I had the pleasure of hanging out IRL with two of my favorite beta readers this week. They didn’t know that our conversation would be reproduced, so I won’t print their names, but we had a great chat about the editorial process that I wanted to share with y’all.
We were speaking specifically about The Politics of Fear, Book 1 in The Compact Cycle, that both of them read in beta form. They were both very complimentary of the novel. In fact, their encouragement was one of the major factors that finally pushed me to launch High Trestle Press. They were curious about what kind of editorial feedback I was grappling with to get the version of the novel they read perfected for publication. It’s a great question.
Unless you’re a writer or a publishing professional, when you hear “editing” you probably think “proofreading.” But these are very different stages in the process. When I ship a second or third draft off to a series editor, what I’m expecting is a developmental edit. This may include some general copyediting, but the primary function of a developmental editor isn’t to correct typos.
In a developmental edit, I expect story- and scene-level feedback zeroing in on pacing problems, inconsistencies, slippage in the POV, and executable instructions for optimizing the dramatic tension. Storytelling, in its most fundamental form, is the strategic reveal and withholding of information to achieve a dramatic effect. The developmental editor analyzes which information I’m revealing and withholding, when, why, and how. Pacing problems occur when information isn’t doled out in the ideal sequence. POV problems occur when information isn’t consistently related. If the reader doesn’t understand why they’re getting certain information when they get it–or worse, why a particular morsel has been withheld–you’ve got yourself a major plot hole.
As a reader, you likely aren’t thinking about the stories you consume in these terms, but you sure as hell recognize these deficiencies. Have you ever felt like a conflict’s resolution wasn’t earned? The writer didn’t feed you the right information before that resolution. Have you ever felt like a scene or a plot arc was superfluous or unresolved? The writer probably fed you too much information. Or too little.
The “what” and “when” of this reveal are narrative concerns. The “why” and “how” are point-of-view concerns. As a writer, POV is the reader’s lens into the story. When an author commits to a certain framework, they need to adhere to it. We can all point to examples that play fast and loose with these parameters, but I strongly believe that the best writing adheres rigorously to the scope of its POV. If we’re in a first-person narrative, all information is conveyed to the reader through the filter of the narrator’s personal experience. You can get yourself a little more room to operate in a first-person retrospective, where the narrator might have future knowledge that wasn’t apparent to them within the timeframe of an individual scene, but I would caution any writer working in this kind of a nested POV not to vest their narrator with too much omniscience. There be dragons.
The Politics of Fear is written in the close third-person from multiple points of view. Third-person is the author’s multi-tool, but its versatility should be weighed against its tendency to slip. It all often comes down to psychic distance. Between the close third-person and the third-person omniscient lie a whole host of over-the-shoulder perspectives, where the point of view follows one character but the reader may be privvy to details just outside the anchor character’s field of vision. Close third is more similar to first-person, where the information available to the reader is bounded by the anchor character’s experience of each scene. Close third also allows for more interiority, since the events are best related through the anchor character’s subjective experience of the world.
Most of the developmental feedback on my draft of The Politics of Fear pertained to slippage in the third-person POV. There are scenes where the aperture feels a bit too wide for the POV character’s experience (too much psychic distance) and there are sections where the action takes over and the scenes proceed from an almost omniscient perspective. These need to be revised to relate the action from the POV character’s in-scene experience. Readers moving swiftly through a narrative might not even blink at these deficiencies, but the book will be stronger when they’re fixed.
If you would like to submit a question to be printed and answered (anonymously or otherwise), simply send your question to [email protected]. Or find me at a toddler birthday party. Whatever works. No question is off limits!