Writers in the Storm

by Jenn Windrow

Developmental editing is one of the most important steps in your book’s journey to publication, and one that shouldn't be skipped. But many authors are unsure what to expect when they hire a developmental editor. What is an editor looking for when they open your manuscript and read that first sentence? What questions do they ask themselves about your MS to help you write the best book that you can? How deep are they going to go when scouring your words?

As a developmental editor for six years, I’ve read dozens of manuscripts, and almost every time, my clients are surprised by the things I find. Things they never noticed the gazillion times they read it before sending it to me. I always tell them that’s normal. It's easier to see the problem areas in someone else’s work than in your own.

That’s true for me as well. Just ask my critique partners.

To help you understand what I look for when I read a manuscript, I’m going to share with you the list of questions I always ask myself as I am editing a manuscript.

Let’s get started…

Story structure

Is the story’s structure clear and engaging?

When I edit, I ask myself whether the author followed the basic rules of structuring a novel. Sure, a novel’s structure can vary slightly depending on the genre, so there are exceptions, but most books follow the same structure. So, I ask myself, “Did they hit all their pinch points, plot points, and the mid-point reveal? Are the genre’s conventions being honored? If not, why, and does it still work?”.

Is the pacing effective and appropriate with buildup and resolution?

One of the comments I leave most frequently is, “Remove this section, it slows the pacing.” Usually, I note this in areas with a lot of internal thought in the middle of the action. But it can be anything that disrupts the flow of the story and makes the reader want to skim to get to the good parts. Most often, the section that slows the pacing needs to be cut, removed, or moved.

Plot

Is there conflict in every chapter?

This one is huge for me. Even a cozy book must have conflict. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have a story. Conflict is the driving force of a well-written novel, but I’ve edited plenty in which there are full chapters of characters sitting around and talking. Now, if they are laying out plans to rob a bank, then you’ve got conflict (or at least the start of it), but if they are sitting around and discussing the weather, and it is not integral to the plot, you don’t have conflict.

When it comes to plot, I like to remind my clients that every word, every sentence, every paragraph has one job: Move the plot forward.

Are there plot holes or inconsistencies?

As an editor, it is my job to ensure that the main plot, and especially the subplots, are all wrapped up and topped with a pretty bow by the end of the book so the reader doesn’t tumble into a plot hole.

I also make notes when something contradicts what was previously established in the plot. Even silly things, such as a character who was wearing a blue shirt two lines ago and is now wearing a green one. Those are all considered plot holes and inconsistencies, and when I edit, I am searching for all of it.

Characters

Are your characters believable and relatable?

To me, this means likable. Now, not all characters have to be likable. Not everyone you meet in the world is likable, but even if they aren’t likable, they have to be relatable. The reader must understand why they do what they do or what makes them a Grumpy Gus.

Do the characters have clear motivation and goals?

I think the main characters’ goal and motivation should be established in the first chapter (or close to it), and if you have a well-structured novel, it will be. If you do this well, then the reader can follow the character’s journey to the end, when they ultimately achieve their goal.

Dialogue

Does the dialogue sound natural?

When editing, I frequently encounter character dialogue that reads (or sounds) stilted or robotic, and I am sure you have come across it when you’re reading. This can be due to a lack of contractions or too many words used to express their thoughts. The best way to fix this problem is to read your book out loud. You’ll hear the cadence of the words and be able to detect and fix the problem in your MS.

Point of View

Is the point of view consistent?

One of the first things I identify is point of view (POV). Is the author writing in first person or third person? Past or present? Are there multiple character POVs, or only one? 

Once I’ve established this, I ask myself whether the author is consistent, or do they “head hop?” Head hopping is when the author slips into another character’s POV and back again (usually within the same paragraph/scene), or they allow a character to know information that hasn’t yet been revealed to them by another character. In the latter case, I’ll often leave the comment, “The character can’t know this.”

Head hopping is not only wrong, but it’s also jarring for the reader. A good editor will point out when you slip into a different POV.

