Reconstructive Surgery for Manuscripts
Minimizing and Disguising Literary Scar Tissue
First and foremost please wish a very happy ninth adoptiversary to Maxine Barkatansky, Shelf Life copilot, who joined this household on December 2, 2012. An auspicious date, indeed. She has clean teeth and many sweaters. A Very Good Dog.
Today’s Shelf Life is about something I’ve been rolling around in my head for a little bit following a couple of comments on editing I chanced upon recently.
First, I had a fellow editor over and we were hanging out and she asked me if I knew the story behind Kristin Cashore’s drafting of Bitterblue. That link there goes to the full story and I recommend longform writers read it, but to sum up, after spending three years drafting Bitterblue, Cashore handed the first draft off to her editor who suggested, instead of revising the draft, starting from scratch and writing a completely new draft now that she had the story worked out. My fellow editor asked me whether I would have the editorial cojones to ask any author to do that, let alone a Mythopoeic Award–winning, New York Times bestseller.
I actually do not know whether I would have those editorial cojones nor whether I would have the editorial wisdom to recognize that it was necessary in the first place. Kristin Cashore has a very good editor.
The second thing was an Instagram post by Sabaa Tahir from a few months ago, on the occasion of receiving first-pass pages for her forthcoming novel All My Rage, of which she said:
For those of you who do not know, first pass pages are when the book has been designed and typeset, and you are really just looking for egregious errors. (Unless you are me, in which case you might re-write a page or ten.)
As a production editor, her comment inspired all my own rage. Rewriting at proofs isn’t unique to Tahir. Lots of authors do this (or try), often with unfortunate results. The other day someone sent me a photo of a book they were reading. The photo had a paragraph of text circled and then, about two paragraphs down from the circled one, the same paragraph repeated verbatim. The person who sent the photo wanted to know what kind of editor would let something like this get past them.
Well, the kind who lets authors rewrite and rewrite at pages; but let’s dissect.
Every edit leaves a scar.
I set it off as a quote because it’s that important. Now: Not to brag or anything, but I have a large collection of scars. I have a big one on my right wrist from where I broke it roller skating and had to have reconstructive surgery. A colleague once examined it and asked me very earnestly, “But what do you tell people who think you tried to kill yourself?” I tell them I broke it roller skating, Diane. Anyway, I have scars of all kinds. I know some stuff about scars.
I was once knocked down the escalator at the Dupont Circle Metro station and split my right philtrum open; it was closed up shortly thereafter by a nice young physician assistant at the GW emergency room. While he was stitching it I asked him if I would still be as beautiful after the injury as I was before, and he assured me I would be. I told him that was not beautiful enough for me and to please inject some botox while he was in there. (He did not do so.)
About a year later, making conversation during an outpatient surgical procedure for which I was awake, a renowned dermatologist with a specialty in Mohs surgery admonished me that if I ever got another facial injury I must demand a plastic surgeon because no other type of doctor is sure to get it right. Here’s what I learned about scarring from that Mohs surgeon:
The way an incision is made and the way it is closed affect how it will scar.
The age of the patient and the age of the scar both factor into how well it will heal.
Scars on your face will always be the most noticeable and visible.
Personally I could do with some more facial scars. They would make me seem more interesting and mysterious.
When you edit a manuscript, all of the above stuff is true except for the part about visible scars making you seem more interesting and mysterious. Visible scars, places in the text where edits are obvious, do not make the text more interesting or improve it in any way. It’s more like Frankenstein’s monster than, for instance, a pretty girl with a neat eyebrow scar.
When you’re writing, drafting, mostly you’re setting down sentences in context of the sentences around them. Some of us edit as we go, we just can’t help it. But when drafting, the tone and voice of the text is very fresh in your mind. When you come back later and edit, or if someone else comes through and edits, those edits are going to leave scars. They could be big or small, noticeable or invisible, but they’ll be there. Your job, whether you’re the author of the manuscript or an editor who is not the author of the manuscript, is to minimize the scarring as much as you can.
Herewith, my five tips for managing manuscript scarring like a plastic surgeon.
Open the Incision With Precision
The way you make the cut matters. When you make a surgical incision that you want to heal well, my doc tells me you have to pay close attention to things like the grain of the skin and the placement of underlying muscles that move the skin around while and after it heals. I don’t think of my skin as having a grain but I trust the dermatologist. My skin is just leather, I guess. Leather has grain.
When you take a scalpel to your manuscript, take notice of where you’re cutting, what you’re cutting, and how much you’re cutting.
The more text you remove, replace, or change, the more likely it is to be noticeable—especially if you’re coming back after taking a post-drafting break and looking at your work with fresh eyes (or looking at someone else’s work). The more you change, the more careful you have to be that you keep the narrative voice and pacing consistent with the surrounding text.
My strategy for creating the editorial incision: Find what you need to change and make your edit, and then give the surrounding text an edit, too. Begin a few paragraphs or a page ahead of the parts you excised, replaced, or rewrote, and then do a light-handed edit over all the text, stopping a few paragraphs to a page after your initial edit. Then insert a comment or highlight the area or flag the page or whatever method you use to mark off a part of your manuscript. Come back a few days later and give the whole section another quick edit—you’ll almost certainly find something on that last pass that doesn’t quite jive with the rest. You’re welcome.
Close the Incision Carefully
The way you close the cut matters even more than how you open it. How many stitches do you use? What kind of sutures? How carefully do you line up the skin to keep the grainline even and straight? I’m still not comfortable with my skin having a grainline.
