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What, J. Jonah Jameson, editor extraordinaire and bête noir of both SpiderMan and Peter Parker? That can only mean I’m going to talk about the  developmental edit of Stone By Stone.

But first a bit about Let This Be The Last, a 6,000 word story that reimagines the Norse god Loki.

I got a notion to do this when I was browsing Duotrope, a site that provides useful info to writers, like directories of publishers and their content specializations. Browsing through SF&F short-fiction publishers, I came across Flametree Publishing, that had an open call for stories about the trickster god. Now, I’ve never been good at writing prompts: “Write a story based on the song ‘My Home Town’”, stuff like that. But in the spirit of training I decided to work on this – a good writer should be able to write about anything, not just what bubbles up out of their own brain.

Here’s what I did. I knew from the start I wanted a story that mixed the age of myth with an SF future. What can I say, the idea seemed cool. Then I refreshed my detailed knowledge of the subject by spending a day or so reading everything Google sent my way. At first I was totally stumped. All the myths seemed, well, trite – I mean by definition they are stories that have been told and adapted for a thousand years or more. In a way, the most trite of all is the myth of Loki and Baldur. It occurred to me to wonder, why does Loki contrive the death of the most noble god? Is he jealous? Devoted to chaos and evil? Just a jerk? Then it further hit me, a new answer to that question might be worth writing about. After that, the three acts of the story – ancient Scandinavia, medieval Africa, and a future colony planet – fell into place. The 6,000 words were essentially done in 2 weeks. It’s with Flametree now, I won’t hear till March if they want it. Meanwhile, I think I’ll keep looking for similar opportunities – it was a good workout for the writing muscles.

Words, Words, Words

When Hamlet answers this to Polonius, he is uttering one of Shakespeare’s trademark ironies: books of course are nothing but words, but Hamlet’s blunt and deranged delivery makes us think, “Everyone knows books are more than that!” Now, having received an edit of Stone By Stone, and embarked on updating the book, I have a little insight on exactly how books are more than words.

If you don’t know what a developmental edit is, a quick definition: where copy-editing involves punctuation and formatting, and line-editing is about grammar and clarity, a developmental edit examines the high-level aspects of your story – character, plot and setting – and both analyzes and critiques your book at that level. The main reason to get a developmental edit is to answer questions like:

• Are the characters engaging and believable? Do we understand their wants and needs?
• Is the plot engaging and believable? Does it make sense? Does it pose problems that are big and interesting?
• Is the setting presented complimentary to plot and character? What is unique about time and place that bears on the story?

I started this process in July. Looking at different directories online, I read websites and bios for about 30 editors. I reduced that to a short list of 4. After video calls with these candidates, I made my pick. Something that quickly became clear – editors, especially good ones, are extremely busy. My chosen editor could not start till mid October. BTW, in future I will share their name. I’m extremely happy with the work, I just want to see how things go with SBS before I say more.

The edit took a month and a few extra days. What I received was a 10-page single-spaced letter, analyzing the book and summarizing key recommendations, and my marked-up manuscript. The MSS included tracked-changes and comments. There were more than 1,000 changes and 1,405 comments.

“I’m a Writer, not an Engineer!”

Dr. McCoy’s catchphrase to the side, I am finding that to deal with this feedback, I have to think like an engineer. There’s two reasons for writing a novel, (1) For your own satisfaction, and (2) To connect with readers. If (1) is your only goal, you probably don’t need an editor at all. But if you are aiming at (2), you have to come to terms with understanding that the raw insight and creativity of your story is almost certainly not enough to connect with anyone. Making that connection requires that some fundamental expectations need to be fulfilled for the reader, like:

• Relating to characters. No one is going to enjoy a book where the characters do things and we have no clue why they do them. Good books show us events that let us develop our own guesses as to character motivation. Great books bolster through things that characters say or think.
• Knowing why it matters. It may seem obvious that your detective character would go after the bad guy. It’s not obvious to your reader: Why this detective, and not someone else? It has to be crystal clear that if the main character does not accept the challenge posed by the plot, then very bad things will happen.
• Getting readers to turn the page. I expect we’ve all experienced books we “could not put down”. Likewise we’ve started some we just could not finish. Good books have a structure and a tone that takes you along for the ride: chapters that build tension and expectation, language that “feels right.” A common thing for poor books is they are like a lecture you just want to be over.

Note how none of this has to do with creativity, theme, or meaning. The same requirements apply to both a bubbly rom-com, and to a grimdark cautionary tale.

What does this have to do with engineering? Like a programmer responding to a code review, I am trying to take my editor’s feedback in a spirit of improvement, not criticism. I will tell you, it ain’t easy. Among those 1,405 comments in the MSS were probably about a 100 to the effect of “Why is he doing this?” My impulsive reaction was frankly, “Isn’t it obvious?” or “How can you not see that?” But just like when receiving a code-review comment to the effect of “The way you wrote this conditional is unclear”, I had to set my first reactions aside and try to see things through the commentor’s eyes. Sure enough, I had to admit, they were right, it wasn’t obvious what motivates my main character. It was obvious to me, and not just because I wrote it – my life experiences set me up to understand my own characters.

