This month, Janet joins Crys and JP for another book club, this time reading Editing Your Novel Structure: Tips, Tricks, and Checklists to Get You From Start to Finish by Bethany A. Tucker. They discuss hot takes, useful advice, and how they will incorporate this book’s lessons into their writing craft.
Question of the week: What were your hot takes for Editing Your Novel Structure: Tips, Tricks, and Checklists to Get You From Start to Finish? Share your answer here.
Show Notes
Editing Your Novel Structure: Tips, Tricks, and Checklists to Get You From Start to Finish by Bethany A. Tucker
Doing Diversity in Writing Podcast
So This Is Ever After by F.T. Lukens
Transcript
Crys: Hello friends. Welcome to episode 91 of the Write Away Podcast: Book Club Edition. We are recording this April 13th, 2022. I’m Crys Cain, and I’m here with my cohost…
JP: JP Rindfleisch.
And one of our regular crew of book club members. This has just been the month where everything has come up with everyone, but we do have our dear friend…
Janet: Janet Kitto.
Crys: Who has made it. And I’m actually super excited about this author because earlier today I messaged JP because I looked at the author’s name again, and I have been listening to the Doing Diversity in Writing Podcast, and I was like, I think this might be the Bethany from the podcast. And I verified, and it is.
And she mentioned that the end of the book in her bio that she’s planning on starting a diversity podcast. So the book was written before the podcast. So my first introduction to this author was through her wonderful podcast, Doing Diversity in Writing with her cohost Marielle. I believe her last name is Smith, but I have not gone to verify that, so forgive me if I’m wrong.
JP, would you give us a rundown on the book that we are discussing?
JP: Editing Your Novel’s Structure: Tips, Tricks, and Checklists to Get You From Start to Finish. So this book really breaks down each of the pieces of writing, from structure, character arc, plot, all those pieces together. And then it also talks about how to approach editing and be able to get your story from where it is now to a better state. And it has questionnaires at the end of every little section, which is really pleasant.
Crys: Okay, so first thoughts, what did y’all think of this book?
Janet: I think that this is a really incredibly rich book for beginners, because like JP just said, there’s lots of checklists in there. I love how she explained all the components of story structure. And she’s talking about finding your voice and she explains how she draws on physical sensations to convey emotions instead of using nouns to describe the feelings.
So she really does give a wonderful presentation for someone who is doing this editing job maybe for the first time. But then again, I found it really helpful to o.. There was a lot of new things in this book that I knew about, but I just always love to hear another perspective from another author.
JP: Yeah. For me, the first part of this book before it gets into like all of the structure pieces, I just wasn’t clicking with it. And I was like, I don’t know why I don’t like this so much, but I was trying to like it. And then, this book is really short, it’s 135 pages, so all of a sudden things started to pick up. And like the more that I processed each chapter and thought about it, the more I really liked this book overall, mostly for beginners, but even for myself.
It’s so short that it’s so easy to go back, read what you need to read, maybe even consider this in one of my next editing pieces either with a client or with my own stuff. Because it’s a really good resource, just to double check on some questions I didn’t think of before.
Crys: Yeah, I’d love to all the question lists. And once I knew it was the same Bethany that wrote this, I expected Things to be presented in a clear, not Overwhelming, undistracted manner. And I was not disappointed. Cause that’s how they present the podcast with very complex ideas, take it in bite sized pieces. And she says a few times like this topic is too big for this book. It’s a whole thing on its own, but here’s the key factors that you’re going to look at. And I think one of the things this book does even better than teaching you how to edit yourself, it gives you an idea of what to expect from working with the developmental editor as well.
JP: Yeah, definitely.
Crys: One of the things that I highlighted and she didn’t say it this way, but I think I’m going to add this into how I question authors when I’m working with them as an editor, she said and I highlighted, “Keep in mind that readers of fiction, mainly read for escape, not work.”
And I’ve worked with so many authors who try to do something neat because they’re trying to do something technically proficient and trying something new. And that’s always a great idea when you’re in the drafting playing phase. And it’s something that you’re stretching yourself to do. But it may not work out and that’s okay.
And the question I want to start asking authors is, does this technique or this pattern of relaying information or whatever it is, does this add to the enjoyment of the reader or does it make them work?
JP: Yeah. Yeah. And I like that approach to it because I’ve seen that before in my stuff and in reading others, just those little flares that are added that don’t do so hot.
Janet: I know. I highlighted the same thing as Crys, and this I’m actually taking from the book.
“The reader only needs to know what’s important for understanding the story.” I can agree with you there on that, JP, that there’s a lot of stuff that we think we need in there because it makes the story for us. But you have to think about what does the reader need to know.
JP: Yeah, so I’m writing basically an academy urban fantasy series. There’s tons of info dump moments. There are tons of just in a classroom, you need to learn something, but that is so boring as a reader. And so it’s how do you make that engaging? When I go through and I edit, I asked the question, what is the actual information that needs to be conveyed and how much of this can be removed?
