Be Your Own Editor

A question from Dennis:

Lisa,
I am looking for an editor for my 64,000-word manuscript. It’s a memoir that focuses on the effects on my life of the death of my 18-yr-old sister. She was murdered by a serial killer. Agents refer to the work as a true crime narrative. I think of true crime as focusing on the killer, crime scene, forensics, hunt, capture, etc. I deal with that, in detail, including the execution, but the real story is how the event could have changed me, made me cynical. Instead, I decided to honor her by changing my life in a positive way. Is that a true crime narrative? Can you suggest how I can go about finding “the right” editor?

A sensitive question that demands a sensitive answer. And a sensitive editor.

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Contributed by Mary Jensen, who knows much more about this genre than I do

It is common for fantasy characters to visit establishments such as inns and taverns. After all, everyone needs to eat and sleep on their travels. But do you know the difference between the two?

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Contributed by David B. Silva

You’re going to write a fantasy novel. You’ve come up with some characters, you’ve come up with some spells, you’ve even outlined your basic plot. Now what? How about research? The most important element of a fantasy novel is originality. Therefore the cardinal sin is not knowing what’s already out there.

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JC writes:

I write in the fantasy genre and there are certain expectations that readers
have where language is concerned. However, the copy-editor I’m working with has balked at my use of “upon,” to the point where she changed all of them into “on.” She must have done a search and replace all because “whereupon” became “whereon.” *sigh*

My question is: How can I convince her that “upon” sounds more appropriate after words like “wait,” “lay,” “set,” “look,” and in phrases like “upon the instant,” “evening was upon them”?

JC, your question brings up two other questions: Does good writing mean different things in different genres? and, Why do you have to “convince” your copyeditor of something?

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With the tremendous success of such memoirs as Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the 1990s and early 2000s saw an explosion in the genre. The boom was seen in the number of memoirs acquired by publishers, the number of titles shelved in the memoir section in bookstores, and, as a result, the number of memoirs unfolding on writers’ computer screens across the country. But the brutal truth is that without a few crucial elements, your memoir will have no chance of catching a literary agent’s eye, never mind becoming a bestseller.

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Some time ago, I was hired by a woman with a harrowing family story to tell. She desperately wanted to share her tale, believing that it would expose truths and help other people, but she recognized that her writing was not at a professional book author’s level. So I agreed to ghostwrite the manuscript.

I had never done such a job before—editing books was my thing, not writing them—and I soon came to regret it. The woman lived far from me, so I never met her, and she had a difficult time understanding the level of detail I needed from her to effectively turn the events of her life into a potential book. The experience led me to ask: Can a deeply personal story be told in a deeply personal, affecting, true way—by someone who didn’t live it?

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