And the biggest question I ask myself when I am editing a book…

Is the opening engaging and impactful?

IMO, an engaging opening drops the reader right into the action. It introduces the characters, their story world, and the journey they are about to embark on. It showcases your writing style. And above all else, it leaves the reader wanting more.

I could write three blog posts on this subject alone, but I am going to stop here.

I hope that seeing the questions I ask myself when I’m doing a developmental edit will help you during your own editing process. Maybe when you are plotting and planning, you can look at this list and answer these questions before you even start writing. Or while you are self-editing, you can keep this list next to you to make sure you have hit all the points. 

In the end, it will make your editor’s job easier when they begin work on your novel.

If you’ve worked with a developmental editor before, was there anything your editor did or said that surprised you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

About Jenn

Jenn Windrow is an award-winning author of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance. When she isn’t editing her own books, she spends her time helping other authors shape their characters and worlds into the best books they can be.

Jenn loves characters who have a pinch of spunk, a dash of attitude, and a large dollop of sex appeal. Top it all off with a huge heaping helping of snark, and you’ve got the ingredients for the kind of fast-paced stories she loves to read and write. Home is a suburb of it’s-so-hot-my-shoes-have-melted-to-the-pavement Phoenix, where she lives with her husband, two teenagers, and a slew of animals that seem to keep following her home. At least that’s what she claims.

Website: https://jennwindrow.com/

by Janice Hardy

A hard-to-read book is a book that doesn’t get read.

My mother was a voracious reader, reading one or two books a day. We were talking about books once and she mentioned she'd stopped reading one because it was “Just too much work.” It wasn't a bad book, in fact, she said it was a great idea and well written, but it did some things that made reading it a chore, not a joy, and she'd decided it wasn't worth the trouble.

Ouch.

Not worth the trouble? That's a hard blow for a well-written book.

But it happens. I've also read books that fell into that “too much work to read” area. Series I loved early on that faltered, books by authors I admired, books with fantastic premises I really want to explore. The only thing "wrong" with them was something they'd done that made reading them more work than the story benefit of doing so.

Is Your Novel “Too Much Work” to Read? 

Before I go on, it's important to note that there's nothing inherently wrong with a complex or complicated novel, or one that does any of the things I'm about to talk about. Tastes vary and what one reader thinks is wonderfully layered another might find tedious to get through. It's all very subjective, and it's up to the writer to decide if the story is working or if it's becoming unwieldy.

If you’re getting negative feedback, though, and readers are saying they’re having trouble getting into the novel, or they skimmed a lot of it, or they never finished it, then “being too much work to read” could be a reason why. 

Here are five red flags your story might be pushing the limits and scaring away your readers: 

1. It frequently requires readers to do extra "research."

This includes having to read inserted newspaper articles, poems, songs, etc. that aren't part of the narrative, but contain valuable information the reader needs to understand the story or plot.

The key phrase here is: “Contain valuable information the reader needs to understand the story or plot.” If the extra pieces are more for flavor or setting, and the reader can skip them and still understand the story, it’s probably fine. But if they need to read all those bits to get the story, then it might be a problem.  

It's the writer's job to convey that information through the narrative, not to make the reader do all the work and feel like they're doing background research for a report. A short bit here and there is usually no problem, but the more these extra pieces appear, the more likely it is the story is asking too much of the reader. 

Books such as epistolary novels, where the whole point is to read the letters or articles don't count here, of course.

2. It has way too many characters.

I stopped reading a favorite fantasy series because the author had introduced at least 50 characters by chapter three and I couldn't remember who was who by then. If readers can't remember who people are, they can't connect to them or even understand why what someone says or does is even important. If it requires a cast of characters list before page one, that's typically not a good sign.

Look for ways to combine or cut some of those characters. Who has to be there?

3. It has way too many points of view.

In the same vein, readers can only remember so much before it all starts to gloss together. If the scenes are constantly changing from character to character, and it's multiple chapters before the same character or plotline comes around again, salient details can and will get lost. Even worse, too many points of view usually go hand-in-hand with too many characters, especially if every point of view has its own cast. It's not long before all those secondary and minor characters are overwhelming.