And I’m focusing on removing 70% of what’s actually being said. And then I’m also asking the question, what does my main character actually want out of this situation? Cause are they actually listening to the teacher? Are they giving heart eyes to someone else? Is there someone behind them that’s annoying them? What are other aspects of the room that are impacting the wants and needs of the other characters? Because no one wants to read an info dump. They don’t want to read backstory about a character, they want to get into the action and kind of get into the moment. Now there are places and times for those, but not pages and pages.
Crys: Janet, you said you had quite a few notes. What’s one of your big takeaways?
Janet: This is something that I’m working on in my current manuscript is, do the characters fail? Failure is essential. And it’s has your character failed enough? And so I have my character in a situation where she says no once to something. And I need to go back and she needs to say no more than once, but I need to also advance the story with that no, something has to change. She can’t just keep saying no. So that was something that I took a lot of interest in is, have you pushed your characters far enough?
Crys: Another tool I’d like to add to that particular element is one that’s used in improv acting. An improv acting tool is that when something goes wrong, they say, “yes but.” it’s “yes, but something else bad happens” or “no, and something more bad happens.” and so even if you give your character a win, you also hand them a loss.
JP: Yeah. That’s how stories carry forward. In the simplest form of that, when you talk about like therapy and having conversations with difficult people or coming up with ideas and brainstorming, it all comes down to saying “yes and” because that’s how you keep a conversation moving forward.
If you say no to everything, you’re going to cut it off. And if you take that into storytelling, if you say no to everything, your character is not going to move anywhere. There always has to be this “and” or “but” that gets added in too because otherwise that’s the end of the story.
One thing I really liked was the discussion around the soggy middles. The diagnosis of that may not actually be a fault of the middle, but it may be a fault of the setup. And so the first 25% is really setting yourself up for the middle. And if you aren’t clarifying your stakes, and if you aren’t ramping up the tension within the first 25%, that’s sometimes why your middle gets quote unquote soggy or where things start to taper off. And I found that really interesting because that wasn’t really something that I was considering as much until it was mentioned here.
Crys: I just read a book called, So This is Ever After by F.T. Lukens, and this did not have that problem, but it had a much shorter set up then 25%. And so in some ways it feel jarring. So the setup of this book is you come into the story right after the hero has lopped off the big, bad King’s head. So the traditional end of the hero’s journey. And now they have to figure out what to do.
And jumping in at that place in the story felt very jarring in a lot of ways because there’s this team that’s really together that we don’t really know. And it took me two times of picking the book up to actually get into it. But once I did, I’ve been sitting here thinking, okay, like what was the full setup? And the full setup, Like the inciting incident, I think is about where they realized that the heir they hoped would take the throne does not actually exist and they are now saddled with running the country themselves. So the setup is a bit longer than it feels because you’re coming in so late in our traditional storytelling, and yet they still managed to do everything very quickly.
JP: I’m very glad I reached that point in the story because I’m currently reading that. So you didn’t ruin anything for me.
Crys: I debated about sharing it. It’s not a super big spoiler because it is very early on. And it’s like one of the premises of the story.
JP: Oh yeah, definitely. And you’re so right. Like to me, when I was reading that, it felt very much like I was sitting down in a room of like D and D players and they were just wrapping up. I liked it, like I could get into that story, but it’s definitely jarring. It was very different than anything else I’ve seen before. So yeah, I totally agree.
Janet: That’s what I’m wondering about a book like that, are a lot more authors pushing that envelope? We talk about these set points where readers have this expectation, I don’t want anything really big to happen until… I’m expecting it here at 25%. So is there a lot more books being written this way to push all those numbers?
Crys: I don’t think so. So the advice generally given is start at the latest possible point, right? And with that story in particular, I’m like, is there any earlier they could have started? No, not without making it a completely different story. And that’s one of the things I’ve been struggling with one of my manuscripts is at what point is the appropriate point to start my character story.
And Bethany in the book talks about the book ends with her beginning and starting of the story. And that’s why I’m having so much trouble figuring out what’s the appropriate ‘this is the latest possible point I can start this story’ because of the particular kind of ending I want. Because I’m like I could start the story past the big characters big crux that like throws her out of her village and like she’s in the midst of it. I could start it there, but that’s going to be a very different story than if I start the story with her and her family, and we see the bonding, and we see the trauma event happen, and move on from there. So it very much just depends on the kind of story you’re wanting to tell.
So This is Ever After, the point of the story is the romance. It’s a romance book, it just is. And for that story to be told, like the beginning of the book starts, they killed the bad guy, and the main character is like, great, now I can tell my crush that I like him. And that’s the thing, like that is the entire thrust of this story is him trying to tell his crush that he likes him and everything getting in the way of that. It couldn’t have started any earlier because it would have been setting up a completely different arc.
So I think it’s rare that a story starts off in the midst of such intensity like that. But if you think of The Matrix, one of my favorite for like weird like beginnings, we start two or three times it feels like different stories, where we have the phone call that we can’t see and Neo. And you almost like you forget about the other beginning once you’re in the new beginning. That’s super rare. That’s super advanced storytelling. And I just don’t think we have a lot of stories doing that successfully. I’m sure there’s a lot of stories out there doing it very unsuccessfully and we just don’t hear about them.
