Ep. 171: What To Do With a Revision Letter (and where are the memoirists?) Bonus MiniEpisode

Ep. 171: What To Do With a Revision Letter (and where are the memoirists?) Bonus Mini-Episode!

Transcript

Rachael Herron: Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron, and this is a bonus episode brought to you directly by my $5 Patreons. If you’d like me to be your mini coach for less than a large mocha Frappuccino, you can join too at www.patreon.com/rachael

Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode 171 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. So pleased that you’re here with me today as I come to you from the co-working space, which I mentioned in the last episode. I love it so much that it actually hurts. So this is a mini episode, and I’ve got some questions that have been backing up here that I want to answer. So let’s jump right into it. Hopefully I’ll get through at least two, maybe three. 

[00:00:45] Okay, first is from Mel Kleimo. Where do memoirs hang out? Do you have any recommendations for where I can start looking online for this tribe? I do have a great group of romance writers locally and nationally, New Zealand. Whoo. But while they stray into thrillers and fantasy sci-fi, I am clearly not hanging out in the right places to find memoir writers. And I’m too far away to come to a university courses. I wish you could know. I have a travel memoir drafted. And I’m keen to find some like-minded critique partners to swap with and get building my memoir muscles. 

[00:00:21] Okay. So that is a really interesting and tricky question, which is why I am enjoying answering it right now. There used to be a, an association, which I think is still around in the United States, which I believe is open for everyone called the National Association of Memoir Writers. I just Google that, and if you go to any of their pages, it looks like they have lost their URL, and now there’s somebody trying to tell you to download things that you shouldn’t download. So, that’s no good. But they do still have a Facebook group. Let me glance at it really quick. I pulled it up. It has 3000 people in it, and if you Google National Association of Memoir Writers, join the Facebook group. It looks like it’s pretty healthy. They have monthly round tables, there are different talks that you can get into teleseminars and the reason I recommend that is just because it is nice to play it, have a place to start connecting. Being in these kinds of groups is great. But finding your peers is better. So what I recommend is that you find a Facebook group like this or some other kind of group, and start to get to know the players inside. If you find some memoirs that you love, follow them on social media. Start leaving them comments. I know this sounds like a lot of work, but it actually works and is a form of networking. 

Marion Roach Smith has a podcast now it’s called Qwerty. The like the keyboard letters, a Q, W, E, R, T, Y, Qwerty, and she interviews incredible Mel Morris and get to know them, follow them around, see where they are hanging out, see what they’re posting online. You can actually really become pals with people just online. By following them around like Mel, I feel like I know you because you and I have been around each other. Oh wow. Now, so that is a good way to do it. I don’t really find any other memoir groups easily available. And I’m not sure why that is.

So if anybody listening to this has something that they know about, please come to www.howdoyouwrite.net and drop us a comment. Now, I’ll be sure to pass that on to you. But other than that memoir are so, we’re hard to find. We hide, we hide in plain sight and write all of our truths down. So, yeah, that’s what I’ve got for you right now. If I hear more, I will let you know. So good question.

[00:04:04] Let’s see, Maggie! Hello Maggie! Maggie says, have officially hired an editor for the first time, first book, who will get the manuscript in mid-February and get back to me in mid-March with an editorial assessment after reading all the, yeah, so it was, this is, this sounds like it’s a structural edit. Some questions for you in the, how do you write community, when you’re working progress is off being edited, do you suggest you keep working on it? Or put it away and jump into something else. Do you have tips or suggestions of how to get the most out of your experience? Down the line when you get into needing a line edit? Do writers usually hire the same editor again for consistency, slash relationship or go with someone different to get another set of professional eyes on it? As you are essentially paying someone to tell you what’s wrong with. And hopefully write with it. Is there a way to prepare yourself to sit with constructive criticism of your first novel that wanting to quit?

[00:05:02] Okay. I know that is a rhetorical, not answerable, but definitely a big fear of mine. I have loved everyone’s questions on the new bonus episodes. Thank you for offering them. You are very welcome, Maggie, and I really wanted to get to your question because I know that time has been running out as you’re reading for your editorial letter to come back in the mail or in the virtual mail as it probably is coming. So you’ve got a bunch of questions in here. People who are listening and wondering about these different kinds of edits, the biggest, and I consider one of the most important, they’re all important, but what the most important is that developmental edit is also known as a structural edit. It is also known as a, Oh, what’s the word? Content edit. Because writers have a million different words for a million different things. There’s no reason to why we did that. We just call things differently. So that’s the, that’s the thing. It is, the 30,000-foot view of your book, the, the editor looks at how it works if all of your, it’s looking for plot problem, this looking for character arc problems, this particular edit is looking for, does this book make sense? Does it have a theme? Does it have a point? What is that point and how effectively is that point being given? So it’s a really, really big and very important edit. And Maggie, I’m going to skip around in your question. When you say how do you prepare yourself to sit with constructive criticism on this first book without wanting to quit? First of all, I think most people feel this way. When you get that revision letter, that first big revision letter, you’ll want to quit. It’s hard because this editor is someone that you’re either working with at a traditional publisher and they’ve bought your book and they’re working with you on it, or there’s somebody you hired. In either case, this person is important and their opinion matters in a way, that your friend’s opinion don’t matter, that your husband’s opinion does not matter. This is an authority figure who will be coming to you to tell you how your book is broken. And that is because that’s what we need them to do. A structural, a structural or content edit will never come back to you and say, great job. Nailed it. And we should not believe it if they do. Every once in a while, editors will say little, you know, leave little smiley faces or a little ha-ha’s.

