Almost every week, usually on a Tuesday, Itch of Writing supporters and super-supporters and I have a live Ask Me Anything Chat, where everyone posts their current questions and puzzlements, and I do my best to answer them. With supporters’ permission, I collect and lightly edit some of the questions and answers to be shared more widely.
Hi Emma, I’m in the home stretch and I’ve put off fully dressing my characters, adding in furniture and generally putting a fine point on the details, for the most part, until the end. It’s historical fiction and so there’s all that research. In dressing and accessorizing them, of course trying to incorporate personality, status, and narrative arc, while staying more or less true to historical record. What’s your process, if you have one, on dressing and accessorizing your characters? Does your internal editor have specific preferences or criteria for what stays on and what gets tossed?
Emma: Good question! You’re quite right that when you’re writing along and come up against a detail that will need a bit of digging, it’s often a good idea not to divert from writing the scene and disappear down a research rabbit hole. And of course with historical fiction that can happen quite often! While I’m drafting, if the need for that kind of thing comes along, if I can’t write what I need off the top of my head, I’ll probably put what’s important about it in square brackets, and sort it out during a ‘square bracket pass’.
And of course there are practicalities, which can mean it’s wise to check in with the basics of e.g. clothes, or handbags, hats, furniture, coaches, drinking vessels and so on earlier rather than later. Every now and again I’ll say to a writer I’m working with ‘So she’s running upstairs carrying the tray of gruel - so how is she holding up her skirt?’ or ‘So he’s escaped the lab, but a moment ago he’d have been wearing a white coat. If he’s now sneaking around in the woods hoping he’s invisible, when did he shed the coat?’
Having said that, I don’t by writerly nature put in a lot of clothes, accessories and furnishings, considered just as local colour and setting - so I’m maybe not the most helpful on this! Maybe it’s my drama background, but my imagination only tends to get interested when such things become part of the action: a cap to be doffed, an expensive bag you can lose or drop, a hem to tread on and fall over, a coat that’s not warm enough or a bodice that’s too warm.
If it’s a non-viewpoint character, my imagination will probably only come up with what they’re wearing etc. if my viewpoint character would notice and be thinking about how someone or some setting is rich, poor, cold, fashionable, whatever.
What I’m really saying, I think, is that I would never put that kind of thing purely as set dressing, but always for a storytelling reason.
Another supporter: I think these things differ so much from writer to writer. I have a friend who has written a couple of 19th-century-set novels and who absolutely glories in them in the physical details of Victorian life: detailed descriptions of clothes, food, architecture, carriages, hairstyles, visiting cards etc. That’s part of what appeals to her regular readers.
But when I wrote a novel (unpublished, alas) set at the start of the 20th century in Paris, the only details I mentioned were the ones my (not French) POV character would notice, the Parisian-ness of Paris, anything foreign in the environments in which she finds herself. I think my sole reference to her dress were when she leaves off her corsets; [other than that] she didn’t seem to me someone who would note what to her were humdrum, familiar clothing norms, if that makes sense? The challenge was in part trying to figure out what a foreigner from where she came from would notice as foreign about Paris in 1901, and I did it by reading memoir and guidebooks.
Emma: I think this is very true - that it hugely depends on the writer. But though you’re absolutely right that if the viewpoint character wouldn’t think about their clothes, then why would it be in the narrative, we do have the problem: what we can (and can’t) assume readers know or understand. Sometimes you will have to make sure modern readers will ‘see’ your character in, for example, long boots for riding, when people of the time wouldn’t think about it. The trick is to sneak them in in a sentence which is apparently about something else and preferably to do with the action of the scene: not ‘I was wearing long boots for riding as everyone does, so…’ but, ‘I struggled out of my boots as fast as possible, but I was too slow: she’d vanished’.
Q: Scenes: any useful tips on how to ensure you don’t enter a scene too early and stay too long? I think my natural tendency is to get in too early and stay too late, but I second-guess myself when cutting in revision. Especially when I suspect that in some cases, the end of a scene is only there because it’s always been there. I suppose I’m asking how I know when something is properly earning its keep on the micro- and macro-levels? Thanks you, as ever!
Emma: Ah, classic! ‘Get in late and get out early’ was one of the first pieces of writing advice that I can remember getting my head round - but that still leaves you working out what to cut and what to leave in.