JP: Yeah. that’s the crux of it. If you want to do something too extreme, you’re probably not going to get the readers.
Janet: Yeah. And I think too, just to throw in that we’re talking about something that you’re editing. We’re not talking about something that you’re thinking about writing, because really you should just write it because you don’t know how it’s going to work until it’s written. So yeah, just the editing side.
Crys: I think one of the most important things that Bethany talks about because it’s not something I generally have to deal with with my fluffy romance, and that is she says edit subject matter first. And what she meant by that is if combat or medical or archeology, like whatever it is, if there’s a specialty that’s super important to the rhythm, the plot, and the knowledge of your book, edit that first. Because if you’ve got it wrong and you need to fix it, it could change your whole plot. And I’ve had a few times where I’ve had to change what I wanted to do, because it didn’t fit reality as far as like, well, that wouldn’t happen in a police force or a medical institution, or that’s not how wounds work. I don’t know. I write half fantasies, I can do just about whatever I want. But occasionally something pops up where I’m like, okay, I can’t do it that way and I have to change it. And the deeper and more important that is to how your story works, the more important it is to edit that first. And I think a lot of people don’t even think to mention that.
JP: Yeah. And that’s a very good way of starting off or at least figuring out what to do next, because yeah, if you’re trying to do something that is completely against the grain of medical science then like your whole story probably doesn’t work in that sense.
Crys: And this is honestly one of those points at which the self-editing process is about the only time where you are going to get the chance to address these, because chances are your developmental editor is not going to be an expert on those subjects. They’re going to be looking at story structure and not factual evidence, and the factual evidence can change your story structure. So that, I think, is one of the most important, but like quiet takeaways from this book.
Are there any last thoughts?
JP: Well, I would say too, like if anyone is writing anything that they need to reach out to an expert on, I would always check out your nearby university. Look at a list of professors because I’m not going to lie, like of the number of professors that I’ve emailed, a lot of them I went to college with, but they love the strange things. They love the weird questions and the things that kind of push the envelope as to like what their what their field of study is. So I just cold email them and tell them like, Hey, I’m writing this story, I have this thing in it, and I just want to see if that’s accurate. The worst thing that’s going to happen is you’ll get a no or you’ll get nothing.
Janet: Bethany does a really good job of explaining alpha and beta readers and the benefits of having those kinds of people have their eyes on your manuscript. So again for a new writer, this book covers a lot of those details.
But this is totally random. Okay. I have to bring this up. There’s somewhere in about two thirds through the book, and she’s talking about watching movies and she says, wash your brain. And I take this so, literally I’m like, how do you wash your brain? What do you do? How is that done?
Crys: Go take a sound bath. Yeah, you should look at sound baths.
But no, but I think for the most part I think of it as like when you’ve got a dirty rag, you’re like, okay, all the ideas are in the rag, right? Like we shoved them all in the rag and that’s like our working rag. I don’t know. And like when you’re cleaning, you have to rinse it out so that you fill it with other more stuff that isn’t the stuff you’ve been working with. So you fill it from the well and then you go back and fill it back up with the mess of your manuscript and then you fill it again, that’s how I think about it. So reading other books, watching movies, Listening to music, especially things that don’t have anything to do with your book.
I totally agree with that sentiment too, about gaining and having the input of other stories either through different books or through different media. Because whenever I get a consultation call with a newer author, one of my questions is what are you reading? Or give me three books that your book would sit right next to. Because I’m challenging them to figure out, are they reading in their genre? Are they able to pick apart where their story actually fits? Because that’s really important when editing your novel and figuring out how it is going to fit in with the rest of the world, so you can market it if that’s what you want to do. And I’m going to assume a lot of people want to do that. So that’s why it’s important for me to ask those questions. And I think that it’s really important for authors to be having that input and reading in their genre.
Janet: And asking their editors what they’re reading, because then you’re going to know if like you’re both on the same page.
JP: Yeah, definitely. Yup. As a last thing that I want to say, I really appreciate the section about race, minorities, and disabilities, just because it gives a list of questions to ask about your novels that you may or may not have been thinking about, or they may be in the back of your mind. But really seeing those questions listed and reflecting back on them when you’re editing, I think is super important. Obviously that’s the first step, if you really want to take more steps towards that, you would reach out to anyone that you’re representing within your novel and figure out different methods there, that she lists way better than I could in the book.
Crys: And I want to highly encourage anyone who appreciates that section, which is everyone, but especially those who found that section really useful, to check out the podcast that she co-hosts Doing Diversity in Writing. We’ll have that link in the show notes for sure. Season one is very much about why writing diversity is important and the fears and a lot of headspace around that.
And then in season two, they go into some of the publishing challenges and they just so all over the board. They’re in the process of writing a book on the topic as well. So definitely be looking out for that cause their podcast is super, super easy to understand, yet nuanced and helpful.
All right, friends. Thank you so much for making it tonight and enjoying this read with us. If you would like updates on our book of the month, and what ones are coming up, and when we’re recording, you can check us out at patreon.com/writeawaypodcast. The link will be in the show notes.
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