Tag: manuscripts

“The First Draft of Anything is Shit”

firstdraft

I get ideas for stories all of a sudden out of nowhere and can see the scenes clearly in my mind’s eye before I ever attempt to write them (even months beforehand).

The idea for the To Thee is This World Given  came to me in March 2014. The next day at work I jotted down a brief outline on a yellow legal pad that would remain the same until the story was finished:

Two characters, a man and woman, meet on a road several years into a zombie apocalypse. They leave the road and go into the woods. They camp at the side of a stream where the woman tends the man’s wounds. They talk late into the night. The next morning they hike back to the road where they meet a third character, before parting for good.

The only  significant changes to my original concept were to make their relationship antagonistic (originally they had been much more chummy), to make their relationship with the third character friendly (originally it had been hostile), and to have the female character walk away from the male character (originally he had walked away from her).

While my stories may come quickly, the actual writing for me is not spontaneous. It’s the result of intense planning, outlining, reworking, refining, and even acting out. I frequently make the faces and perform the actions the characters are doing to figure out how to describe them and to make sure they actually work in real life. I also recite dialog out loud as I write to make sure it sounds like normal speech. All of this makes it a little embarrassing for me to write where other people can see and hear me.

It ended up taking me four and a half months to complete the novella’s 20,000 word first draft, and I ended up throwing out 99% of the text away in the second draft.

I started the actual writing the middle of April 2014. The first two lines I wrote were the first and last lines of the book — this is pretty typical for me, except that usually I start off with just the last sentence (I often can see the end of my stories before I can see their beginnings):

The First Line of To Thee is This World Given is The dead congregate; the last line is The living collide.

The only other text that stayed unchanged through all drafts was a paragraph of dialogue in which the female character is talking about the star Betelguese, the left hand of Orion. I almost named  To Thee is This World Given, “The ninth brightest star” in honor of Betelguese. This paragraph is one of the most important for understanding the story:

Her voice was wistful, almost sad. “It rushed into existence and used up all of its fuel too fast. Just the blink of an eye in the lives of most stars. And right now its winds are crashing against everything in the galaxy, even us. And eventually it will explode outward and there will be nothing left. No star. No black hole. Just empty space. As if it had never been there at all.” Her eyes closed. “It’ll have had just a short, brilliant life that extinguished so much with it when it went.”

To Thee is This World Given is written in both third person objective and in medias res. I wanted readers to experience the space between themselves and the characters in the same way and at the same time the characters experience the space between themselves. Third person objective and in medias res forces them to do so.

The reader is dropped immediately into the action and is never told what the characters think or feel, or how the characters got to where the story starts. They have to make that decision for  themselves, based on what the characters do and say (and fail to do and say). The reader is never told who is the good guy and who is the bad guy, who is the hero and who is the villain, who to root for and who to root against. Just like life.

The truth is that unless we are told, we never know what is going on in someone else’s head, and even then we have to take it on faith. The best we can do is pay close attention, but even then we often still get it wrong. How we decipher someone else usually says more about us than it does them. That’s a central theme of the book.

The slowest period of the entire writing process, which ended up taking me eight months to reach the final draft, plus another three months in editing, were the first six pages. Those six pages took me almost three weeks to finish, because I kept reworking what I had written the day before instead of moving on. So I got nowhere.

I was having a very hard time getting the voice right. It was driving me crazy.

The voice in third person objective is “silent.” There is no narrator, there is no “telling” at all. Everything must be “shown” through action, dialog, and description. In all other point of views the voice is obvious and can smooth over less elegant writing in the action and dialog. In third person objective, the action and dialog have to stand on their own, relying solely on the strength of the writing in each sentence. It requires tremendous discipline; it’s like a straight jacket, except that you are always fighting slipping into telling.

Additionally, by writing in medias res the story starts with no exposition, and especially early on, is in strict active voice; you just jump right into the action. The problem I was having was in not sounding like blocking, or like something written by a five year old.

(To this day, the first half of the first chapter remains the part of the book that I am the least happy with. I never could get it completely right).

