How Can You Tell When It's GOOD Advice?

Yesterday I went to my writing group, where two of my fellow writers had submitted pages, and the rest of us told those (un?)lucky two what we thought.

Sometimes we agreed, which is always reassuring, both as a writer and a critiquer--it means there's probably something legitimate in the criticism.

And sometimes we didn't. At all. Or sometimes we offered wildly different potential solutions to perceived problems. Like mine was "maybe more dialogue" and someone else's was "if she passed out from pain, that would explain things"-level different.

Killing Your Darlings

We're all supposed to do this. Go in with a blood-red pen and slash through all the words that we love--GOD how we love them--but which aren't doing what we need them to.

Maybe they're part of a hilarious scene that connects to nothing else in the larger work.

Or lyrical and challenging and lovely but the character they're describing/being spoken by should be cut from your MS.

Or they're pretty-good, and have one REALLY awesome metaphor buried somewhere in the creamy center, but the entire surrounding scene is just unnecessary, under-baked novel-dough. It's the incipient spare-tire of your novel. Verbal saddle-bags.

REVISIONS.

So the current young adult book has probably been revised fully 10 times, partially a couple dozen more. I got it to a point where I wasn't happy with it--when is anyone ever happy with it?--but where I knew that I no longer knew what to do with it.

This is when you're supposed to query, right?

Long, boring, recognizable-to-all-authors story short, I was ready to leave it on the back burner, at least for a little while, because I couldn't fix it alone.

Then I really and truly lucked out. I got COPIOUS notes on the manuscript from an agent, the kind of notes that make yet another revision feel worth it, since I have someone confirming my instincts about where it's going off the rails, and I was able to move it onto the front of the stove again (has anyone ever tried to extend this metaphor beyond the back burner before? It's a little awkward...).

Which brings me to:

REVISIONS ARE THE HARDEST THING EVER.

WARNING: Writing Ruins Reading

Apologies for the click-bait title; it's not QUITE as dire as all that.

It's just mostly dire.

Now don't get me wrong--I'm still the kind of person who falls in love with books. Pushes them on every friend I talk to while the afterglow is still strong. Stacks new ones around the house, in tottering towers, all of them "ohmygod I have to read this right now," and none of them capable of preventing me from buying yet ANOTHER title the next time I pass a book store. Thinks about the characters, sometimes months later, as though they're real people who are real-life friends with me, capable of thinking about me back. All of that is me.

But the longer I write, the more I find myself incapable of turning off my "writer's brain" when I'm reading. I'll come across a sentence that's very expository and an alarm starts blaring internally, "INFO DUUUuuuuUUUUUMMP!" Or I'll catch a character looking in a mirror early on, just so the author has a chance to describe the length and texture of her hair, and the deep wells, or velvet pools, or piercing steel of her eyes. Cliche. Easy. Or I'll read a lovely description of something tangential to the story, like a sunset or a puppy's sorrow or abdominal muscles, and I find myself thinking "So? Who cares?" EVEN THOUGH I LIKED THAT PART.

What Kind of Editor are You?

Partially because I'm hoping to some day soon be working with a professional, I-work-at-a-publishing-house, this-is-my-day-job editor--and even more because I've been forced to deal with I-know-better, how-about-I-just-rewrite-your-work, emphatically non-professional editors at my current day job--the idea has been rolling around my brain lately: what kind of editor am I? What kind do I need?

As far as my personal editing style, I think I'm best at the small picture. A sentence that's not working right I can spot--and fix--in a blink. Paragraph and even chapter level problems are easy-peasy (is it too long? too short? not following? I know the answer).

What's harder, and what I've been trying to train myself to do better, is seeing the forest for the trees.