Live Journal Idol Season 9 Week 15 Chekov’s gun

[puppetmaker]

One of my many jobs over the years was working at Del Rey Books, which is a division of Ballentine, which is a division of Randomhouse.

Part of my job was to read manuscripts and write up a report on them for various senior editors and the like.

I read a lot of manuscripts. I am a fast reader and my write-ups earned me praise from several quarters for their simplicity and ease of information.

I was acquainted with the concept of Chekov’s Gun a creative writing class I took at Emory. And it did come into play when I analyzed manuscripts for work.

Here are a few things that I looked for in a manuscript that made it worth passing on to a senior editor for their look see.

I always gave a manuscript two chapters to engage me. I started by given the writer half a manuscript to convince me that something is in there. Eventually I learned that the first two chapters couldn’t engage me then the reader wasn’t going to read to the good part of the book either. And I was and still am considered a generous manuscript reader.

Formatting does count especially if it was not an electronic manuscript that I could reformat to make it easier to read. If I am looking at a badly formatted manuscript, I am wondering how much care has been taken with the words on the page. Appearance does count both for the author and against the author.

Bad grammar would pull me out of a manuscript faster than the formatting. Part of the problem of being an editor is that it is very hard, try impossible, to shut off that part of the brain that keeps correcting part of the manuscript. Once I am spending more time trying to figure out how something should be written rather than the writing itself, there is a problem.

Spelling didn’t have to be perfect but at least make sure that the character’s name is spelled consistently. I once thought there were twins in a manuscript I was reading until I figured out that it was one character with two different spellings of the same name and honestly the manuscript would had been better if there had been twins in it.

Then there was a content of the manuscript.

Believe it or not, we can tell when it is fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off. We are pretty savvy to that kind of stuff. So if an author is going to do that, the bar is going to be set that much higher to not make the piece derivative and original to make us want to take a chance on publishing it. Admitting it was fanfiction in the cover letter was almost an automatic ‘no’ from the publisher. It was an automatic ‘no’ if we published the subject material like Star Wars.

Consistency is a must. If you have a magic system, make sure you know how it works. Having the rules change in midstream is very distracting. Characters can grow within a novel and that is a good thing but sudden changes for no reason are jarring and off-putting. There was one that I was reading that turned the hero into the villain for no reason except that they, the author, seemed to not like the hero anymore. There was no plot reason I could see. I have a sneaking suspicion that the hero/villain was based on a real person and that the person when from hero to villain in the author’s eyes.

There is such thing as too much description. If you have to go on for three paragraphs about the curtains, I am going to be setting your manuscript down and stepping away for a while. Yes, that did happen. We don’t need the entire ecosystem of the author’s imaginary planet unless it directly affects the story.

There is also too little description so I really can’t get a picture of where the author is trying to place me. The author may have been to Paris and has a picture in their mind’s eye of what they were seeing but if I have never been to Paris it might be good to tell me a bit of what I am seeing. This holds doubly for those things in the realms that don’t exist in our space-time continuum.

Then there is Chekov’s gun. Something that is introduced in the first act that if it isn’t used by the third, one walks away with not how wonderful the story is and how amazing the characters are but why was that gun there? What was its purpose? Was it a symbol of something or ?

I know somewhere the idea of the cliffhanger with books seems like a good idea but if the author, especially a first time author, doesn’t give the reader some satisfying conclusion to the story being told then it is a hard sell to both the publisher and the readers. They need some reward for reading through the book.

There are a lot of hurdles to overcome to get an editor interested in an author’s manuscript. There are even more getting the reading public interested in the published book. But if the author can do all that, then they will be among the ranks of the published.

I hope you have enjoyed a peek behind the editorial curtain and will vote for me when the time comes.

Comments

[bleodswean.livejournal.com]

I REALLY enjoyed this peek behind the editorial curtain! Thank you for sharing.

This new YA thing with cliffhangers is a terrible trend, imnho. I've been "tricked" twice and was so insulted that I have not returned to either author's/publisher's sequel. Ick.

[whipchick.livejournal.com]

Yeah - I picked up Dorothy Must Die, and felt entirely ripped off that it ended on a big cliffhanger with zero story arc resolution!

[veronica-rich.livejournal.com]

The grammar thing spoke to me, because as a newspaper editor I have the same problem. Also on the spelling - I have this one contributor who, I swear, is trying to drive me into an early grave by giving me different spellings of names in the same piece almost every time. She's better than she used to be, because I yelled at her (nicely) to knock it off - but it still happens. (Like yours, these articles would sometimes make more sense with two different people too. Sometimes three!)

As for the fanfic thing - how do you explain 50 Shades of Grey? ;-)

Thanks for the advice!

[roina-arwen.livejournal.com]

Two chapters sounds very generous, all things considered. :)

Good advice for sure!

[eternal-ot.livejournal.com]

A wonderful read..and thanks for sharing these tips and tricks..gonna be helpful for sure..:)

[adoptedwriter.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I will take this advice/ insight and refer to it often. AW

[waltzmatildah.livejournal.com]

Ooh, thank you for this peek! Very informative.

[beeker121.livejournal.com]

This was fascinating. I'm certain two chapters was sometimes two chapters too much.

[penpusher.livejournal.com]

With this approach, any writer would be delighted to have you as their reader! Any GOOD writer, that is. But the bad ones should be thankful as well! Even more thankful, actually.

I just sat through a very bad film called "Very Good Girls." I'll probably post a review of it, it was just that horrible. But your approach to the work is similar in my approach to seeing that movie. There is a "benefit of the doubt" approach when going in.

This is definitely Manuscript Writing 101! So thanks for sharing this with the world, and maybe we need to link this to some social media so that others can see...

[dmousey.livejournal.com]

Thank you for letting us into your world!

A few persnikity things, third paragraph, I think your missing a 'from' or 'in' after Chekhov's gun.

The paragraph where you're talking about hero changing to villian, you need to change when to went.

Other than that I appreciate this greatly! :)

[n3m3sis43.livejournal.com]

This was a really interesting read!

[rayaso.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed reading about what a manuscript reader looks for, and better, what a reader hates. Some of it seems so basic, like spelling a character's name. As the writer, you get to choose the name and the spelling, so there is no excuse for this type of mistake.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

This was quite interesting. Personally, I think all writers should have to do slush pile reading as part of their writerly apprenticeships.

Thing about Chekov's Gun as a literary trope set in stone is that it seems to stand in direct opposition to Tom Wolf's "new journalism" sentiments on the use of status detail.

I think foreshadowing may be more important in a short story -- by definition compact -- than it is in a novel.

[jem0000000.livejournal.com]

I give them one chapter, and I'm not even editing -- if it doesn't hook in one chapter, back to the library it goes.

[eska818.livejournal.com]

If you have to go on for three paragraphs about the curtains

I feel for you, so badly. <3 Thanks for sharing this inside look!

[halfshellvenus.livejournal.com]

All of these points are well-taken, but the note about cliffhangers is something I run into much more often these days. So many people seem to have it mind that they want to write a trilogy, and insist upon each book leading to the next. But if that book does not also stand alone, or finish its own arcs satisfactorily, I will feel cheated. It's like bait-and-switch on the reader.

[uncawes.livejournal.com]

Love how you explained your thought process to us.
You're more generous than me. I don't give them two chapters most of the time.
Except Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.