In the end, I made a rule that the only thing I could read on a given day was what I was writing that day and that I could not re-read or rewrite anything I had written earlier. I finally began making progress.

I wrote every day from noon to 4 pm, longhand on yellow legal pads, and as I went along I created detailed outlines mapping out each chapter. In the third chapter, I realized that having the characters get along didn’t work, so I changed course going forward as if they had always not gotten along and stuck post-it notes on the early pages about what changes would have to be made in the second draft.

People are often surprised at how long it took me to write the first 20,000 words. The thing about a novella is that everything included has to pull its weight. Everything is Chekov’s gun. Every word has to count. Whereas the difficulty in writing 100,000 words is in having enough to say, with 20,000 words it is not saying more than enough. This was compounded by how tightly structured To Thee is This World Given is. On most days, at least half of my time was spent organizing and mapping out what I was going to write.

I didn’t keep a copy of the first draft. Every time I finished re-writing a corresponding section in the second draft, a handful of yellow pages was tossed into the recycling bin. At the end, a mountain of scribbled-on yellow pages that no one ever saw but me.

At least once a day I said, “God, this is garbage.”

Not getting demoralized was hard.

I couldn’t see how I would ever get anywhere close to being happy with the story.

But I had a little post it stuck on my desk reminding me that the first draft of anything is always shit. I had another ordering me to not edit as I wrote.

It’s better to press forward and throw it all away, than to stand still and have nothing to throw away. Ernest Hemingway threw away the first 3,000 words of

 The Sun Also Rises and re-wrote the ending of a A Farewell to Arms forty-seven times.

-k-

You can read about the themes in To Thee is This World Given, in my post  The Hardest Thing in Writing is Simply to Tell the Truth

Some of my thoughts on writing in general can be found here and here.

 

 

 

Advertisement
Posted on by Khel Milam 0

“The Hardest Thing in Writing is Simply to Tell the Truth”

The unifying theme behind To Thee is This World Given is that we are not an inherently selfish, callus, violent species. While I don’t believe we are inherently good, I do believe we inherently desire to be so, which is diametrically opposed to our supposedly sociopathic nature depicted by The Walking Dead and other books, movies, and television shows in the post-apocalyptic genre.

For the most part I believe we are basically a pretty decent species. After all, there is no other species on the planet willing to adopt the offspring of another, rear it as a family member, and do everything in its power to keep it safe and sound (especially the offspring of a species that used to eat them). That’s pretty exceptional when you think about it.

What I don’t believe is that we have to love each other. That’s unrealistic, even as goal. I don’t even believe we have to like each other, we just have to try tolerate each other, not harm each other, help each other if we can, and at the very least acknowledge that we’re all just struggling to stay afloat in our own way.

I tried to suggest this in To Thee is This World Given from the very beginning with a pair of quotes from Siddhartha and Charles Dickens:

“What is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world where each person is clinging to his or her piece of debris? What is the proper salutation between them as they pass each other in this flood?” Siddhartha

“It is required of every man…that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow men, and travel far and wide, and if that spirit go not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness.” Charles Dickens

In To Thee is This World Given, two-thirds of the character interaction is cooperative, and the two best adjusted characters are the two most cooperative ones. Additionally, basic human decency comes up in dialog scattered throughout the story and is shown in the “hobo code” that people use mark to the roads to let others know that lies ahead and where to find things like food, water, and shelter.

While I made up my own symbols, the road markings in the book were inspired by the actual hobo code of the 1930s. The fact that the real hobo code developed is, itself, a testament to human nature.

A second theme in the story is our fallibility in interpreting and understanding other people’s motives and personalities, and the fact we often deceive ourselves about our own. This is alluded to by the title itself.

To Thee is This World Given is comes from one of the most famous quotes in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, Young Goodman Brown:

“Now faith is gone…[t]here is no good on earth; sin is but a name. Come devil, for to thee is world given.”

Young Goodman Brown centers around the title character’s shifting interpretations and opinions of his neighbors’ motives and personalities, as well as the reader’s own shifting interpretations and opinions of Goodman Brown’s motives and the reliability of his conclusions.

