succinct way to say the same thing.

The rules are:

1. You must write.

2. You must finish what you start.

3. You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.

4. You must put it on the market

5. You must keep it on the market until sold.

The emphasis is his; I assume that, like every professional writer I know, he’d been accosted by more than his share of folks who talk endlessly about how much they want to write, but who never put more than a few paragraphs down on paper or pixels (if that). They’re good rules; numbers 1, 2, 4, and 5 are as true today as they were when Heinlein formulated them over sixty years ago.

The catch, of course, is Rule 3.

There are several problems with it. Some, like the lack of editorial time to spend working out what revisions may be needed, are the result of the way the publishing system has changed in the past sixty-plus years – when Heinlein penned these rules, there were still editors around like the great Maxwell Perkins, who could take the time to edit a rambling 800-page authorial submission down into an award-winning 400-page novel. (These days, Thomas Wolfe would have been lucky to have an editor tell him “Cut this in half, and I’ll look at it again.”) Some of the problems with Rule 3 have been there right from the start.

Rule #3 doesn’t fit with the other four rules. “Sit down and write,” “Finish it,” “Send it out,” and “Keep sending it out don’t prescribe any part of how one goes about writing and submitting; they only say that you must do it. The writer is free to find or develop whatever process works for their particular personality. These four rules are about procedures, and business procedures at that (which means they don’t vary much from writer to writer).

“Don’t edit unless an editor asks you to,” on the other hand, is about process. Process varies wildly from writer to writer; what works for one, won’t work for someone else. This rule, in particular, will work fine for those writers who, like Heinlein, can produce an almost-perfect first draft (and/or those few who still have professional editors they can rely on to ask for in-dept revisions when needed). It will work not at all for those writers whose first draft is over- or under- written, or which is otherwise deeply flawed.

Late in his career, Heinlein himself admitted that he did, in fact, revise/rewrite his work before sending it out, but he never, to the best of my knowledge, explained why he had laid down this particular rule.

I have a couple of theories about that.

The first possibility is that Heinlein was of the school of thought that felt that “good enough” was all that was necessary, ever. Since he began making a living from writing in the days when you could support yourself selling short stories to the magazines if you were prolific enough, and since “prolific enough” often involved not having time to polish and revise much (if at all), this attitude would be understandable in him. It still begs the question of how one gets to “good enough” without revising, though, especially if one tends to flawed first drafts.

My other thought, and the one I think is more likely, is that Mr. Heinlein had run into a disproportionate number of extreme revisers (those writers who polish and polish and polish, ten or twenty or fifty drafts’ worth, and still won’t send the story out because “It’s not finished; I have to go over it one more time”). Since he himself did not tend to excessive revision, he drew the conclusion that this was a common beginner mistake (it is, but it isn’t exclusively a beginner problem) which needed to be addressed. Hence the rule.

The trouble is that there’s another sort of revising mistake, to which an equal number of beginning writers seem to gravitate. These folks consider every comma of their first draft divinely inspired, and refuse to fix even blatantly obvious problems. In the SF field, a lot of them have read Heinlein’s rules, and they always cite Rule 3 at anyone who tries to tell them their stuff needs work. Me, I’ve never seen a first draft that couldn’t use at least a little polishing, and I’ve never seen a fifteenth draft that would gain enough from yet another revision pass to make it worth spending the time revising.

So my feeling is that this particular set of writing rules would be better off as a set of four, in part because there is no simple, brief way to address problems of process. You’d have to come up with a brief way of saying that those writers who think their first draft is golden need to remember that nothing is ever perfect the first time, while those writers who think that their fiftieth draft is still too deeply flawed to send out need to remember that nothing will ever become perfect no matter how many times you run it through the computer. And then you’d have to convince each set of writers to apply the half of the rule they need, instead of the other half (which will always be the one they’d prefer, given their respective tendencies as regards revision).

It didn’t arrive.

We didn’t realize this for a week, because I was being restrained and not asking “Where the $#%@& are the revisions requests you promised me on Monday?” and he was being restrained and giving me time to think about them because they were fairly substantial (we’ll get to that in a minute). By the time we got that sorted out, I was down to two and a half weeks of revision time instead of four.

This was important because those two and a half weeks included a) my turn making tea for the girls (six of us have been doing this every other month for…over twenty years, for sure. Between cooking and cleanup, it’s a big production and eats up at least three days, counting the day of the tea itself), and b) a drive down to Chicago and back to take care of Dad’s paperwork and bills for the month, which took about four days but only ate two because I took the laptop and worked while I was there.

Fortunately, I didn’t have much in the way of questions; David is an excellent editor, very clear in explaining what he wants and why, and he’s also usually on the same wavelength as I am (meaning, he doesn’t ask for totally off-the-wall things like “Why don’t you put in some explosions? I like explosions.” or “What this needs is a completely new plot twist that has nothing to do with anything else in the story…put it right here, where it will wreck the pacing and twist the main plot totally out of shape.”)

Unfortunately… Well, I did mention that these were substantial revisions, didn’t I? By my standards, anyway. Among other things, I ended up needing a whole new chapter (containing a whole new character, because it’s really hard to do very much dialog that’s only tagged “one of the men said.” I needed somebody for my characters to talk to).

