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- My name is Cheryl Klein
- I’m an Editor at Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc.
- And this talk is titled “The Art of Detection: One Editor’s
Tips for Analyzing and Revising Your Novel.”
- Before you read this, you should download the supporting materials mentioned above, print the pages out, if possible,
and put them in numerical order according to the numbers in circles at the top of each page. (You will need to combine the
two documents.)
- You will also want a pen, and to have one particular Work-in-Progress in mind for some of the exercises.
- Now, as the Sherlock Holmesians among you will know, “The Art of Detection” is the title of his as-yet-unpublished
multivolume opus on the work of a detective
- Actually, editing and detective work pull in opposite directions
- Detectives work backwards from the evidence to find out the truth
- Editors work forwards from the manuscript to make its truth all it can be.
- But in the end, they both come down to paying attention to details that add up to an overall result
- So just as a detective evaluates a crime scene and decides what
action to take from there, I’m going to take you through my process as I respond to a manuscript
- Reading
the situation
- Applying certain analytical techniques to figure out what’s
working and what’s not
- And then communicating those ideas to the author
- With examples from a book I edited with Arthur, which will be out in stores next April—So Totally Emily Ebers by Lisa Yee
- And some useful illustrative quotes from Master Holmes.
- Before I get into the manuscript analysis, I want to offer five caveats:
- 1. These are critical techniques you should apply only after you’ve finished your first draft and put it away
for at least two weeks.
- When you’re revising, you want to try to look at your book with objective eyes, as an editor or any casual reader
would.
- And the first best way to achieve objectivity is just to get some mental distance from the project; and the first best
way to do that is time.
- 2. Though of course editors aren’t wholly objective either—we approach a ms. with certain standards to
which we want it to conform. I think a good novel is defined as one with:
- Characters in whom the reader takes an interest
- Usually the reader will identify with the protagonist—but not always
- A story in which things happen and change.
- Good prose
- A point to its telling
- We will discuss all these in more detail as we go along.
- And when I edit a book, this is what I will edit it towards, and what all of the techniques I discuss will point towards.
- The standards of literary fiction—which may or may not apply to your novel.
- 3. Because every single book is different and needs different things.
- An action novel needs a tighter plot than a coming-of-age story. A moody YA needs more character development than a
middle-grade series.
- Part of what we’ll be trying to do here is figure out what your book’s
personality is and how to enhance that.
- I call these methods of analysis TRUCKs—Techniques of Revision Used by Cheryl Klein—because they’re
techniques that work for me.
- I love lists and outlines because I’m a Virgo on the cusp of Libra, and they organize (Virgo) my extremely discursive
brain (Libra).
- 4. However, they may well drive you crazy. Feel free to pick and choose among them as your own revision style warrants,
or depending on what you feel you need and where you are in the revision process.
- Finally, 5. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. These are meant to be diagnostic techniques, not destructive
ones.
- You might run the outline or plot chart and discover your novel is working exactly as you want it to, and that’s
great
- Or it’s not working according to these standards but it feels right anyway, and right to your readers—that’s
also great
- But if you have a sense something isn’t working or isn’t as strong as it could be—or if you get feedback
that something isn’t working, but you’re not sure what—hopefully these methods will help you identify the
problem and figure out how to fix it.
- So, to begin:
- As Holmes says: “We
approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories.
We were simply there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations.”
- Step 1 in any editorial process: Read the book.
- I read through the manuscript and make notes of my impressions every step of the way.
- I’m bored
- Love this
- Where is this going?
- Hmm.
- Incredibly advanced and sophisticated editorial thinking, as you can tell
- But this is a really important step, as this is the only time in the process
when I’ll approach the book as the first-time reader would: “with
an absolutely blank mind, there to observe and to draw inferences from [my] observations.”
- And what I am doing with the “bored, love this, hmm,” etc., is tracking my emotional reactions to each
scene, sentence, and word.
- Then when I finish the novel and look back over the whole thing, I try to judge whether I was having the right reactions
- By “right” I mean the reactions the author intended me to have at each point in the book
- And whether those are the right reactions for me to have given the content and audience for the book
- For instance, if I am really grossed out by the description of the disembowelment of Mr. Fluffy in a picture-book manuscript—that
may be just the reaction the author intended me to have, but that does not mean it is an appropriate
reaction to try to evoke in a picture book for children.
- I also try to judge how the reactions add up to achieve the overall effect of the book.
- And if any of those reactions don’t feel quite right, then I know we’ll need to do some editing.
- A brief digression on editing
- When we’re looking at writing, we editors are basically nothing but nerve endings: constantly quivering, relentlessly responsive.
- We’ve developed this responsiveness through years and years of looking at manuscripts, good and bad, and figuring
out what makes the good ones work, and how the bad ones can be fixed.
- And then articulating our reactions and analysis to the author in a way that is hopefully useful to him or her
- Though often articulating the problems is harder than identifying them in the first place!
- Most authors don’t have these extreme sensitivities.
- So with the TRUCKs, I’m trying to put forth the techniques I use to help me analyze my reactions, so you might
get a sense of where those reactions are coming from.
- In the end, the goal of my first reading of a manuscript is to find answers to two questions, which will help me focus
and shape my response:
- 1. What is the story?
- 2. What is the point?
- The answers to these two questions will be my guidelines for the rest of the editorial process, so I’m going
to discuss them in more depth now.
- I feel a little odd putting these questions in a specific order because they are both essential, and so deeply entwined
I consider them both at once. But since I can’t talk about them both at once . . .
On to Part II: Story
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