In the story, Goodman Brown’s neighbors are revealed to be hypocrites; however, the reader can’t be certain that the part of the story in which the reveal happens actually took place or not. It could have been a dream or a hallucination, for instance, and the only time the reader actually sees the neighbors undeniably in action, they behave the opposite of how they behaved in the dream-like reveal. So the reader must decide if the neighbors are hypocrites or if Goodman Brown is deceived. Because the story is written in third party objective and in medias res, the reader has nothing more to go on than what Goodman Brown sees, hears, and says.

But if you move beneath the superficial story, you realize there is only one character that is undeniably a hypocrite, and that is Goodman Brown. He is everything he condemns his neighbors of being, and everything he condemns them for doing, he does, himself.

The final theme in To Thee is This World Given is that we are our actions. There are no good or bad people, just good or bad actions. The difference between a hero and a villain is that the villain is honest and up front about doing bad things, while the hero creates elaborate excuses to justify doing bad things. Hero’s suffer from Goodman Brown syndrome.

This is why I did not give my characters’ name. Names are authorial and reader short cuts into character personalities — “Bubba” forms a completely different picture than “Allister,” for instance. Even common names influence one’s perceptions of a character — John tells a different story than Jack does. If a character doesn’t have a name, they can only be evaluated by their actions, which are either good, bad, or neutral, or more typically a hodge podge of all three

I also had the main characters address this theme directly when they argue about Superman and Lex Luther, and indirectly when they argue about the refusal of the leader of Britain’s south pole expedition to let his surviving men try to continue on to get help.

I think of my story as sort of a moebius circle. Every element can be traced back around itself to one of these themes, all of which are already inherently intertwined with each other to begin with. Each time you run your finger along the story’s edge you end up in deeper layer. There is the superficial story, and beneath this, a story about the fallibility of perceptions and expectations and conclusions and justifications, and then at the deepest level, there is a story about the world as it is today.

Plots to me are not the stories, to me they are just the way stories are made sensible to other people. The stories are the truths about the spaces between people, and between what we believe is the truth and what the truth really is.

 

-k-

You can read about my experiences writing the first draft, in my post The First Draft of Anything is Shit.

Some of my thoughts on writing in general can be found here and here.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on by Khel Milam 0

Finding the Time to Write To Thee is This World Given

Virginia Wolf once said that one needs money and a room of one’s own to be able to write. But what one really needs is time. Money and a home are just the currency needed to purchase it.

Ever since graduating college, I had been trying to find a way to both support myself and have enough spare time to write.

In the 1990s, I lived in Manhattan, attended NYU’s Publishing Program, and worked in the editorial departments of various houses, hoping that by working in publishing I’d have a better chance of my manuscript being read.

But as you probably already know, it’s challenging to be able to write while working full time, especially if you don’t write in a heavily formulaic genre and you have to share 800 square feet with five people (publishing doesn’t pay so well). So, while all that time I had an “in,” I didn’t have a finished manuscript.

After a while the realization set in that the whole point of my working in the industry was moot and I ended up in law school (all but two of my roommates from that time also went to law school, of the two others, one stuck it out in the industry and one I have know idea).

I chose law because I had the grades, did well on the sample LSAT test, and wasn’t good enough at math to go to med school. My plan was to work for a few years, scrimp, and be able to buy an inexpensive house outright, which would free me from having to work so much that it would interfere with my writing.

What I didn’t know was (1) that I’d leave law school with student loans that rivaled most people’s mortgages; (2) that I’d have to work at least eighty hours a week at a firm; and (3) that the housing market would experience the worst inflation in history. So, as you can imagine I didn’t get much writing done.

During this period, the thought that I was running out of time and not doing what I was supposed to be doing became more and more urgent, until around 2006 or 2007, when it turned into an all encompassing preoccupation that didn’t let up until I actually began writing To Thee is This World Given . I would sit at my desk every night researching cases and typing memos, thinking, “I am not supposed to be doing this,” over and over and over.

Then something happened. It would end up providing me with enough money to live off of for about a year and half without having to work.