Frequent point of view switches is also a tension killer, since whatever felt tense and immediate five chapters ago probably doesn’t any more. You might do a fabulous job at building tension, then it cuts to a new character in a new location and all that tension plummets. By the time the reader gets back to it, they barely remember what was going on.

Look for the points of view that are critical to the story, and cut the rest. You can also take critical elements from one point of view and add it to another (with some tweaks so it now fits that point of view, of course).

4. The names are all too similar, or too hard to pronounce.

Names that start with the same letter (Anna, Andrew, Arianna), names that are all the same size (Joe, Ted, Ann), names that look similar, (Lawrence, Terrance, Vance) all make it hard for the reader to remember who's who. Different names with the same ending also feel similar (Jessie, Marie, Ronnie).

It's not a bad idea to list all the names in alphabetical order and see how they look together. It's an easy way to catch potential confusion and change names that might be too similar. 

Genre names can really be a problem here, with names that are unpronounceable or impossible to tell if they're a person, place, title, or item. “After the fall of Drelekomor, when Silith bound the Thay’ne’mahi at Calvenrock, even the Ashen dared not awaken Nyrr.” Did a city fall, a nation, a single leader? Who or what are Thay’ne’mahi? Could be a group, a magic sword, or even the name of a creature. 

Look at your names out of context and see if they all work together. Is there a variety of letters, sounds, syllables?  

5. There's not enough backstory or reminders of key details in the later books in a series.

Think about the critical elements a reader needs to know to understand a scene, and treat it like it’s the first book in the series. Remind them of what they might have forgotten in the year since the book came out.

The more accessible your story is, the better the chance that readers will be drawn into that story.

The more complicated the story, the harder it can be, but if you take a little extra time to consider how the reader is going to move through the story, you can make that journey as easy as possible.

Have you ever stopped reading a book because it was too much work? What made you stop? Have you read any good examples of books that did anything on this list?  

About Janice

Janice Hardy is the award-winning author and founder of the popular writing site Fiction University, where she helps writers improve their craft and navigate the crazy world of publishing. Not only does she write about writing, she teaches workshops across the country, and her blog has been recognized as a Top Writing Blog by Writer’s Digest. She also spins tales of adventure for both teens and adults, and firmly believes that doing terrible things to her characters makes them more interesting (in a good way). She loves talking with writers and readers, and encourages questions of all types—even the weird ones. 

Find out more about writing at www.Fiction-University.com, or visit her author’s site at www.JaniceHardy.com. Subscribe to her newsletter to stay updated on future books, workshops, and events and receive her ebook, 25 Ways to Strengthen Your Writing Right Now, free.

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by Sarah (Sally) Hamer

What’s the difference between conflict and tension? And why is knowing so important in writing? Because they are so very different. Although they are intimately connected – you really can’t have one without the other – they come from different places.  Understanding – and utilizing both in the correct ways – can shoot a boring book into the stratosphere. We just have to figure out how they both work.

So, first a quick explanation:

What is conflict? 

Conflict is the setup of a book. It’s the human nature tangles of arguments, struggles, battles, skirmishes, clashes, quarrels, tiffs, wrangles, spats, disputes! Why? Because we humans are so darned good at it! 

In real life, we at least pretend to avoid conflict and we try for peace, again and again. 

Which is the right thing to do in real life.

But books are different. The stories we tell MUST have conflict. Maybe, just maybe, it’s because we need to see struggles between others to learn to deal with problems ourselves. 

So, in the movie, Up (Pixar, 2009, animated, Ed Asner starred), Carl has just lost his beloved wife. Her dream was for them to go to Paradise Falls. Carl decides to go on his own. His conflicts abound, from taking on an unexpected passenger, to finding a megalomanic explorer who is willing to kill to prove a theory. 

That’s conflict. It’s a set of plot points that take us from the beginning of the story, where Carl doesn’t know how to accomplish his goal, to the end where he is forced to make a choice. 

