Show Some Improvement

By Linda Yezak

My thirty-something grandson indie-published his first novel for the mainstream market this year. What an honor for me to be his mentor and editor. What a thrill to see his first book cover. His first book. His first royalty check, tiny though it was.

JP has great intuition for storytelling. He understands how to create different personalities, how to generate tension, how to cause page-turning anticipation. But he can’t write. He’s got a knack for the creative side of novel writing, but when it comes to the mechanics, he’s clueless. He tends toward verbosity and repetition. Punctuation, as it is for most newbie writers, is a definite weakness. Effective paragraphing is totally off his radar. And considering some of the things I’ve seen, I’m beginning to believe that is more suitable for an advanced class—a class which would include things like sentence construction, proper subject-object pronoun usage, verb agreement, and everything else involved in grammar and punctuation that he should’ve learned in high school.

I try to help all my clients overcome some of their weaknesses, and my favorite clients usually show improvement so their manuscripts don’t look quite like the car wreck in the image each time they send me a new one. Soon, certain things in both the creative and mechanics sides of writing become second nature, and they’re able to do them without thinking. For instance, once the idea of using the senses to help with the setting sinks in, some write them in without thought. Head-hopping goes away. A balance is struck between action and emotion.

I’m not saying they’ll no longer need an editor. There will always be ways to improve, but the car will have fewer dings and dents from one manuscript to the next.

And that’s what I wanted for JP, for him to take what I taught him and implement it. But if he read it at all, it seemed to go in one eye and out the other. His second manuscript was worse than the first, probably because he knew Grandma would fix it for him.

“When the day comes you actually have to pay for an edit,” I warned him, “you’ll be far better off financially sending a polished manuscript than paying someone to doctor what you sent at $40/hour.”

Like so many new authors, he just wants to get his story down. He just wants to write. Until the lightbulb turns on in his head, how much better his writing would be if he paid attention to his editor’s advice. I guess I’ll keep trying to teach him. Gotta save that boy some money any way I can.

Photo courtesy of Linda Yezak as seen on Facebook. Author unknown.

  

Linda W. Yezak lives with her husband and their funky feline, PB, in a forest in deep East Texas, where tall tales abound and exaggeration is an art form. She has a deep and abiding love for her Lord, her family, and salted caramel. And coffee—with a caramel creamer. Author of award-winning books and short stories, she didn't begin writing professionally until she turned fifty. Taking on a new career every half century is a good thing.

 

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