To all editors out there--you're bloody AMAZING!

I got into trouble on Amazon recently. I joined a group of writers with the aim to write a collection of shorts for a novel. I was designated 'gatekeeper' (knocking back the bad, and allowing the good to pass through). The stories were interesting, that's just keep it at that. But I couldn't say no to anyone! The passion, the heat, love and tears had gone into those stories and so I decided to edit them, every last one.

And some of you may know, I take it VERY seriously. I'm anal about commas, apostrophes and all things punctuation--as one should be in writing. I'm sharp on POV, dialogue and tightening up.

The only thing I'm not too hot on is grammar and spelling (why I hire editors for my own work, and probably why the odd error is found on this blog).

Anyway, I settled down to edit the entries often staying up late to get finished (there was a deadline), and I think I forgot that these stories weren’t mine. I highlighted every little POV slip, put an exclamation against any errant comma, made comments against over-wordiness then basically rewrote the entire thing!

Did I say I was anal about editing?

It didn’t go down well with the authors. Where’s my voice, they cried.

Er, I wrote it out, said I. Want it back?

Well, duh, yeah.

I unedited, and they were happy.

My point, apart from discovering how anal I was about editing, is that the next time you see your editor give them a big sloppy kiss.

They deserve it!

Come here, John! MuuuuuuaaaaaaaaaaaaahhHHHH !

Get the bad guy right

by 
Clive West

Enter the cafe: VBT

Have I missed a comma out in my title? I think not.

Ask yourself what the following have in common:

• A fairy tale
• A romance
• A horror story
• A police procedural
• A Victorian melodrama
• A children's play
• A spaghetti western

... and so on.

The answer is that such stories, disparate as they may be in content, style and demographics, will almost certainly possess a truly despicable villain. The only question is whether that villain lives in a house in the forest and gobbles up lost children or whether they've seduced our beautiful and headstrong heroine at the time of her greatest vulnerability.

But what really makes a good villain?

Naturally the specifics relate to the book itself but there are many lessons to be learned from popular culture - not just of our generation but also of our recent ancestors. Look at the logic behind what was possible not so many years ago because, as a species, we haven't significantly changed in the meantime. In bygone days, theatre audiences weren’t able to see much of the stage, by-and-large wouldn't be particularly well educated, and would universally want something that they could let off steam over. To coin a phrase, they wanted someone to boo and the louder the better.

From a modern writer’s perspective, the first decision to be taken is whether to have multiple villains or a single one. If the answer's 'a number' then the next question is from the book's perspective - are you going to see things from the point-of-view of the heroes or the villains? If it's the former then the villains should possess minimal individual characteristics as giving them too much personality will reduce their effectiveness; the reader will begin to identify with them.

If you’re going to write from the point of view of the bad guys then, yes, you do need to develop their characters and this is where you can have some fun. As with the principle of theatre, it's perfectly permissible to go a little bit over the top. The reader isn't likely to want someone who's a 'bit on the bad side' doing things which 'aren't very nice'. They want someone really evil doing mind-bogglingly horrible stuff. NB this doesn't mean a splatter-fest - there needn't be an ounce of gore in the storyline for this criterion to be fully satisfied. Your truly bad guy can be the evil seducer or the wicked witch just as easily as they can be the mad psychopath or the bandito with the bad teeth and an even worse attitude.

With a group of bad guys try hard to think of something which links them. Don't forget that altruism won't figure highly on their agenda so come up with a good reason why they stick together - e.g. through fear, greed, power etc. The higher the level of 'bad-ness', the stronger the glue you're going to need to hold them together so work on this before you start putting 'pen to paper'.

A book without a solitary bad guy is likely to be insipid yet a book without a good guy isn’t of necessity a bad read. This is because we still like to be able to boo our villains – good and loud.

Now, there's a message there somewhere.

Editing is an art

by

Steve Evans

Editing is a strange beast. People write about it as if its meaning is obvious, yet for someone who does it professionally, as I do, it's not at all obvious. Put another way, editing covers a range of sins of commission and omission, and there are people who focus on different aspects of the art.

And it is an art, or so I think. Most professional editors do most of their editing subconsciously as they rip through a text, correcting spelling, grammar, syntax, while at the same time thinking, or trying to think, about the "big picture" - what the piece is meant to be about, how it can be improved. So I reckon that when people are working like that, on a number of levels simultaneously, they are artists. That's true even though they are participating in a social process, rather than creating themselves in the dark garret of their imaginations.

It's probably unfair to say so, but much of my best editing is done using the highlighting function of the mouse cursor, followed by a deft manoeuvre* with the delete key. I'm really quite good at this.

No writer writes without doing some "self-editing". A really successful writer, whose hard copy books are flying off the shelves of airport bookstores, will have editors begging to massage her or his work. Those of us who are not so favoured will do it pretty much alone.

There is a difference between an editor and a reader. I have a few readers who read my stuff, and give me (hopefully) unvarnished opinions. I don't have an editor, and wouldn't pay for one.

Readers are important, partly because they help give a writer perspective that is easy to lose when buried up to one's shoulders in the muck of a manuscript. When people argue in favour of editors this is primarily what they have in mind, I think. But someone who does a lot of editing of other people's work develops this for their own writing, or should - a built-in bullshit detector.

I came to fiction somewhat late in life after many years working in daily journalism, and chose the thriller genre for what might seem somewhat arrogant reasons but that actually concealed a lack of self-confidence: my line was (and is) that I have a "serious purpose in a frivolous genre". I admire writers who work in this territory like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Elmore Leonard, not so much for their "hard-boiled" approach but the seriousness of their purpose. The best thriller writing surpasses the limitations of the genre and I suppose that was my aim from the first. Now I am thinking about writing in a different way.

Experiencing things first hand is good, but it is impossible for a writer to experience everything in life in order to write about it. At least one thriller writer murdered his wife and then wrote it up, but I don't think this is recommended. Doing desk research is necessary, and occasionally direct questioning of experts is possible and desirable. For me, most of the sub-genres that shuffle under the rubric of the thriller are implicitly boring as they focus on the "real detail" - police procedurals for example. Police work in real life is quite mundane 99 per cent of the time. It's also pretty safe, even in countries like the US with a reputation for casual violence. Emotion is where it's at.

One manual for fiction writing that I admire, says that your book is finished when you are sick of it. That's pretty good advice.

* I live in an antipodean society whose spelling and syntax are very different from dominant American usage, and even from the "parent" English. Anyone who is put off by it - sorry, it's just too hard to put into another guise.