But it’s NOT tension. 

In fact, the entire story could be told in a paragraph (like I just did) if it weren’t for the tension. Tension is absolutely essential to storytelling. Not always life-or-death conflict, mind you. But certainly something that is interesting to watch.

Tension is how the conflict is laid out, with each step along the way raising the temperature. Each step sets up the next episode of conflict. And the final step is a big explosive confrontation between your protagonist and his nemesis – whether internal or external – which leads us to a satisfying ending.

Tension. Conflict. Problems. 

Interesting! 

Another example is Misery by Stephen King. Paul Sheldon, a well-known writer, is injured in an accident in a remote area of Colorado and is rescued by a woman – Annie – who is his biggest fan. She nurses him back to health with the pain killer, Novril, but at one point:

He discovered three things almost simultaneously, about ten days after having emerged from the dark cloud. The first was that Annie Wilkes had a great deal of Novril (she had, in fact, a great many drugs of all kinds). The second was that he was hooked on Novril. The third was that Annie Wilkes was dangerously crazy.

Oh my gosh! King is really brilliant, even if you don’t read horror. He knows so well how to keep an audience engaged from the first to the very last word. By this time, I’m so worried about Paul Sheldon, I can’t wait to see what happens next. Even when it completely creeps me out!

The conflict is that Annie wants Paul to resurrect the protagonist of his books. She’ll do whatever it takes. But Paul is being held prisoner and, even though he almost escapes, she crushes his ankles and forces him to write the story the way she wants. Paul’s only goal is to get away from the crazy woman. Tension grows as we watch, piece by piece, as Annie nurses him, keeping him comfortable, and making him feel safe. But each sentence and paragraph unveils her mental illness. She gives him too many drugs too often. She makes demands. She finally plans to kill him. But Paul is able to get away.

Tension is what carries this tale. 

Layer upon layer of tension drives the conflict, as the conflict directs the path the story goes. We set up the conflict – Annie’s goal against Paul’s goal – and tension provides the “push” to the next conflict. Go back to the quote. Paul first tells us the conflict in this short scene. Annie is giving him drugs and he’s hooked on them. Then, even though it’s not in this quote, we know he’s in danger. The door opens and Annie comes in with a tray. On it are the pills Paul knows he’ll be forced to take, both because she will make him and because he’s craving them. He has no real choice but to do what she wants. 

That sets up the next conflict. His goal is to get away and he has to figure out a way to do it. Of course, she’s standing in the way, with each action she takes amping up the tension. He’s caught in a trap. And his life is on the line.

Tension is essential.

1. Tension is absolutely necessary (did I beat that horse enough?)
2. Tension comes from both inside and outside your protagonist:
   1. Internal – what drives him or her
   2. External – what happens to him or her
3. There are also two basic levels of tension:
   1. Global – as in the actual set-up of your story
   2. Scene by scene – as in what happens in each scene 
4. Tension is not about car wrecks and sword fights. It’s about things that happen to your characters and how they react to them. 

Tension is not boring!

Think about how you can build tension in your story. Wrap it around the internal goals and motivations and conflicts of your characters. Think about how they will react in different situations. Build tension so that readers will keep turning those pages!

How do you express tension?

About Sarah (Sally)

Sarah (Sally) Hamer, B.S., MLA, is a lover of books, a teacher of writers, and a believer in a good story. Most of all, she is eternally fascinated by people and how they 'tick'. She’s passionate about helping people tell their own stories and has won awards at both local and national levels, including two Golden Heart finals.

A teacher of memoir, beginning and advanced creative fiction writing, and screenwriting at Louisiana State University in Shreveport for over twenty years, she also teaches online for Margie Lawson at www.margielawson.com and for the No Stress Writing Academy at https://www.worldanvil.com/w/classes-deleyna/a/no-stress-writing-academy.  Sally is a free-lance editor and book coach, with many of her students and clients becoming successful, award-winning authors.

You can find her at info@mindpotential.org