THE ICE PICK

Self-editing for Fiction Writers : How to Edit Yourself into Print, by Renni Browne and Dave King. 2nd ed. New York : HarperCollins, c2004. 279 p. $13.95. Includes illustrations, bibliography, and index. ISBN: 0-06-054569-0.

You probably already know that editors at most publishing houses no longer edit books the old-fashioned way and that imperfect manuscripts don’t stand much of a chance in today’s competitive market. Publishers now routinely reject manuscripts that need any kind of work, regardless of their innate potential. This means that if you submit something that needs editing, even if the story itself is fantastic, it will almost certainly be rejected. And self-publication of such deficient work, on-line or not, has resulted in such poor quality that it has given the whole industry a bad name.

If you are serious about wanting to publish the very best work you can, you have to face the fact that you need to edit your own manuscript or hire a professional to do it for you. "But," as Browne and King say, "even if you do hire a pro, you want your manuscript to be as strong as it can be before you have it worked on. After all, why pay for editing you can do yourself?"

Recommended to me by an editor, this book is superb at showing what is wrong and how you can correct it.

For example, you are told to "show, don’t tell," and that "many writers rely too heavily on narrative summary," losing out on dialogue and action that would make their story or novel come alive. And, of course, "the first chapter is not the best place for narrative summary--you want to engage your readers early on." But you are not often told that you need a balance between telling and showing or you will throw off the pacing of your work. For example, you might combine the two techniques by summarizing a dinner scene in a paragraph or two and then showing "the five minutes of after-dinner conversation that were really crucial to the story" in detail. Using a "telling" narrative summary in that way would be wise.

Or you might use narrative summary "to capture weeks or months of slow, steady growth," to handle repetitive action, and to take care of plot developments that are "not important enough to justify scenes."

The book goes on with practical, no-nonsense advice for characterization and exposition, point of view, proportion, dialogue, character voice, interior monologue, beats ("the literary equivalent of . . . ‘stage business’"), pacing, avoiding repetition, stylistic tricks, and writer’s voice.

Each chapter contains checklists to help you revise your work and exercises to help you learn the principles. One thing I really love about this book is that it gives you answers to the exercises and doesn’t just leave you to flounder and wonder if you did it right or not. Of course, there are many "right" ways to do something, but I’ve found it very helpful to have this kind of guidance.

I hesitated even looking at this book, because I wasn’t that thrilled with the first edition, but it has been completely revised, especially in the area of showing writers where characters’ emotions do and do not belong, thus avoiding the earlier edition’s mistakes, which--as the authors admit--caused some writers to strip their stories to an emotional minimalism. So, if you have been relying on the first edition or you didn’t like it, you may want to check this new one out. I recommend it very highly.

{Published in SF and Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Aug. 2006.}