You Need an Editor: Show, don’t tell (and tell, don’t show)

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count, as we finish out our series for the month of September! All month long, as you know, we’ve been talking about the myriad reasons why you need an editor. During this series, I’ve talked about some of the things editors will look for in your manuscript, and (I hope), shed some light on how the editing process goes, in general. I’ve had a lot of fun with this series, as I always do, and I hope that you’ve learned some things as well. After all, editing is one of those things that we just can’t get around. We, as writers, really need editors. We just do.

You Need an Editor: Show, don’t tell (and tell, don’t show)

Now, I’ve talked about this before, fairly recently, but I still wanted to bring it up in a series about editing. Why? Because it’s one of the first things we ever learn when it comes to writing, and yet it somehow never completely sticks—or it sticks so much that the manuscript suffers in the exact opposite direction as before. We don’t want either of those things to happen.

See, writers have a constant struggle when it comes to knowing how much to show and how much to tell. We do. I know, because I’m a writer. I still struggle, with knowing what sections need to be fully shown and what sections don’t. But my editor? She knows. She knows almost instantly, in my manuscripts, what pieces I need to show more of.

Again I’ll tell you: as the writer, as the creator of the manuscript in question, it’s nearly impossible for you to spot the errors in your writing. You know how it’s supposed to read. You know how every scene plays out. You’ve blocked it all out in your mind, and you can see it, without even having to read it. But that’s part of the problem. You can see it, without the words. Your readers can’t. But how are you supposed to know what they can’t see, when you can? An editor; that’s how.

Your editor will look through your manuscript and highlight areas where you’ve told instead of shown. They’ll look through your book and tell you why you need to add more details in some areas, why some sections of the book need to be better described and given the extra attention. But they’ll go one step further.

If you’re anything like me, then there are some descriptions you’ve done that you absolutely love. You just love them, fully and completely, and you don’t want to remove them from the manuscript at all, ever. But some of those descriptions don’t need to be there. Sometimes we’ve spent a great deal of time describing something that has literally no significance in the story, and that’s a problem. If you’re going to spend a lot of time describing it, then it needs to be important. But I highly doubt that you can see those things, that you can notice them at all, because, of course, you wrote and love that description. Which I don’t blame you for, in the least.

But I do encourage you, as I have all month long, to seek out an editor. Hire someone you trust, someone you know will work well within your genre and lead you in the right direction. Find an editor. Work with them, all you can. Let them change and better your manuscript—because, believe me, your work will be better for it.

All you have to do is take the plunge.

Thank you all so much for sticking around through this series! I have something really fun planned for October, but if you have any suggestions for upcoming topics, please let me know!

[love]

{Rani Divine}

You Need an Editor: How long/short is too long/short?

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. It’s the last week of our series, and I have two more reasons for you, why you need an editor. You know me, I’m full of reasons why you should hire an editor, why you shouldn’t leave the editing only to your own eyes. For the sake of your readers, if nothing else, editors are extremely necessary if you intend to publish your work. If you’re only going to let your mom read it… well then, you’re probably fine without editing. ;-)

All month long, I’ve done my best to tell you of the myriad reasons why editors are important, for writers. And today, I have what is probably one of the biggest reasons why you need an editor.

You Need an Editor: How long/short is too long/short?

My dear writer, if I know you like I think I do, then you really don’t have a clue how long your manuscript should be. Sure, you’ve probably done a little bit of research into how long an average novel in your genre is, and you might even know how long you want the story to be, but I can nearly guarantee that you haven’t considered how long your story wants to be, on it’s own.

That’s a thing that editors know, and can tell simply by reading through your manuscript. It’s one of the things I pride myself on doing. I know, on a single read-through, which sections need to be lengthened and which sections need to be cut down. I know what parts will read extremely well from the point of view of the reader, and which ones will be boring, confusing, or just need to be blocked out better. I know this, because I know novels. Because I’ve worked with novels for a very long time. And, honestly, because I’m also a reader.