I think the key is to know why this scene is in here: what is it doing for the story? What is the critical point of it? How much of the detailed action of the scene is serving that purpose? If it isn’t, but you still want the reader to get the material that’s in it for some other purpose (as with the boots in the previous question, say), how can you combine those two purposes in the same text?
What sections of the scene are part of its forward movement, part of a dynamic of ‘then - but - therefore - but’; part of an up-and-down of going-well and going-badly?
It can actually help to think in terms of act structure, not as a suit of armour, but a way to help you identify the main bones of what happens in this scene: act structure is fractal, as John Yorke explains in his brilliant Into the Woods, so you can useful apply it to a chapter, a scene or even a paragraph.
For what it’s worth, my mnemonic for five-act structure goes: Getting Going, Going Well, Going Critical, Going Badly and Going for Broke. This can help you decide how much you can nibble inwards from beginning and end, before the whole thing doesn’t make sense. And forget, too, that you may not need some of the middle to be fully dramatised, but only there as a bit of (vivid and specific) summarising. This is an old post about that.
Original Poster: You mean that a scene should mirror in miniature the larger act structure in terms of reversing expectations etc?
Emma: Yes, exactly. If a scene doesn’t feel right, it can be very helpful to hold an act structure frame up to it and see what’s going on.
Q: I am paying for an editor to look at my draft before I self-publish - a proper developmental/stylistic edit. I found someone who gets a good rating on the Alliance of Independent Authors site. Today she has come back with a slot at the end of September. My question is what should I aim to do between now and then? Should I give her my current draft with all the flaws I am aware of but have avoided tackling? Or should I do as much as I can myself between now and the end of September with the risk that I may do more harm than good. And what should be my priority? I’m thinking I might leave filter word excavation to her (there’s a lot needed) and focus on the characterisation issues I have identified.
Emma: It’s a very good idea to have your novel professionally edited before you self-publish, and I suggest you ask her what would be most useful for you to do, but that will depend on what you want from her.
When you’re trying to decide what you want an editor to do, it’s worth thinking about the fairly distinct stages that publishers put a novel through, not because they like spending more money on more work, but because that’s actually what’s most efficient. Follow the links for more detail:
the Structural Edit: storytelling (n.b. these are the ten structural edits I most often suggest)
the Line Edit (n.b. these are the ten line-edits I most often suggest)
Not all of it is relevant to you, but when you are your own publisher it’s still essentially the same set of processes. Although there’s an overlap in the issues that each deals with - so it can be possible to work in more than one mode at once - essentially each needs a different mindset and pair of glasses.
I certainly wouldn’t give your editor a MS which is full of things you already know need changing, because why pay her to find things you’ve already found? You’re paying her to find the things you can’t see.
And there’s not a lot of point in getting down-and-dirty with line-editing type issues such as filtering, before structural-editing issues like character arcs have been tackled. Whatever you do or don’t decide to pay for, and how much you use fellow beta-reading writers for the developmental and line-edit stages, I would always suggest that anyone self-publishing seriously finds the funds for a professional copy-edit.
You could discuss with your editor whether you would like her to simply to highlight your line-edit-scale habits (e.g. filtering) for you to then work through, or whether you want her to pick up every instance of such things - which may need doing as a separate pass. It depends how she works.
Editors who are accustomed to working for publishers don’t always find it easy to transition to working directly with writers: indeed, I’ve run seminars for the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (another fantastic source of good editors, by the way) about how writers think and work, to help develop a shared understanding and vocabulary. My post The Fiction Editor’s Pharmacopoeia came out of those seminars.
But with the rise of self-publishing editors are getting more used to working with us. Hopefully if you separate those three editing labels out and decide what you want, it will make sense to them and the two of you can start a fruitful conversation. It’s always worth asking if an editor you’re considering working with would do a sample edit of a few pages to see if you have a shared idea of what sort of thing they’re looking for.
Another supporter: That’s very helpful about getting the most out of a developmental editor, and makes sense of why I found a professional edit quite frustrating. I particularly wanted a structural edit, but may not have used the correct term and felt I had much more of a line edit than was useful. Food for thought, thanks.
Original Poster: Thanks Emma. She seems to line edit as part of the package she offered me. I suppose I don’t feel that confident about my own judgment which is why I’m a bit wary of changing too much, though I’ve done quite a lot of structural editing. But there are certainly things I can tackle ahead of passing it over.
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