The subtitle “How to Edit Yourself into Print” provides a warning: today’s book publishing agents look for copy that has been skillfully pre-edited before it gets to them. The old days when house editors lended a hand are gone. More than ever, they say, one is wise to learn to DIY. Or maybe it’s SEY (Self-Edit Yourself).

Handsomely produced and over-abundant in verbiage, the content provides maxims and guidelines. It’s familiar ground.  Nothing about it strikes me as the Go-to book on the SEY process. Instead, most of the topics point back to the initial creative writing process. This more or less says to me, you need to make all these edits because you didn’t write well in the first place, and…so now, let us now discuss how to write.

The thrust of this book lacks clear distinction between fixing a draft (which I had hoped it would, like a field manual I can refer to when I redline) and writing a draft. Come on, guys. Even if we didn’t know what the main POVs are, or how to write dialog, are these really self-editing topics?

What if  all the bugaboos the authors talk about were absent and things were written well in our drafts? What other editing advice do the authors provide? There’s got to be more to editing than fixing show vs. tell passages (pretty shopworn advice, that one is, and you beat it to death. We’re not all screenplay writers out here). And I think most of us know how to break up dialog and we can usually spot a dangling participle. Seems we could get some more pointed writing tricks of the trade. Enlightening us more about technique rather than mechanics.Maybe even something more subjective, like how do we prepare our mindset to view things fresh so we can fix them? How do we make a chapter become impressive reading rather than simply something correct by your rules? In this respect, the teacher-narrators of this book are no match for the guys who both teach and impart wisdom, like Jerome Stern or Sol Stein.

It does have some useful information. The chapter on adding “Sophistication” offers valuable ways to check your prose for amateur mistakes. This section is presented cleanly without as many rambling paragraphs as we suffer in the rest of the chapters, where “do’s and don’ts” are not so easily gleaned. But what’s perfect? Nothing. So maybe their general layout needed the edits of another set of eyes. Self-editing can be blind, after all.

Overall, it misses the mark. It lacks thrust.  It tries to regulate the very nature of free exposition. It begs for an intimate connection. It does not meet the writer as a friend but as a subscriber. It has sort of a chiding schoolmarm tone, like “Why would you want [to do that]?”  Oh, we’re just dumb students, that’s why.  To make us feel even more like geniuses they include writing exercises – with answers!  They’re not exercises, as in normal writing books, they’re little exam questions with no set answers. Well, okay. Maybe this was a workshop course they turned into a book. I suspect its content and delivery has roots in the pedantesque Writers Digest Factory of Experts.

Some of the bold statements the authors make that are misleading or incorrect or queasy:

• “sketching out your characters for your readers is just plain obtrusive.”
• “You don’t want to give your readers information.”
• “engage readers’ emotions, not their intellect” (paraphrasing)
• “the writer’s voice in a novel generally belongs to a character.”
• “we see that sort of thing all the time and it’s wrong” (the Royal Condescending We).

NOTE: This post needs to be self-edited. :>0

Unlike the hackneyed writing sometimes seen in quick-study brochures, it’s discerning, succinct, and a model of organized writing.

Old tech writers (I’m one) can appreciate it.  The text isn’t clogged with dense scholastic theory.  It’s open-aired and practical.  When the reader spots something in the novel itself, the notes are confirming.

At 115 pages and 8 bucks from a second-hand book dealer, mine is the 1967 original assembled by two professors, Doctors Carey & Roberts. Those guys must have spent many a long day and night in offices and taverns figuring out how they would distill the huge book into pony notes.  Marianne Sturman later added short essay-like pieces on theme, structure, characters, etc.

The pieces instruct, in the spirit of the book itself:

“An outstanding feature of Tolstoy’s writing is that his characters are always “becoming” and not just “being.”  Even in static chapters where there is little external action, the characters are changing … Tolstoy can make unusual dramatic material out of essentially undramatic stuff.”

* Follow-up post several days later:  After reading sections of the Cliff’s,  I picked up where I left off. It started with a chapter about a hounds chase at the Roskov estate. Nikolai is in his element and has his veteran dog ready to show how good they are.  He seeks the target away from the pack. Meanwhile hundreds of other dogs and multiple horseback riders go after the  wolves…not foxes, not hares — not a British chase, a Russian one. Rostov has his chance and seems to have triumphed but the wolf eludes him and his hound. The property’s wrangler, the giant Danilo, wraps up the wolf instead.

So the editor and publisher chose an unfortunate title: “How to Write Killer Fiction.” There are sections in this book that are much more sophisticated than that. And in fact, they contain material that is subtle and artful and difficult to find anywhere else. Not without a lot of wading anyway. Carolyn Wheat presents things to us in a straightforward way.

It’s not entirely a book about how to write murder mysteries and suspense novels. In fact, I skipped over much of the first part about mysteries and was no worse for it. It’s really a book about how to create suspense and build scenes and story patterns in any genre. To help us out, she first provides a succinct list of novel categories and types, de-mystifying the book market genres and showing us which are the most popular at the airport bookstand.It is up to us to apply her information to the type of book we are writing.

Wheat’s discussion on how to use the outcome pivot devices of “yes, but…” and “no, and furthermore…” are worth the price of admission.  There is lots of advice about action arcs and reversals and tricks of the trade. Examples are used that require some inference. I am not sure if a beginning writer can catch all the subtleties and complexities. The book has a good share of writing nuggets, some so profoundly basic and true that we can tend to skip by them. On the first go-through anyway. This is a book worth reading more than twice and can kill your highlighter. I keep my copy  with the other handy writing reference favorites (to be reviewed as well in upcoming posts).

Wheat doesn’t overload us with inspirational and cutesy writing fluff, like so many of the other writing books out there. Some of the material, like the last section of general writing advice, is ordinary, but her advice on creating suspenseful scenes, employing outcome tricks, and identifying genres is about as rare and useful as you can ever find. But we have to think and apply.  It’s not a hand-holding type of writing guide.

It’s a collection of insights and habits as described by a mixed group of successfully published fiction writers.

It’s okay, but I’ll probably put it in the stacks for donation.

It reads like everyone wrote their answers to the topic-driven Q&A at home and sent in their answers on a telecommute basis.  There’s no evident interaction or the feeling of listening to a panel at a seminar.  The moderator becomes an editor and is sometimes inconsistent, giving us not enough in-depth discussion on some topics and way too much chat on others. In some cases, when things are just warming up and getting interesting, he pulls the plug. Maybe the mailed-in supply of material ended too soon.

That aside, there are lots of interesting tidbits for writers to consider and measure their process against.  The topics are given in a TOC, which is pretty generalized. So in order to relocate something for reference, it’s probably necessary to have read all of Joshua Foer’s memory book (see May 12).  Thats okay. The book is okay even if you open a page and go fishing.

The title refers to a Borges story.  It sounds like a Sunday-school play. I get the connotation of it being “inspirational,” or maybe that was an accident, and no one could come up with a better title. The cover’s Halloween colors dilute the air of holiness.

I didn’t know who many of these authors are, and tended to skip and carefully read responses from the bigger names: Chabon, Egan, Goldman, those. I hope all the writers got paid well to talk shop and put their necks out there in print. Their secrets about the supposed miracle aren’t secrets anymore.