It’s not to say that you, as a writer, aren’t a reader and therefore can’t possibly know where you’ve written too much and where you’ve written too little, but that because you’re so close to your manuscript, because you’re the one who wrote it and therefore you have an amazing vision into what’s going on, what’s happening, the background, the information never entirely privy to the reader… you literally cannot tell, where the manuscript needs scenes to be extended and better fleshed out, and what sections you need to skip through, because the information isn’t exactly necessary.

That’s where your editor comes in. That’s where we’re able to help you, to show you which scenes you might need to expand, which things we want to know more about, which things we want to see more of, and which things you can cut back on a bit.

In my own writing, this often means cutting out some dialogue, and replacing it with exposition. When I’m writing, I like to give a lot of information through dialogue—but that’s not always the best way to do things. And I didn’t know that, until I’d worked with an editor and she told me I was using my dialogue as a crutch.

We don’t want crutches, in our writing. We want to better our writing, all around. And sometimes, an editor is the only one who can really help us do that.

So yes, my writer friend. You need an editor. Because your eyes cannot see what’s unknown to them, until someone else point it out. I think that sentence might’ve gotten away from me, a bit.

[love]

{Rani Divine}

You Need an Editor: Exposition that just needs help

Hi everyone! Welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. Really. It wouldn’t be the same without you here.

This month, this lovely, finally-starting-to-cool-down-below-90-degrees month of September, we’re talking about editing. We’re talking about editing because it’s one of the most important things for writers to discuss, one of the most important things for us to understand, and to do. We need to both edit our own work, and to hire someone to edit our work after we’ve edited it ourselves. Why? Well, that’s what we’re talking about, this month.

You Need an Editor: Exposition that just needs help

Really. Your exposition needs help. I know it does, because I’m both a writer and an editor, so I know writing from both sides. There isn’t a writer in the world who writes perfect exposition—but there are a whole lot of writers out there who think they write some of the most amazing exposition in the world. And sure, they might be right, but they probably also hire an editor, to make sure it stays that way.

See, there are two kinds of miswritten exposition, and editors are great at finding and fixing either one.

Option 1: You’ve written too much exposition

Let’s face it, this happens not infrequently, to a lot of us. We sit down to write a scene, and we get overwhelmed ourselves by the amount of information we want (and need) to include in the scene. So we write all of it, we love all of it, and we think all of it is necessary, even in its chunky, blocky, pages upon pages upon pages format. And that’s not okay.

My general rule of thumb is that if it was overwhelming for you to write, if it was a lot of exposition and seems to you, as the writer, to be a lot of showing without a lot of telling and without a lot of action or dialogue… it probably needs a good edit. And if you can’t figure out how to find or fix those places, well then. You need an editor.

Option 2: You’ve written too little exposition

Logical, right? Those are the only two options. It’s fairly rare to have actually written the proper amount of exposition throughout your entire manuscript. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it happen, and I’ve edited a lot in my day. Some of you have underwritten your exposition. Maybe you’re not as comfortable writing it, maybe you didn’t know what needed to be said, but you didn’t include enough descriptions, enough actions, enough not-dialogue text in your manuscript. And that needs to change.

How do you spot writing like this? That’s easy. It’s mostly dialogue, without much happening that isn’t directly stated, through dialogue. And it’s actually one of my least favorite things to edit, because it feels like I end up changing a lot more than I would usually do in someone else’s manuscript. But most writers in this camp honestly don’t know how to fix it themselves—and that’s okay. That’s what editors are here for.

We want to help you. We want to teach you how to write better exposition, how to match your exposition to your dialogue. How to get your ratios right, so you don’t have too much or too little of either one.

And I’m willing to bet you can’t do that on your own. ;-)

[love]

{Rani Divine}

P.S. If you have any suggestions or ideas of things you’d like me to talk about in the coming months, let me know in the comments or contact me on Facebook!