And of course David put his finger right on every single place where I’d hoped I could avoid dealing with some bit or other, or where I knew it needed a bit more but I’d figured I could skate by with what I had. I couldn’t even really argue.

So after I’d read the letter and the comments through once, I sent him an email and we worked out the new title and discussed a few aspects of the story that hadn’t been clear. To him, anyway; I knew the answers, but they hadn’t gotten down on the page. (One of my besetting sins is that I either over- or under-explain; I can’t seem to get the hang of making things clear without actually saying them straight out, so they come out cryptic instead of…well, instead of that thing Megan Whelan Turner does, where the reader figures it all out for themselves and feels clever). While we were discussing, I mulled things over. And made tea.

Mulling is a necessary part of the process, and very important. It doesn’t look like writing; indeed, it usually happens when the writer is doing other things (baking scones and making chocolate silk pie, in this case). Anyway, once tea was over and cleared off, I got started on the actual writing part, with two weeks left and a trip to Chicago coming up.

How I do revisions is, I look at the big ones, and if any of them look easy, I start with those. None of the big ones looked easy, this time. So I did a first pass, knocking off the little changes to get rid of as many comment balloons as I could and feel like I’d made some progress. ”Little changes” are usually stuff like deleting unnecessary adjectives or changing a word choice. Every so often, I’d go back and write a few sentences or paragraphs of the new chapter. Then I hit the short scenes, again alternating with the new chapter. The nice thing about revising is that every time I get stuck, I can skip to some other part of the manuscript and work on that for a while. The unfortunate part of revising this way is that it leaves all the hardest bits for last.

On Thursday, I emailed my editor and asked whether Production was really going to be working on my book all weekend, or was the deadline actually Monday morning? David assured me that Monday would be fine, so Production was off the hook for the weekend, and I was on. Until 9:01 last night.

The manuscript is now 10,000 words longer than it was when it started. It has one entirely new chapter in the middle (I hope I didn’t miss anything when I renumbered all the rest of them), four or five completely new scenes, and a whole lot of new paragraphs scattered throughout. The last chapter got taken apart and totally rewritten; so did two of the mid-book chapters. This is all a lot harder than it sounds, because when you add a new chapter, you have to revise about half a chapter before and half a chapter after to make the transition into and out of it work properly. Same thing for new scenes, and even new paragraphs.

So it’s done (until the copy-edit comes, anyway), and I am going to take the day off and play computer games. And then get back to work on the next one.

But mainly the answer to all those how-can-you-be-sure questions is:  You can’t. Not before you get started and do some work on them. And if you fiddle with things enough, you can get practically anything to work if you really want to. It depends on what you’re willing to do.

So the first step is diagnosis – why doesn’t this plot make sense? Why does it seem underdeveloped, broken, clichéd, whatever? Sometimes the author has been a little too clever about getting characters in trouble and can’t figure out how to get them out. Sometimes, the plot hinges on an event that, when it comes to writing it, requires a well-established character to act totally out-of-character. Sometimes, you realize partway in that the plot as originally conceived violates some fundamental principle of your worldbuilding, or worse yet, of common sense. Sometimes the chain of logic is broken somewhere – there’s no reason to introduce the zombie apocalypse to get the hero moving because he’s already hot on the trail of the kidnapped goldfish.

Whatever the problem, you can’t fix it until you know what it is, at some level of detail greater than “there is a problem with this bit.” Asking other people often helps; at the very least, if eight other people tell you there’s no problem with a bit that you know in your heart has something wrong with it, you can take comfort in the thought that even if you never do figure out what’s wrong, hardly anyone else will notice.

Once you know where the problem is, you get to the hard part: changing your mind about the story. Because you can’t fix most plot problems by dinking around with your phrasing or rearranging your paragraphs. Something is going to have to be ripped out and redone, and it’s probably going to be painful. If you’re very lucky, you will only have to add a connecting bit – it’s really the zombies who are behind the goldfish kidnapping! – but most of the time, it’s going to be a lot uglier than that. You may have to delete whole scenes and chapters – the first time I messed up this way, I had to delete seven chapters to get back to the point where the plot had gone wrong because a character had given an out-of-character answer.

No writers I know enjoy doing this. Some of them hate it to such an extent that they simply refuse to change anything they’ve already written. They’re like the couple who wanted a baby and needed a room for the nursery, but they didn’t want to give up the den, they still needed the spare bedroom, the home office was non-negotiable, they couldn’t put the baby in the kitchen or their own bedroom, there was no room to build on, they couldn’t afford a new house…eventually, someone has to ask, do you really want a baby after all?

You can’t change without changing. If a plot or subplot is broken, there will be important ways in which the story is not the same once you fix it. Maybe the character’s ultimate success will change – instead of becoming king, he knows himself well enough to turn down the crown. Maybe the whole story will shift from being about the quest to being about the politics or the people waiting back home. Maybe the character would really be more interested in her career than romance, so that subplot won’t work without a different ending. Maybe you have to ditch three-quarters of the opening or shift to another viewpoint character in order to get the story headed where you want it.

When you’re faced with this kind of situation, you have two choices once you’ve figured out the problem: 1) You can go back to the problem point and fix that, and go on from there without worrying too much about the way you originally thought things would go, or 2) You can go back to the problem point and revise everything up until then so that the problem goes away and the plotline will continue on its original track. Either way, something is going to change