Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print
by Dave King, Renni Browne
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Book Summary Information
Author: Dave King, Renni BrowneEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-04-13
ISBN: 0060545690
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print
Book Review: A breezy read
Summary: 3 Stars
Renni Browne and Dave King have written a better than average book on craft for fiction writers. It covers the following topics:
1. Showing not telling
2. Characterization & exposition
3. Point of view
4. Proportion
5. Dialog mechanics
6. How the text sounds
7. Interior monologue
8. Beats (character actions between bits of dialog)
9. Sentence/paragraph/chapter breaks
10. Repetition
11. Sophisticated versus amateur style
12. Voice
They include passages from works of famous writers as well as of clients of their own editing service in showing how to address errors. They also provide exercises, and in the appendix, suggested answers to those exercises. Excellent.
The book is certainly worth reading, but I am concerned they missed the forest for the trees in certain places. The best example of my concern is in the first chapter on showing not telling. The authors take issue with the following line from F. Scott Fiztgerald's The Great Gatsby:
The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially.
The "problem" is the ly-adverb "confidentially". The authors suggest it would be stronger to eliminate this adverb explaining the girls' emotion, and instead write the following:
The two girls and Jordan leaned their heads together.
Their rule is to avoid using adverbs to tell the reader which emotions the characters are experiencing, and instead convey their emotion by dialog and actions. This is a perfectly reasonable rule, and I agree it should be followed, most of the time. In the above example however, the rewritten version doesn't quite convey what Fitzgerald intended. There could be many reasons for the girls to have leaned their heads together. They could have been tired from the party and from the alcohol they consumed, for example, and simply flopped their heads to one side in exhaustion. The notion that they leaned closer to gossip was lost when the word "confidentially" was removed. To address this, we could give a more detailed explanation of exactly how they leaned together. Here is my suggestion:
The two girls and Jordan leaned their heads together, glanced from side to side, and lowered their voices.
A problem with my version however, is that the longer explanation might interrupt the flow of the scene. None of us can get into Fitzgerald's head, but I'd like to offer a reasonable guess regarding his reason for using the dread ly-adverb. Most of us have a mental image of how a group of gossiping girls behaves. The word "confidentially" encapsulates this mental image, and adequately conveys the mood of the scene. It's a shortcut, and if it's not overused, it can be effective. I sense the authors are too rigid in the application of their rules.
FINAL QUESTION: Would The Great Gatsby have been a better novel if F. Scott Fitzgerald had not made "mistakes" like the one above? I doubt it. For me, Dave King and Renni Browne lost credibility when they began line editing a novel of that stature. Most readers agree the novel has an essence that goes beyond such mechanical issues. That's what I meant at the beginning when I said the authors may have lost the forest for the trees.
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Summary of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print
Hundreds of books have been written on the art of writing. Here at last is a book by two professional editors to teach writers the techniques of the editing trade that turn promising manuscripts into published novels and short stories.
In this completely revised and updated second edition, Renni Browne and Dave King teach you, the writer, how to apply the editing techniques they have developed to your own work. Chapters on dialogue, exposition, point of view, interior monologue, and other techniques take you through the same processes an expert editor would go through to perfect your manuscript. Each point is illustrated with examples, many drawn from the hundreds of books Browne and King have edited.
There's not much of the old-style editing going on at publishing houses today. Renni Browne, veteran of William Morrow and other publishers, founded the Editorial Department in 1980 to teach fiction writers the techniques professional editors (many of whom have gone independent) use to prepare a manuscript for publication. In this book, she and senior editor Dave King share their accumulated expertise in a series of brilliantly compact lessons. One page from their simply and markedly improved version of a scene from The Great Gatsby alone would make a compelling advertisement for their techniques. Very highly recommended. --MTB
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