• The author gets my letter and revises the book
• This can take anywhere from one month to five or six, depending upon the amount of work to be done, the book’s schedule, and our personal schedules

• Then the manuscript comes back to me, and I repeat the process all over again
• The first draft, we tend to try to fix the overall story, character, and point things
• The second draft, we’ll focus more on individual scenes—making sure they add up, that everything is necessary, that the pacing is right, all that
• And on the second and third drafts, I’ll do in-depth line-edits.
• The line by line, or even word by word, review of a manuscript
• The same way we discussed the most basic qualities of a good novel above, we can come up with basic standards for good prose
• Goal is perfect match of style and content
• And that is what I edit toward.
• Style has five essential qualities
• Strategy for communication that serves the point of the novel
• Also known as “voice”
• This is a whole other talk by itself.
• Encompasses tone, vocabulary, rhythm, point of view
• Most crucially, it reflects the point of the novel
• Compare these two paragraphs from great literature: 

The evil of the actual disparity in their ages (and Mr. Woodhouse had not married early) was much increased by his constitution and habits; for having been a valetudinarian al his life, without activity of mind or body, he was a much older man in ways than in years; and though everywhere beloved for the friendliness of his heart and his amiable temper, his talents could not have recommended him at any time.

“Give me bacon and eggs,” said the other man. He was about the same size as Al. Their faces were different, but they were dressed like twins. Both wore overcoats too tight for them. They sat leaning forward, their elbows on the counter.

• The first is Jane Austen, from Emma; the second Ernest Hemingway, from his short story “The Killers”
• The Austen rolls on and on, with beautiful balance and long words—appropriate for a novel about bringing things out of balance into peace and harmony
• The Hemingway is staccato, uneasy, quick—appropriate for a story about sudden violence disturbing the rhythm of everyday life
• Your style should serve the point of your book
• If your main point is to entertain, you want to be easy to follow
• To thrill, you want to be tight and fast
• To tell the story of a simple country girl, you may want simple country language. Unless you’re making fun of her, and then perhaps you want fancy high-falutin’ language to point up the disjunction between your style and her life, and the life’s inferiority.
• And so on. 
• Quality #2 of good style: Rhythm
• The rhythm is the way the sentence sounds when it’s read aloud—like meter in poetry.
• That Jane Austen sentence is 73 words long, but because she breaks it up with commas, you have places to breathe and it feels easy to read.
• Quality #3: Variance in rhythm and language
• Rhythm:  If every sentence in a paragraph has the same length and meter, the effect is a bit stultifying.
• Suppose we edited the Hemingway like this:  

The other man ordered bacon and eggs. He was about the same size as Al. They had different faces but wore the same clothes. Both wore overcoats too tight for them. They sat leaning forward with their elbows on the counter.

• Do you see what I did?  I took out the commas in the first, third, and fifth sentences.
• It feels tenser—but not in a good way. More in a dead way.
• Language
• Repeats words in close proximity to each other only by strategy
• Again in the revised Hemingway:  “wore” jangles there.
• #4: Flow
• The narrative voice doesn’t jump from subject to subject without any connection or transition
• But rather it has a natural forward motion of ideas and action
• So the reader never says, “Wait, stop, where did that come from?” and gets broken out of the story.
• #5:  Originality
• A voice I haven’t heard before
• The narration doesn’t use cliches
• “Trembling like a leaf,” “as luck would have it,” “bored to tears”—these bore me to tears
• Sometimes characters will speak in clichés, and that’s fine as long as it’s intentional—that is, the writer is deliberately having the character speak in clichés to show us something about that character
• Though of course it’s better to have
• Original imagery and phrasing
• I recently read David Levithan’s Wide Awake, which is a fascinating YA novel about civic responsibility (as much as that sounds like a contradiction in terms), and the main character loves American history and the Boston Tea Party. So when it’s time to rebel, he says, “Let’s throw some tea overboard.” I love that.
• The best way to test the style of your work is TRUCK #7: Read it aloud.
• You’ll be able to hear the rhythms and variance—or lack of variance
• If you find yourself editing what you’re reading as you go along, write in what you’re saying, because what you’re saying truly reflects your natural voice.
• Watch your own emotional reactions as you read—are you excited in the action parts? Emotional in the sad parts? Do you get tired or bored in any particular scenes? Maybe that’s a sign you can tighten them up a bit.