In March 2014 I was offered a settlement from my firm, and so I had a decision to make:  refuse the money and continue working for an employer I’d grown to hate; take the money, be responsible, and find another job right away; or take the money, be irresponsible, and begin writing, knowing that the longer I remained unemployed the harder it would be for me to find another job.

I chose to write.

And I wrote every day, four to six hours a day, for nine months. As soon as I started writing, I felt for the first time in my life that finally I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. For the first time, I felt absolutely content.

It’s been two years since I began To Thee is World Given  and one year since it was released, and now I’m back to where I was before  trying to figure out how to have both enough money to live and enough time to write. But I’m no longer frightened by an insecure future, and I look at the problem now as finding enough time to work, not finding enough time to write.

You can read about my experiences writing the first draft of To Thee is This World Given, here.

 

You can read about the themes in To Thee is World Given, here

Some of my thoughts on writing in general can be found here and here.

-k-

 

 

Posted on by Khel Milam 0

The Science of Writing Slowly

When I wrote To Thee is This World Given, both my first and second drafts were written longhand on yellow legal pads, and even as I typed the third draft, every iteration of each reworked sentence and paragraph was handwritten on a combination of legal pads and post-it notes. The revisions to the fourth through the tenth, and final, draft were also longhand changes scribbled between the lines of the printed manuscripts.

I always assumed that my preference for longhand was just an old-school crutch, because my writing always seems to have a clarity that my typing does not.

But it turns out that writing slowly actually does improve the quality of one’s writing. The results of a study in the British Journal of Psychology, released in January, showed that participants who were forced to slow down their writing by typing with only one hand wrote with greater sophistication than those who were allowed to type quickly with both hands.

Typing can be too fluent or too fast, and can actually impair the writing process….It seems that what we write is a product of the interactions between our thoughts and the tools we use to express them.

[S]lowing down participants’ typing by asking them to use only one hand, allowed more time for internal word search, resulting in a larger variety of words. Fast typists may have simply written the first word that came to mind.

Another study released in 2011 found that writing by hand strengthens the learning process, while typing impairs it. 

The process of reading and writing involves a number of senses….When writing by hand, our brain receives feedback from our motor actions, together with the sensation of touching a pencil and paper. These kinds of feedback are significantly different from those we receive when touching and typing on a keyboard.

Our bodies are designed to interact with the world which surrounds us. We are living creatures, geared toward using physical objects — be it a book, a keyboard or a pen — to perform certain tasks.

For myself, I’m able to see inconsistencies and weaknesses in my writing more vividly when I write by hand, and they bother me more intensely, to the point I that can’t ignore them, then when I type.

One thing I’ve noticed in works by the indie authors that I have read, both fiction and non-fiction, is a hastiness. Even when the writing and editing are sound there is a hasty, rushed quality to it as if the author is not fully aware of what he or she has written.

It may be that the real difference between great authors and ordinary writers is not just innate talent, but the speed and haste with which they write.

Consider this quote from Hemingway:

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?

Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.

Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?

Hemingway: Getting the words right.

—Ernest Hemingway, The Paris Review, Interview, 1956

Or this one from Faulkner:

Faulkner: Since none of my work has met my own standards, I must judge it on the basis of that one which caused me the most grief and anguish.

Interviewer: What work is that?

Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury. I wrote it five separate times, trying to tell the story, to rid myself of the dream which would continue to anguish me until I did.

—William Faulkner, The Paris Review, Interview, 1956

Or this one from Renard:

Style means the right word. The rest matters little.

—Jules Renard

Or even this famous one from Twain:

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

—Mark Twain

If you would like to improve your writing just slow down.

You might also like my posts: A Few Thoughts on Writing, The First Draft of Anything is Shit, and The Hardest Thing to Do is Simply Write the Truth.

-k-

 

 

 

Posted on by Khel Milam 0

AutoCrit Automated Editing — An Author’s Best Friend

AutoCrit is an easy to use, automated, online substantive editing tool for fiction of any length, be it flash fiction or an epic novel. It can be used at any stage of the writing process — from the first draft to the last — to help identify common weaknesses in your writing and any areas that may need your attention. And it’s awesome!