Another way dealing with editorial feedback is like engineering is how you do the needed changes. An widely accepted practice in software engineering is the minimal necessary change – the smallest thing you can do to meet a requirement. It’s the same with revising your book. To make your character’s motivation more clear, you don’t have to rewrite the whole book, you look for an important action the character takes, then you insert a thought or some dialogue where the motivation is clarified. Bonus points if you refer to a foreshadowing event that is the origin of the motivation. Net-change: probably 2 lines or less.

But, they have to be the right two lines.

You Write It, You Own It

Here’s where I am now. After I read through the letter and sampled the comments, I had a call with my editor to go over the main findings. The goal was to make sure I understood them correctly, and also to explore some of the bigger criticisms. Next I read every manuscript comment, responding with a quick notation like AGREE, EXPLORE, CLARIFY and so on, plus some short ideas on approach. Then I exported all the Word comments to an Excel file, so I could read them more easily. Going through the comments and responses that way it was easier to identify patterns.

I then created a revision plan document. This document has 22 changes and/or improvements to make. One example:

Condense Prologue

Shorten upfront part, eliminate several Civspace species from the prologue, get to Keret and Talon-va more quickly.

Like many SF books, mine has a prologue that sets the stage for the different species and planets in the story. My editor felt there was too much infodump in it. The new version is 459 words, down from 869, and features only things that directly bear on the story – Talon-va is the founder of the planet Caron, where the story takes place.

Here’s a bigger one:

Split and Condense Childhood and Adolescent Chapters

Split longer chapters into two, properly interleave into the flow. Maybe adult chapters need splitting to do that.

To start with, don’t change content, just the boundaries.

After the chapters are split, all non-adult chapters need pruning and focus. Emphasize connection points to Finn’s adult life.

This speaks to my editor’s biggest point. In Stone By Stone, I use a structure where 3 story arcs – the main character as a child, adolescent, and adult – are told simultaneously through interleaved chapters. The adult story is 75% of the content. I did this for several reasons: I wanted to do something that was structurally distinctive, and I wanted to convey important back story and worldbuilding in a more impactful way than flashbacks. My editor felt this was more a hindrance than a help, that the changes in perspective would be confusing. Their judgement was, this would reduce the marketability of the book.

I hope it’s clear from the above that I’m not switching to flashbacks. What I will do is make these non-adult chapters shorter, so they are less of a break from the main action. I’ll also “punch up” the main character’s early life events that explain his motivations as an adult. Will keeping the current structure make the book harder to sell? Maybe, though I’ve asked a number of people about this, including pros from the industry, and no one seems to feel what I’m doing is an explicit disqualification.

What it comes down to is, I own this book. Where execution is concerned, I will take my editor’s advice and try my best to make improvements. But as far as my vision for the book — I’m not going to give that up without even trying.

Ok, J. Jonah is growling at me for my next revision. Till next time …

Some recent reading has me thinking about expertise and secondarily, people’s capacity for change and their decision making about the world. The first was an Ideas piece in the Boston Globe (sorry about the paywall) mainly about Henry A. Cotton; here’s the Wikipedia article on him. The summary: Cotton was a highly respected physician and psychiatrist in the first decades of the twentieth century. He promoted a theory that psychosis was caused by infection. (Recall that the “germ theory” of disease dates from the 1860s.) In the 1920’s Cotton opened a hospital that performed various surgeries – mainly removal of some or all of a patient’s teeth – as a way to cure psychosis. Despite the absence of evidence or tangible successes, the medical establishment of the day strongly supported Cotton. Of course today everyone sees this was always obvious nonsense.

There’s little conclusion or recommendation in the Globe piece, beyond a caution on the perils of groupthink, and the dangers of institutional incentives:

It is a hallmark of moments like this that some people, the key players, become trapped in a sort of ideological death spiral: They double and triple down, captive to the brutal sunk cost fallacy …

The next piece on expertise I just saw today. It’s from Adam Mastroianni, who’s Substack is entitled Experimental History. His latest piece: How to get 7th graders to Smoke. The summary here: In 1989 more than 2,800 7th grade students were enlisted in a program to compare the effectiveness of different anti-smoking and anti-drug programs. To this layman the programs seem like reasonable things to have tried. But, one of these programs caused the participants to smoke more than those who were in no program at all. Mastroianni also recounts the ineffectiveness of other, well-known programs:

“Scared Straight” programs, where at-risk youth go to prisons and get yelled at by prisoners, famously do not work and maybe make students more likely to commit crimes.

The Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E) program I had to do in elementary school, where a cop came to class and told us about all the drugs we weren’t supposed to take, also doesn’t do anything.

A big trial of mindfulness training in UK schools maybe made kids a bit more depressed, and two attempts to teach psychotherapy principles to students in Australia both failed.