• Good prose:  Content
• Written in voice
• Within the boundaries of what your narrator could potentially say or the reader would expect to hear
• Makes steady forward progress
• Doesn’t repeat itself unless it’s necessary to make a point
• This includes restatements of the same thought:
• Joey was speechless. Not a word came out. He couldn’t even open his mouth.
• I think I get the point.
• Shows, not tells
• Develops the emotion the character is feeling in the reader
• Does not just outright tell the reader what that emotion is (“I felt so sad”).
• But at the same time, chooses dramatization wisely
• Telling is putting something in narration
• Example: We talked about the concert next week.
• Showing is dramatizing it for the reader so it’s as if it unfolds before our eyes
• Example:  “Hey, are you excited about the MetroCards concert next week?” “Yeah, I can’t wait!”
• Showing has more weight than telling because it takes up more time and lays the situation out so readers can see it with their own eyes
• As Holmes has it, “There is nothing like first-hand evidence.”
• But you don’t need to prove every single point to the reader, and if you do dramatize every point for the reader, your book will be very long and you’ll probably waste some of their time.
• Dramatize the things that matter most to your overall story and point.
• Gets the details right
• When I’m line-editing, I’m also fact-checking things both within the manuscript and in the real world
• If Emily Ebers says she lives at 1350 Willow Tree Lane at one point, then gives her address as 1480 Willow Tree Circle at another, I’ll ask Lisa to confirm which one is correct
• Or if Emily suddenly decided to do a chemistry experiment and gave the boiling point of water as 160 degrees Fahrenheit—I’d say to Lisa, “You know, it’s actually 212 degrees. Would you like to revise this, or were you trying to emphasize how little Emily knows about science?”
• As Sherlock Holmes says:  “Have you tried to drive a harpoon through a body? No? Tut, tut, my dear sir, you must really pay attention to these details.”
• When I’m line-editing, I test every sentence against the question “What purpose does this serve?” (You can do this too—carefully—as TRUCK #8.)
• If it’s not necessary—if it’s something we already know, or something extraneous to the story or the point, or if it’s not showing us more about the world or the character—I will often suggest cutting it.
• If it is necessary, I want to be sure it’s phrased in the very best way possible to communicate the meaning to readers
• Here’s an example that’s not from EMILY, but from the first draft of a translation I’m working on right now:

Choosing this tiny, two-story Victorian with its dingy blue columns and faded shutters, wedged between two even more run-down houses, was especially odd since every business worthy of the name had long ago deserted the street.

• What is the point of this sentence? What’s the key information it’s meant to convey? (The Victorian house was an odd choice for the buyer to make)
• That’s what I want to put the emphasis on.
• The easiest way to emphasize something in a sentence or a paragraph is to move it up front.
• Remember when you did topic sentences in school? How the first sentence in a paragraph establishes your thesis, and the rest of the paragraph goes on from that or supports that? The same rule applies to fiction. The first sentence in a paragraph—or even the first phrase in a sentence—ought to give a sense of what you’re talking about and the circumstances in which the action is taking place.
• So the translator and I vastly reworked this sentence to get:

It was an odd choice of location for a bookstore—a tiny, two-story Victorian house with dingy blue columns and faded shutters--especially since every other business worthy of the name had long ago deserted the street. 

• An improvement, right?
• This is where the detective’s work and the editor’s are most alike:  All about paying attention to details.
• “It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles.”