The aspects of your writing that AutoCrit examines relate to sentence craft, not grammar — it isn’t a copyediting program. It doesn’t flag misspelled words and punctuation mistakes.

When you upload your text, it generates instant reports on your story’s pacing, dialog, word choice, repetition, strength of writing (overuse of adverbs, passive voice, showing vs telling, cliches, redundancies, and filler words), and a comparison of your work to successful fiction.

When it locates potential problems, it lists them in the sidebar and highlights them in the text in the main window. It doesn’t make changes, or recommend any specific changes to make, it just suggests the number of any given problem to remove. It allows you to make changes to your text while you are in AutoCrit and to export the edited text to you computer, if you like.

Because To Thee is This World Given has circular structure, where the first and last chapters, second and second to last chapters, third and third to last chapters, and so on, are mirrors of each other, I needed to be able to evaluate each pair of chapters side by side, so printing the reports out and making the changes in the manuscript by hand worked best for me.

I’ve posted a sample of one of the reports from the 3rd draft of To Thee is This World Given here, so that you can see a real world example (the changes made to the 3rd draft with the help of AutoCrit became the 4th draft, which was the first draft sent to a human editor).

This sample report illustrates why you still need a human editor — the section evaluated was all dialog. AutoCrit can’t distinguish between dialog and narration, and since people tend to speak in the passive voice using a lot of filler words and vague pronouns, dialog will often be “red flagged,” even if it is okay.

There are three 12 month subscription plans available: for $60, you can evaluate up to 1,000 words at a time; for $96, you can evaluate up to 8,000 words at a time; and for $144 you can evaluate an unlimited number of words at a time. You can use any level repeatedly over the duration of the subscription, so while there are limits on the number of words you can upload at any one time with the first two plans, over the course of the year all three programs allow you upload an unlimited number of words. You can try it for free here.

I chose to go with the $60 / 1,000 word option, both because I was skeptical whether the program would be worth it and because I wasn’t sure how unwieldy the longer reports would be. The service so greatly exceeded my expectations that it’s hard to put into words how satisfied I’ve been with it.  AutoCrit is the best $60 I have ever spent.

One final plus — AutoCrit can help you gauge a prospective human editor’s competency. In the future, I plan on requiring potential editors to provide a sample edit of around 1,000 words that I can compare to an AutoCritted sample.

Wendy Van Camp on her blog, No Wasted Ink, also reviewed AutoCrit and provides a nice comparison of it to a few other automated editing services.

You might also like my proofreader, Chereese.

For an account of my experiences with Kirkus Editorial services, go here.

 

Posted on by Khel Milam 0

Need a Proof Reader? Try Chereese at GrammarRulesAtoZ

Because of complications with my editing service, Kirkus Editorial, which put me behind schedule, when I received my 1st pass proofs for To Thee is This World Given from 52 Novels (my eBook formatter and print book interior designer), I had to find a competent proofreader on short notice, who would agree to do the work at a reasonable price on an expedited schedule.

Chereese with GrammarRulesAtoZ came to my rescue. Not only did she reply to my inquiry within twenty-four hours, she had my proofs back to me in four days and only charged $150.00 (her rate is based on a flat fee of $1.50 per each double-spaced, twelve point font page).

Cheresse was great to work with and the process was simple and straightforward — you just email your manuscript to her and when it’s ready she will forward you an invoice via PayPal and send you your edited manuscript upon receipt of payment. GrammarRulesAtoZ has a no-frills website, but the service is competent and professional.

I also recommend AutoCrit, which is an automated online editing service. While it does not offer copyediting and is not a substitute for a human editor, it is has been indispensable to me for early round substantive editing, and I can’t recommend it enough. You can learn more about it here. 

Another post you might find helpful is To Lie or To Lay, That is This Question, which provides a quick guide for how to keep lie and lay straight.

To learn about my cover designers, Design for Writers, go here.