Sometimes you’re closing up an incision (an edit) because content was excised (removed) and sometimes you’re closing up where you went in to do some detail work and you’re just bringing the edges back together to cover your tracks. The difference matters.
If you’ve taken something out and you’re not replacing it, you need to make sure that you line up the edges carefully to make sure the reader can move smoothly past your edit. If you are removing a large amount of content, like a scene or a whole subplot, then you want to send it to the literary equivalent of the pathology lab—send that excised text somewhere to be analyzed later. Don’t delete it. Move it to a separate document and flag it for review. You will need to scan it carefully to find anything that is imperative for the reader to know for the main plot to work, so you can put that back into the text somewhere else.
Even if you’re just suturing a minor edit, make sure you read over the surrounding text again to make sure everything flows and nothing is redundant. Double check to make sure you haven’t overused a word by inserting it in your edit when it’s already used nearby. Ensure that deletions didn’t take any surrounding text with them accidentally, which can cause a sentence not to parse.
A single round of editing in isolation almost always introduces at least a couple of errors. Always check your work again.
Manage the Age of the Patient
The younger a patient is when you slice them up, the cleaner they’ll heal. Young people are just more plastic. They bounce back from more.
Manuscripts are like this, too. When you undertake manuscript edits, it’s crucial to resolve the major items earlier in the manuscript’s lifespan so that you’re resolving only minor issues as the manuscript ages and gets closer to becoming a finished product. The earlier you are in the life of a manuscript, the more malleable and plastic it is.
As I noted above, editing a text end to end will fix many errors but usually introduce one or two new errors. The new ones introduced are usually smaller than the ones fixed, but they’re still errors and they’re still there. This is why it’s crucial to fix more stuff at the earlier stages of your manuscript revision, editing, and production process and less stuff later on. The later you make a change in the manuscript, the fewer rounds of editing and proofing are left ahead, which means fewer chances for newly introduced errors to be caught and fixed.
Authors who spend the copyediting phase sweating the small stuff only to turn around at page proofs and request big changes are authors who end up with a book on the shelves with a paragraph of repeated text because they waited till there was no remaining time or personnel to check behind them and make sure they weren’t introducing mistakes. Don’t be that author. Do your rewriting first and your nitpicking last.
Treat the Scar Timely
The best time to start treating a scar is as soon as you can possibly do so without affecting the injury itself (for instance, you don’t want to start stretching scar tissue until you’re confident the wound has closed and won’t reopen under stretching).
When you’ve made edits, the best time to review your work and make sure your editing is seamless and undetectable is right away. If you make a sentence-level edit—as in, you changed a word or a few words in a sentence—stop for a moment and reread the whole sentence. It’s not enough to have inserted a correctly spelled word. Read the whole sentence again to make sure it’s still sound and then move on. (Don’t do this while you’re drafting! This is advice for revision and editing.)
If you replace a whole sentence, stop and reread the paragraph it’s in. If you replace a whole paragraph, stop and read the page. Doing this right away will give you the opportunity to tweak the surrounding text and make sure everything flows together. You will have to read over the whole manuscript again, later after getting some distance from it, to make sure everything is flawless—but if you wait to review your edits until that final pass of the whole manuscript, you’ll be making your surrounding text tweaks then. And then you’ll need to either do another pass or hope none of your tweaks created an error or interrupted the flow of text.
Mind Your Face
Last but not least: Take extra care with scars in the most visible locations. This is why you need a plastic surgeon for your face when a less-exacting practitioner will do for other body parts. People see your face first. They’ll never not notice a facial scar.
Think about what parts of a book are the most prominent and noticeable, the parts where literary scarring would stand out the most. The covers, the title page, the table of contents (if you have one), the first few pages. Readers who see a mistake or an inconsistency there are going to notice it immediately. If you changed the spelling of a character’s name, or changed your title, or changed the presentation of your name (Catherine Forrest versus Catherine E Forrest verses CE Forrest, for example), you need to make sure you catch every single instance of that change. You can never check these too many times.
In a traditional publishing setting with a full production editing schedule, these items get checked by every person who gets their hands on the manuscript every time they touch the manuscript. There’s no point where these items get a final sign-off and we stop checking them because we’re sure they’re fine. I upload the final files to the printer and then I open the remote copy on the printer’s FTP site one more time to make sure.
Whatever those risky elements are for your book, make sure you never get complacent about them. If you change a character’s name or the spelling of their name, for instance, put that on your “critical items” checklist and check to make sure you caught every instance each time you review the manuscript. Changed somebody’s hair color? Stay on high alert for references to that character’s appearance during every revision and every edit.
Every reader can tell you about the book they read where somebody’s eyes changed from green to brown halfway through, or a canine companion was suddenly called a feline companion one time on page 214 and then never again.
The goal is for your book to never be that book for anybody.
A final note on Kristin Cashore. I do hope you will read her blog entry on rewriting Bitterblue instead of revising it. Not every book is going to need that. I suspect many editors who encounter a manuscript that could benefit from a full rewrite would not suggest it to the author, given what an enormous editorial ask that would be. But it can’t hurt to ask yourself, of a draft you have finished: If I were to begin this draft now, today, understanding where the story has gone and how it came together in the end, could I do it better than I did the first time?
The answer doesn’t mean you definitely should rewrite or definitely shouldn’t. It’s just worth considering.
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