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In fiction (especially long fiction) your greatest peril is losing your perspective—getting so lost in the interior world of the story, which exists mostly in your head, that you lose track of how it actually appears on paper. The cure is fresh eyes—or ways to look at your own work with fresh eyes.
What might be better than an editor as such, in the early stages, is simply a reader. The reader's role is descriptive, not prescriptive. S/he does not (or should not) make recommendations, but instead faithfully reports on hir reading experience. What you're looking for is Maybe a few more paragraphs of backstory here, but instead This didn't ring true: I got bored here: I got confused there.
Under no circumstances should a reader rewrite any portion of the piece s/he's reading: s/he's not there to tell you what s/he would have done, but rather to tell what you just did. (Because you, being too close, have no fucking clue.)
You, for your part, may not argue with the reader. The reader is never wrong: how can reactions be wrong? (If your nose wrinkles at the scent of garlic and mine does not, that does not mean that either of us is mistaken.)
Obviously, your reader is someone you should pick with extreme care—someone whose judgment you trust, to whom you can defer: someone who cannot be bullied: someone with no personal ego-stake in the product. In short, you should never use another writer as your reader unless you have no choice.
Know what criticism to take on board and what to ignore. Stephen King suggests showing your work to a large number of people—ten, say. If three or more of them comment on the same thing, you should focus on fixing that one thing. If all or most of them complain about different things, you can safely ignore all of them.
In any case, your job in this process is to listen, smile, nod, and shut the fuck up. Resist the urge to explain your work: it's a waste of energy better spent on improving same. Remember that you will not be able to sit down with the editor and explain to her or him the effect that your story is supposed to have, nor will it be possible for you to personally visit every person who purchases your book and set them straight. A bad story may be brilliantly-defended after the fact, but it remains a bad story for all that. The work must explain itself.
A useful trick for seeing your own text afresh in the absence of an outside reader: print a hard copy of your work and go over it sentence-by-sentence in four different-colored highlighter pens. You might highlight dialogue in blue, description in yellow, action in pink, and introspection & internal monologue in green, for example.
Then spread your pages out over a large table or a floor and examine the shape of the thing as a whole, from a distance. How's the ratio? Does any single mode of prose predominate unduly? Is the piece balanced for what you want it to be? |
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