Our Diary

On the one hand, as an editor, you don’t want to repeat yourself. On the other hand, I do find myself saying some of the same things over again (so much so that at times I will just copy the comment from above and paste the same exact one below). That got me wondering if it would be helpful to describe some recurrent challenges I see, so that writers might get ahead of the issues before they become structural. In that spirit, here are four common editorial observations along with a brief exploration as to what they might mean on a larger scale.

1. This feels a little abrupt: I understand that links, those transitional passages that fuse one scene to another, often come last. At the same time, nothing benefits “the willing suspension of disbelief,” as Samuel Coleridge put it, more than a causal connection between scenes, or a temporal one, or some other reasoning (which is clear enough to the reader) why something should come next and something should come after that.

So why might this “feel a little abrupt”? It could be that the order of scenes (or subheads, if you are working in non-fiction) is actually off — a common enough challenge to navigate in the drafting process. In fact, you can actually work backwards and say: if this feels a little abrupt, might it be that things don’t go in this order at all? 

If, however, you are content with the current sequence of things, then you might have to dig deeper to discover why a segue isn’t satisfying between one scene or paragraph and another. What is the tributary, the meaning, that can be harnessed, so that you can the river of your discourse can flow from one aspect of presentation into the next? 

2. Dragging in here: As you can see in this reel, I am a big fan of something happening in a work, regardless of the genre. It’s like Robert Louis Stevenson said, “When we are in a hot corner…we want incident, interest, action: to the devil with your philosophy.”

 Now, I understand that the novel as an art form was, in part, invented to give voice to interior monologue. And that people read for different reasons; some, like the British novelist Laurence Sterne, maintain, “Digressions are the very soul of reading.” Nevertheless, I often find myself wondering while editing, what is the point of this speechifying, if nothing is going to happen? That is the first definition of scene, after all: A scene is where something happens. The second definition follows from that: a scene is where because something happens, something changes.

I don’t think it is just my taste for (relative) minimalism — as evidenced by the fact that my contract for my forthcoming parenting memoir, Amnesty Day, called for 70,000 words — a bar which I found almost impossible to reach. Rather, I think I am not alone when I find myself asking, “Is it so much to ask for for something to happen?”

3. Question to be answered: This is a good one — see, they aren’t all bad! This comment means that we have identified where something is at stake. There always has to be an unanswered question that the reader keeps in mind. Otherwise, as the theater critic Louis Catron once said, “When the questions are answered, the play is over.”

 If you have gone to the next level with the Book Architecture Method, you know that every series — those repetitions and variations of an object, a character, a relationship, a location, or a phrase which create meaning — has to ask a question. The question might be basic (“whodunit?”) or it might be complex; it might be brief, or it might require most of the narrative to answer. But these questions are literally what keep the pages turning, so that we can find out whether someone ends up safe, falls in love, gets what’s coming to them, etc.

Some advanced considerations in this category include: a question being resolved in such a way that it poses a new question, not having too many open questions at one time that the reader can’t keep them straight, having the same question open too long so that the internal development stalls, and — if at all possible — avoiding those kind of clumsy recap paragraphs when the author tells us all of the open questions at once.

But perhaps the most important aspect to keep in mind is that, following the logic that a series worth tracking has to ask a question, that question has to eventually be answered.

4. Avoid repeating the same word in the same paragraph: This might seem obvious. Less obvious, perhaps, is the challenge to not repeat the stem of the same word in the same paragraph, or even on the same page. 

At last count, there are about 170,000 words in current daily use in the English language. Even if you don’t fancy yourself a word nerd, the average native English speaker knows at least 20,000 words and usually more like 35,000.

So, use them. One of our Book Architecture core values is, “We use our words.” We aren’t too afraid to raise the bar with our vocabulary, even in a social setting that doesn’t seem to call for it. Let other people puzzle the meaning of a word out from context…or even go look it up.

This comment isn’t solely designed to help you avoid repetition; it is also meant to encourage you to think about the exact shade of meaning you are trying to convey. To lift your writing out of cliche into an original expression with every word choice. 

Ironically, the better your writing gets, the more challenges that will present themselves. Because some words are so dynamic that they can’t even be repeated in the entire manuscript. We learned this injunction from editor Annie Tucker, who once told us that the mark of a good editor is that they can remember you used a word like “deromanticizing” once already, and even though it is now 183 pages later, you can’t get away with it a second time without making it seem like your resources are limited.