This is somewhat scary. Cotton was in the the 1920s, when science, and the ethics of science, were in their respective infancies. But Mastroianni’s examples were in the 80s and 90s – hadn’t we figured out a lot of stuff by then? So maybe experts are all BS, and we’re just as well-off trusting some rando with a laptop – let’s choose Aaron Rodgers just for yucks – who does his own research, as we are trusting people with PhDs.

Not so fast. Mastroianni goes where the Globe article should have gone, which is to point out: Changing people is hard. Extremely hard. Yet over and over, all of us assume it is an easy thing to do. Imagine the relatives of Cotton’s patients. Their child, or their uncle, or their spouse was unable to function in the world. They’ve tried everything. Then this venerable physician offers a way out, it just requires removing some teeth. Is that too much of a price to pay? Hundreds of people who went to Cotton thought it was not. But, they were blinded by the false assumption that change is possible and even easy.

Mastroianni’s answer – which I like – is that we need more science, in a purer, preconceived-notions-free form:

The philosopher Michael Strevens argues that science requires humans to adopt an “alien mindset”—you have to ignore common sense, the wisdom of the ancients, the literal word of God, etc. Why would anyone toss out everything they know and instead try to learn things by putting rotten meat in a jar? Science took so long to develop, Strevens says, because it seemed stupid.

I say: we must become even stupider. If all of our intuitions, theories, and knowledge cause us to run programs that make tweens do more drugs—well, then, we oughta ditch our intuitions, theories, and knowledge!

There is a danger here. Depending on the field, there’s variously developed bodies of foundational principles, supported by facts and repeatability. We don’t want attention-seeking contrarians discarding those in favor of pie-in-the-sky hypotheses. But overall I think the “stupider is better” test for science is hopeful – as a species, our record for things that actually help us understand ourselves could use a boost.

Till next time …

Sorry its been so long between posts … after our return back to India I had quite a lot of start-of-year, post-vacation work catch-up to do, including preparation for our IBM Connect 2014 show in Orlando.  Now its been 9 days since my return from a 9 day stay in the US, and jet-lag is only now dissipated.  We saw a lot of sights on our London trip … one of which being the Tower of London, so here I share some pictures and thoughts.

First a bit about the city.  It occurs to me London may be the oldest intact city in the world – and by “intact” I mean structurally recognizable, and having districts with continuous identification over a very long period.  This revelation – not terribly original, I admit – came to me while we were back in India, watching Olivier’s Henry V (having just seen Jude law, we wanted a comparison).  The start of the film is a panning shot over a diorama of London in Shakespeare’s time, ending up at the Globe Theater.  Early on you see the famous London Bridge and a white castle on the north bank of the river:

Seeing this I remarked, “That’s where we were!” – meaning, the Tower of London.  Suddenly the tube maps I had looked at, and all the place names I had heard of somehow fell into place as I realized modern Londoners have a mental map of their city not unlike what Shakespeare himself must have had.  How different from a place like Pune, where 90% of what you see is new since the mid 90s, and long-time residents have often have trouble recognizing where they are.

Ok, enough commentary … here are some pictures:

The Tower is not a single castle or building, it is several all enclosed by a bordering wall.  The largest is the White Tower (the center pic above) which was build by William the Conqueror in the 11th century, and so is the oldest part of the overall Tower.  Inside the grounds are many buildings built over the centuries, and in some places historical staff re-enact medieval life, like the campsite in the picture on the right.

The Tower of course is famous as a prison:

Above left are some carvings made by Catholic prisoners in the 16th century; these are in the Salt Tower, a series of plain stone cubicles and stairways.  Rather more comfortable where the apartments assigned to Sir Walter Raleigh, who was imprisoned in the so-called “Bloody Tower” (where supposedly Richard III murdered his young nephews) from 1603 to 1618.  Raleigh’s desk, shown above, is where he authored his “History of the World”, an ambitious work if there ever was one.

If you visit the Tower you must see the Crown Jewels:

These are maintained in the “Jewel House”.  Since these are the top attraction for visitors to the Tower, there very wisely is a system of managing the flood of visitors.  Railings allow the crowds to queue in an orderly fashion, then every 30 mins or so another batch of regalia-hungry tourists will be allowed to enter.  Photos are forbid inside – I will only say there are one or two knick-knacks therein I would not mind having for my own, not the least of which was the Wine Cistern, a mind-numbingly gaudy punchbowl that holds 144 bottles of wine and weighs over 250 kg – in 18-karat gold no less.

Coming back to the White Tower, through much of its history (including in WW2) that tower was used as an armory.  The display of arms and armor there is unequalled:

 
On the top right is one of the armors of Henry VIII, famous (or infamous) for its codpiece.  Quite interesting was the display of swords of Kings of England, beginning from George III.

I’ll leave off with this last photo:

Here a re-enactor, garbed as a warrior from Williams the Conqueror’s time, explains a bit about medieval life to a young visitor.  The Tower really is like that – live history that is all at once workaday and amazing.

Soon, a final London post, about the Victoria and Albert.