I wrote a series of tweets a while back while sitting beside the pool while my daughter finished her swimming lesson. They were about the pleasure I get from giving feedback on someone’s manuscript, something I do for friends and for the people in my writing group, and also sometimes for people who submit books to the publisher I work for.
I could copy those tweets here, but it feels more interesting to recreate them from memory, and maybe take them in a new direction. I do remember my basic thesis, which was how much I enjoy giving feedback now, and how much useful knowledge I get out of it for my own writing.
The process of reading and thinking about someone’s manuscript concentrates my writing mind hugely, bringing into focus the things I believe or value about writing and about fiction in particular. As an example, when I read I pay attention to the state my mind is in. If my attention wanders, or if there is a moment when I feel thrown out of the story, I go back and ask myself why. Sometimes it’s a sign that I need to sharpen my focus and pay more attention (and perhaps stop half listening to the conversation in the next room). But often it’s about something in the story that’s not quite working, or that’s working in a way that seems to contradict the rest of the story, or feels out of place. Perhaps the point of view suddenly shifts, without a clear reason why. Maybe a character says or does something that seems out of kilter with everything else they’ve said or done previously. Or it might be a sudden tonal shift. Whatever it is, it often has the effect of disconnecting me from the story, breaking my immersion in it.
Part of the pleasure I feel comes from identifying where these moments are in a manuscript, and finding out why they are there. But a bigger part comes from thinking of ways to address the problem. Sometimes a solution can be as simple as changing or deleting one or two words (it’s amazing how often deleting a sentence can help a paragraph). Other times the issue might be something larger, a matter of the writer needing to dig deeper or go further with the story or character. Only rarely is a manuscript in such a state that a total rewrite is needed. More often there are good things in it buried under other less good things. An often repeated phrase at the office is ‘there’s a book in there somewhere’.
My reading, assessing, feed-backing brain has been maxed out just recently as I’ve been editing an anthology of long stories. All the stories were around 10,000 words, and there were a lot of submissions, resulting in a giant pile of reading. After the selection was made, the stories went through a first round of editing. And when I say ‘I’ am editing the anthology, I should say ‘along with two’ of my colleagues. It’s a big job, and that’s before going through each story with the author line by line, a copy edit and proof read, and then typesetting etc. The usual rounds of work that need to be done to get a book ready for publication.
But all this work, and all the hours talking to my co-editors about the stories, have had one huge beneficial effect for my own understanding of what makes fiction work. The ideas I’ve developed while honing my own writing, and those I’ve absorbed from other writers and from publishing colleagues, have coalesced. Discussing them with my colleagues has given me confidence that, although I’m never going to learn everything about writing and fiction, I have learnt a lot already.
At the end of his recent book about story and writing A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders generously talks about what he thinks the book might do for those who read it. He hopes some of the ideas – the mentoring – he provides in the book will be useful. But he doesn’t hesitate to admit that much of it might not be. In fact, he thinks the parts of the book people find useful might not be really from him at all. Instead, the reader might recognise things in it they already knew, and Saunders is just reminding them of those ideas.
Saunders is being a little too modest here, I think. The book is full of wise and wisely told ideas about writing and story-telling and readership. But this does get at the way I feel when I’m reading and assessing a manuscript. Through doing that work, I’m being reminded again of what I know about writing. The good and bad, effective an ineffective, beautiful and ugly. And the best part of that is it isn’t a constant. Every writer, through that to and fro they have with themselves as they work through a story, is continually coming up with answers to the problems they have set themselves. How to make the story work, how to convey what they want to convey and find meaning in it. How, ultimately, to connect with the reader, and take them along for the ride. They come up with new solutions in every story, and sometimes, I’m lucky enough to see how they do it.
Little Monsters Rise and Walk 