To learn more about my experience with Kirkus Editorial, see my post here

Finally, you might also enjoy my post, Publishing: Odds and Ends and Lessons Learned

 

 

Posted on by Khel Milam 0

To Lie or To Lay, That is the Question

Due to my unfortunate experience with the editorial service offered by Kirkus Reviews, I needed to master the proper use of to lie and to lay.

I thought I’d share what I learned in case it might be of help to you. Additionally, a very helpful guide on how to use lie and lay can be found here.

When my first Kirkus editor changed all of my laids to lays and my second Kirkus editor changed all of my lays back to laids, I set about trying to learn the rule for myself once and for all (it turned out that both editors were wrong — both lay and laid mean putting, but what was being done was reclining).

[A full account of my experience with Kirkus Editorial can be found here ].

After struggling to make sense of some very obtuse grammarians, I realized that the distinction is really very easy to keep straight as long as one keeps in mind what lie and lay actually mean.

To Lie is to recline or rest horizontally.

To Lay is to put or place something somewhere.

Lie — recline or rest / Lies or Lying — reclining or resting / Lay* — did recline or rest / Lain — had reclined or rested

If you lie, you recline. If it lies it is reclining. If you are lying, you are reclining. If you lay*, you did recline. If you have lain, you have reclined.

Lay — put or place / laying — putting or placing / laid — have put or placed

If you lay, you put. If you are laying, you are putting, If you laid, you have put.

(*When using lay to mean reclined or rested, only do so if the reclining or resting has already taken place and it makes sense to use it in conjunction with the word did. i.e did lay. If however, the person is in the act of reclining, is currently reclining, or has already reclined, use lie, lies/lying, or lain respectively.

Did lay is likely the source of all of the confusion, but just remember that while it is possible that you did lay on the bed, it is not possible that you did lay the keys on the table, because lay, meaning put here, is present tense, so you cannot be both putting and having put at the same time. Having put is laid.

The “Recline/Put Test:” When choosing between lie or lay, lain or laid, lying/lies or laying, see if your sentence makes sense if you swap lie or lay with put or recline.

If put doesn’t make sense when you swap it for lay, you need to use lie. If recline doesn’t make sense when you swap for it lie, you need to use lay. For example:

Was he [laying][putting] in bed? No, he was [lying][resting] in bed.

Had he [laid][put] in bed for days? No, he had [lain][rested] in bed for days.

[Did] he [lay][rest] in bed yesterday? Yes, he [did lay][rest] in bed yesterday. [Did] she [lay][put] in bed yesterday? No, she [did not lay][put] in bed yesterday. The key word here is did: Did lay means did rest. If she put something on the bed, she laid. If she was on the bed, she lain.

He [lays][puts] back in the chair. [BAD]

He [lies][reclines] back in the chair. [GOOD]

Keep in mind that lie will be followed by an adverb that answers when, on what, and/or in what direction:

  • lie down over there
  • lies down over there
  • is lying down over there
  • had lain down over there
  • did lay down over there

Lay will be followed by a pronoun or a noun:

  • lay it down
  • laying it down
  • laid it down

So once you lay something down, it is lying where you laid it.

I hope this helps! Some additional posts that may be helpful as well: my post on my proofreader, Chereese, who I highly recommend; my post about my experience using AutoCrit, an online substantive editing program that I also highly recommend; and my post about the various things I’ve learned over the past year:

Publishing: Odds and Ends and Lessons Learn.

 

Posted on by Khel Milam 0

Author Beware — Kirkus Reviews Editorial Service

I employed Kirkus Editorial, the editing wing of Kirkus Reviews Author Services, to edit my novella, To Thee is This World Given, in December 2014.

I chose Kirkus Editorial to edit To Thee is This World Given  both because of the reputation of the Kirkus brand and because I could not find any negative reviews from those who had used the service (to be honest, I did not find any reviews of Kirkus Editorial at all; I did, however, find reviews of Kirkus Reviews’ pay-for-review service for independent authors and micropresses from Alli and Michel Sauret— both discouraging others from using their service).

