Editing: Does my editor glimpse talent, or only bugaboos?

I’ve been writing for close to twenty years. I ought to be a lot better at it by now. I expressed as much to my wife and she pointed out that for most of those years, I didn’t see it as much as a craft as I do now. I just wrote. I also wrote for much of that time without an editor seeing my output. Little bits were shared with a writing group, and I took much of their feedback to heart, but I didn’t learn from it what I tend to from an editor. It’s given me a terrible backlog of unedited novels (over a dozen). But as I start to work with editors in Utah, where I live now after moving back to the US from Japan, I am finding bugaboos in my work. There are things that are consistently missing or problematic which will require me to go back and work on all those unedited novels before they are edited, fixed again, and finally published.

For example, my dialogue scenes tend to be too long and unbroken. I was told early on that dialogue was one of my strengths. Wanting to write to my strengths, I put in more dialogue. Some scenes were almost wholly talk, and were long, reaching a  couple of thousand words. That’s a lot of talking. In my defense, it was generally excellent conversation with tension that kept the reader involved. It certainly kept me glued to it. But I’ve been learning from editors that the conversation has to include more action tags (big or little movements you can use to tell who is talking, instead of writing “he said” or “she asked”). I also need to make my settings more specific, focus on body language, and be mindful of what is not said. There is very little internality in my dialogue. I didn’t realize that readers want more of the speaker’s thoughts. My editors have also stressed that to draw the reader in, I need to engage all their senses. Obviously, that was missing. It was not pleasant to be told that what I thought I was doing well actually was riddled with holes. (I’ll write on taking criticism well, another of my weaknesses, in my next blog post.)

As I read, I tend to focus much more on characters and action than I do settings. It’s no surprise that I’ve often ended up with “white room syndrome,” where the reader can’t visualize the scene. For me, when reading, it’s the talk that’s engaging. The setting is just “boring room syndrome,” but I do get that setting is vital for other readers. If it’s boring, it’s my job to find what’s interesting and relevant and show that.

While I focus on characters as I read, and the ones I write are not merely two dimensional, I don’t pay enough attention to character arcs, the elements of the story that drive the characters to change. I know that’s not good, but the story just gets away from me sometimes.

Some editors have criticized the length of my scenes, which tend to be mostly short, although some go on for many pages. They haven’t complained about how I approach scenes or making sure each has a specific purpose in moving the plot along.  I don’t end every scene with a mini cliff hanger that makes the reader jump into reading the next scene. Maybe I should pay a little more attention to that, but there’s something to be said for breaking on something pithy or that may pique the reader’s emotions.

With my short scenes, I end up with many more in a chapter than is “normal.” I’m not sure how much of a problem that truly is. I have also been told that some of my chapters are too long. Again, what is the problem with a chapter that is longer than average? I am not writing stories that really fit into standard genres. They tend to be odd in one way or another. I think the oddness fits the story and the stories are refreshingly different. It may be, though, that I just haven’t yet met the editor who is eventually going to convince me that I’m doing something wrong here.

Along with long chapters, I also tend to write long novels. I am wordy. When I edit, I try hard to cut the language back to only the words that are necessary. Unfortunately, I’m not great at that. My wife, however, is. She is my first and last editor. She’s also the first one who reads what I write, the one who gives me feedback as I go along, and in most cases, the one I’m writing for (after myself). We have many times shortened a novel by five percent just by cutting unnecessary words, sometimes cutting five percent in one pass after another. It often takes an external editor, though, to make us (me?) see where the story itself has to be cut. But I make most of those kinds of cuts, and the novels are better for it, although some great content ends up in the “unused scenes” folder in my computer. But my books are still long compared to standard genre books. How serious a problem is that? I must admit I’m not really sure.

Another bugaboo that I have trouble with is political content. Normally, I would have no reason to touch on a subject like that. My first novels have no political content at all. With the election of Donald Trump, though, I see a fundamental change in the nature of current events. My characters react to this. I take a certain glee in having characters see through him. Of course, politics is one of those things that’s dangerous to include in literature. Trump won his elections with about half the vote each time. That’s a lot of support. It could be a lot of readers, assuming that Trump supporters read my books. I could lose those readers when they run into anti-Trump content—but he’s such a blatant and incorrigible liar. Few presidents in history have been so miserably ineffective, and none have been as openly corrupt and money grubbing. Do I really have to write characters who are untouched by it all? Maybe so.

Maybe.

Or not.

What does the editor end up seeing when they edit my novel? I really like the Betsy Lerner quote that introduced this blog post. I believe it’s true that the editor, in seeing something rougher than the reader sees, gets insight into the writer and their foibles that the reader, thankfully, never encounters. Hopefully, my editors are also getting glimpses of talent. They always tell me how good the stories are—before they rip them to shreds. I get that the ripping is their job. But it’s difficult to judge how well you’re doing based on editors’ feedback. It would be easier if my readers were overjoyed. I guess I need to get myself more of those.