[00:07:37] But I’ve had editors who never leave any positive feedback, just negative feedback, because that is what they’re paid to do. That is their job. So, yeah, you’ll want to quit. Everybody wants to quit when they get that first revision letter. I still want to quit when I get revision letters. And knowing that, I think for me is the biggest part of the battle, your very first revision letter, I have heard it described as like hearing a nuclear explosion being in the impact range of a nuclear explosion. You will not be able to hear for three or four days. There will just be a ringing in your ears as you try to figure out can all of this negative input into my book be true. None of this can be true, can it? I am not a failure. I didn’t write a completely failed book. And the truth is, no, you didn’t. There’s a lot of your book that works, but again, your editor, her job is to point out what doesn’t work. And it is this explosion. It’s, it’s hard to imagine how difficult it is, and I say that with a laugh in my voice because it gets better. And I’ll tell you that too. That’s another good thing to expect. Give yourself two, three, four days to sit on the letter. Don’t start working. Don’t do anything in the manuscript. Just sit with it. Amazingly, three or four days later, usually I start to think, well, you know, that whole letter is crap, except maybe for that first point she raised, maybe I could make that a little bit better.

[00:09:10] And then the next day I think, Oh, maybe her second point isn’t that terrible. It’s not that off. And this keeps happening. The revision letter keeps getting better and better. Shockingly, the more you think about it, because here’s the thing, editors know what they’re doing. They are experts. My editors have been right about what they tell me to do approximately 95% of the time, which to me sounds like a hundred percent of the time. When they tell me to do it, I generally always do it, and I am generally always very pleased that I did, even if I didn’t like it going into it, your mileage may vary. The word stet is very important. When you’re getting edited, you can always step something, which means let it stand. The way it is, the way I wrote it, the author always wins in a discussion with an editor. Author always wins. However, I believe that in a discussion, a disagreement of opinion between an author and an editor, the editor is generally right. Not always. Of course, you may have had a terrible editor in your time, but they’re generally amazing and awesome and right. So give yourself permission to feel shell-shocked to hide in your bed, to comfort read your favorite book for the 35th time, and then go slowly through that revision letter. And, and it’ll, it’ll be okay.

[00:10:38] It’ll be okay. It’s awesome. It’s really the most wonderful thing cause it’s making your book better, which is incredible. So let me go back and fish out these other questions in here. Duh, duh, duh. So when it’s being edited, do you suggest keeping working on it or put it away and jump into something else? I generally put it away and start something else. Unless I’m lying around and I think, Oh God, I did not see that plot hole, I’m going to fix that right now. You can start working on it because you can pretty sure that your editor will come back to you and tell you about it anyway, so you know, do it, do what you want. I’m not a big deal. Not a big deal either way. The time to start a stop poking at it is when you send it off for copy edits. So the line edit phase, depending on your structural edit that you got, is often included in the structural edit. Not always. It sounds like perhaps yours wasn’t, align edit can also be included in a copy edit phase. So perhaps you’ll be able to combine those two. And the difference between the two is in line edit is looking at the grammatical construction and of your sentences and their relative ease of reading. Do they make sense or are you being confusing on a sentence level? That’s what line edits are. Copy edits, on the other hand, are things like typos, missing words, improper punctuation. Getting my copy edits always makes me feel like the worst writer in the world who has never heard of the correct usage of a quotation mark or a possessive “S” Like, I don’t know. The old copy edits are the worst. But so you may be looking at possibly folding a line edit into a copy edit round, which is something that you discussed with the editor.

[00:12:25] And yes, I would always use somebody else for the next round of edits because you do want that fresh eye. Your primary structural content editor will have already seen the book, really thought through it, and she will miss stuff next time. Just because she’s already familiar with it. So you generally want to hire somebody else after your copy edits, after all those typos are taken care of. You do also want to get a proofer or two or beta readers because typos will always look past a copy editor as well, which is very frustrating. But there it is. 

[00:12:59] Let’s see. I think that’s all the questions in there. Those were really great questions. Thank you. Thank you very, very much, and I just want to say, Alex, I have not forgotten your question about romance. I’m going to get that back to that in the next mini episode, but I just wanted to thank you Patreons who send in questions are really fun to answer. It’s really fun to talk to you guys mostly about craft kind of things.

[00:13:22] So, that’s great. And I wanted to thank you so happy writing to all of you. Come over, drop me a line at www.howdoyouwrite.net or email me or Tweet or whatever way you want to get a hold of me. And thank you for listening.

[00:13:40] Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.