The idea that the Kirkus Editorial staff would provide oversight and trouble-shooting in the editorial process appealed to me. But in hindsight, I realize that assuming this would be the role they would play was my projection of the role I hoped they would play, rather than the role they advertised they would play.

Reviewing their website in light of my experience, I concede that the only service they claim to provide is to job manuscripts out to an free-lance editors and collect the fees for the service.

My first word to the wise — at no time in the editorial process with Kirkus Editorial are you allowed to know who is editing your manuscript or what their credentials are, nor are you allowed a new editor if you feel uncomfortable with the assigned editor’s abilities.

My second word to the wise — Kirkus Editorial is part a family of services created by a company that does not give the customers of these services equal treatment and the same level of respect it gives others in the world of publishing.

My third word to the wise — the “Big 5” is not an employer. An editor may have done work for particular houses and imprints that make up the “Big 5,” but if they have, they will likely say that they have worked for such-and-such house or imprint, not the amorphous “Big 5.”

Before I continue, I want to share some of the comments the editors at Kirkus made about To Thee is This World Given, to assure you that my account is not simply a case of sour grapes. The response I received from both editors was overwhelmingly positive:

“Impressive job”

“The descriptions are visceral and sensory”

“The dialog is generally outstanding”

“The characters are vivid and believable”

“The story’s pacing is excellent”

“The zombie element is handled with great skill”

“Brilliantly imagined and skillfully executed”

My experience:

I opted to go with Kirkus Editorial’s three stage pro-package.

This package begins with “collaborative” editing. I assumed that this was their name for substantive line-editing, but this is not what they provided. The manuscript received a very light edit, similar to what one expects from a beta reader. In fact, the editor did not catch anything more than my two betas did. And in the case of one of my betas, she caught substantially more than Kirkus Editorial’s first round editor did.

Particularly troubling was that the editor failed to catch a series of continuity errors that ran over 3-4 pages in the last chapter, nor did he catch point of view lapses that occurred throughout the story, including a lengthy lapse in chapter 2. I had specifically requested that the manuscript be read for this because To Thee is This World Given is written in third person objective, which is a very strict, difficult point of view to write in, making it easy to slip out of (there can be absolutely no “telling”).

Also troubling, the editor changed all of the “laids” to “lay.” By doing so, he was only exchanging one incorrect word for another. Both “laid” and “lay” are versions of “to put or place.” In all instances in question, the action being performed was reclining, so the correct word was “lie,” as in “lie back.” Admittedly, I had made the same mistake, but this was exactly why I had hired an outside editor.

[For a quick and easy reference guide on the proper usage of “lie” and “lay,” see my post here. ]

The 2nd phase of Kirkus Editorial’s pro-package is the copyediting phase. After making the changes from the first round of edits, you submit the updated text for copyediting.

What one expects from copyediting is pretty straightforward — a manuscript returned with primarily mechanical mark-ups, i.e. punctuation, dropped/transposed/repeated words, grammar and usage errors etc. What was returned, however, was a very lightly edited manuscript with bizarre, highly questionable edits and very few true copyedits.

As with the first editor, the copyeditor did not know the proper usage of “lie” and “lay.” This editor changed the “lays” back to “laids,” thereby altering the tense, but not the action of “putting” in situations where the intended action was “reclining.”

Additionally, the copyeditor missed obvious mistakes, such as where the word “shadowing” was used where “shadows” was clearly intended (ex. “their shadowing ran ahead of them”). Yet while missing obvious errors, the editor made inexplicable changes, such as inserting dialog tags and filler words; changing active, “showing,” sentences into passive, “telling,” sentences; inserting sentences that popped a given section out of the 3rd person objective into the 3rd person subjective; and insisting on the incorrect usage of various words.

I contacted Kirkus Editorial about these problems, along with my concerns that the copyeditor was not competent, very quickly — only twenty-three pages into my review, and before I had reached the end of the 2nd chapter. The Director of Kirkus Editorial stood by every edit, insisting that each was correct. The Director’s responses were dismissive — always some version of “if you don’t like it ‘stet it’ or reject it.” Her responses were also tone deaf — I hadn’t voiced my concerns because I “didn’t like the edits,” I did so because I wanted my manuscript to be edited properly, rigorously, and thoroughly. My concern was that based on the copyedits made, the assigned copyeditor did not possess the skills necessary to do this.

Of particular concern to me, because the point of view the story is written in is so critical to the story itself, was the Director’s response regarding the insertions that changed the point view. Her response strongly suggested that she did not understand the difference between the two types of third person points of view and that she was not able to discern the difference between a “telling” sentence and a “showing” sentence.

The final round of editing in Kirkus Editorial’s pro-package is called the “final polish.” My manuscript did not go through the final polish, so I cannot comment on what it entails.

At no point did Kirkus Editorial acknowledge my concerns as legitimate. After contacting them a second time with additional problems I uncovered by the half way point in the story, the Director offered me a nominal refund for the final, 3rd stage of editing, which had yet to take place, and let me know that I could go find another editor somewhere else. I declined the refund and the “opportunity” to find another editor due to impending deadlines of which she was aware.

In the same communication in which I declined the refund and the “opportunity” to locate a new editor, I informed the Director of Kirkus Editorial that the copyeditor, whom she was defending as “one the best, who had worked with the Big 5,” did not know the proper usage of “lie” and “lay.” The next communication was an email from another individual at Kirkus Editorial summarily terminating my contract and refunding me $1,000.00 of the $1,500.00 I had paid.

At no time did I ask to terminate my contract or receive a refund. In fact, I expressed my desire to continue on to the 3rd and final stage due to my quickly approaching production deadlines. I expressed my hope that between the copyedits that were made, my own review, and the final round of editing, all of the errors would be located.

A thousand dollars is a lot of money, and while it was nice to suddenly have it back, what I needed and what I wanted and what I paid for was top-notch professional editing, and I did not get that. Throughout, the attitude of the Director of Kirkus Editorial came across as patronizing and condescending. She appeared to have disdain for micropresses and independent authors, and she appeared have assumed she was talking to a thin-skinned rube with hurt feelings and bruised pride, not someone who had worked in the “Big 5” in the late 1990s.

In order to not forfeit my reservation on the typesetter’s production calendar (which would have required at least another six weeks to be re-slated), in the end I had to copyedit the manuscript myself, submit it to the typesetter, locate a proofreader, work with the proofreader to locate problems in the proof, along with any mistakes I missed during my rushed self-edit, make the changes, and pay to have the proof corrected.

The pubdate for To Thee Is This World Given was pushed back at least one month; I missed the deadline for the Writer’s Digest Book Contest; and I missed the window available to me for a reputable, not-for-fee, review. These are things that cannot be compensated monetarily.

Looking back on everything, I realize that one of my mistakes was not insisting on terminating the contract after receiving the disappointing 1st round of edits. I received them early enough in the process to have allowed me to seek a new editor and still make my deadlines.

But my ultimate mistake was in choosing a service that does not allow the customer to know anything at all about the person editing their manuscript. This was particularly galling in this instance given the appeal to “the Big 5” by the Director of Kirkus Editorial in her defense of her anonymous editor’s skills. I believe that one forfeits the right to extol the credentials of one’s staff or contractors when you refuse to release any information as to who they are.

I hope my experience helps you form an informed opinion about whether to use Kirkus Editorial for your editing needs. I am happy to provide copies of all of my communications with Kirkus Editorial, as well as the edited manuscripts and editorial reports.

While it is no replacement for a human editor, I highly recommend AutoCrit, an online editing program for works of fiction. You can read my full review of AutoCrit here. One thing AutoCrit can be helpful with, in addition to its editorial function, is in gauging a prospective editor’s skills. You could have the editor submit a short sample edit and compare it to AutocCrit’s sample. This is what I will be doing in the future. Additionally, I recommend  my proofreader Chereese, who helped me at a moment’s call. She is affordable and pleasant to work with.

If you found this post useful, you might also enjoy my post:

Publishing: Odds and Ends and Lessons Learned.

 

Posted on by Khel Milam 4