Posts by Tiffany Yates Martin
Authors spend so much time perfecting our writing—making it say just what we want it to say as effectively as we can, trying to get our vision onto the page—but it’s hard to know when we’ve actually reached that finish line and the story is ready.
Yet because story doesn’t fully come to life until it reaches readers, at some point you have to push your fledgling out into the world or it’s never going to fly. There’s no objective marker for when a story is “finished,” but here’s a checklist that may help you know when it’s ready to leave the nest.
The Über-question
Is it on the page? This is overarching question for each element of story below. As authors we know our stories, characters, and worlds so well that it’s hard to objectively assess how well we’ve actually conveyed all of it on the page, versus how much we’re “filling in the blanks” in our own heads. For each question below, refer directly to the manuscript itself—not your notes, memory, or mental image of the story—and ask yourself, How do readers know? Specifically where and how can they glean it on the page?
Editing Checklist Overview
The big picture:
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Please welcome back Tiffany Yates Martin to Writer Unboxed today! Tiffany has spent nearly thirty years as an editor in the publishing industry, working with major publishers and bestselling authors as well as newer writers. She’s led workshops and seminars for conferences and writers’ groups across the country and is a frequent contributor to writers’ sites and publications. She is the author of Intuitive Editing: A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing. Visit her at www.foxprinteditorial.com.
How to Weave in Backstory without Stalling Out Your Story
Your characters don’t just spring to life at the beginning of your story. If you’ve developed them fully, they are “real,” three-dimensional people with complex backstories and experiences that have shaped who they are at your story’s “point A” and directly inform the journey they take in your manuscript toward point B.
Yet how can you fluidly weave in all that depth and complexity without stalling pace and story momentum—getting bogged down in info dumps, flashbacks, or just too much exposition? As an author, how do you glance backward while still moving the story forward?
Let’s look at some practical techniques for developing and revealing who your characters were and are without slowing down the story of where they’re going, using three main ways of bringing in backstory: context, memory, and flashback.
Context
People don’t operate in a vacuum or on a single plane of existence. No matter how compelling our current challenges, conflicts, or goals may be, our experiences in any given moment are a sum total of all our previous experiences, memories, hopes, desires, worries that may be simultaneously present within us.
But dumping in swaths of a character’s backstory can stall momentum and yank readers out of the story. Instead, look for ways to weave this essential context in amid the forward motion of the scene.
Let’s say you have a scene where you’re showing your protag being fired. Unless her workplace has been a significant part of the story, readers may not know enough backstory to invest us, to let us know what’s at stake, to plant our feet in the impact of this event on her life and her arc. Depending on the purpose of this plot development, we might wonder:
What is she being fired for? Is it deserved or unjust? In either case, why is it happening? Did she know this was coming, or suspect it? What’s her boss like, and what’s her relationship with him? Her coworkers? How does she feel about this job? How long has she been with this company, and in this position? Is she good at what she does? What’s her immediate financial situation without a job? And her prospects for other employment?
This is just a sampling of the context that might be germane—key to letting readers know why this event is important, what it means to her and her arc. So how can you include this essential information without swaths of info dump that stop forward momentum cold?
Think of weaving threads into a tapestry, rather than basting in discrete swatches of a patchwork quilt. For instance:
Leah knew the moment she walked toward her corner office that something was amiss. Her door, always open literally and figuratively—always—was shut, and there was a […]
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Please welcome developmental editor Tiffany Yates Martin to Writer Unboxed today! Tiffany reached out recently with an offer to write a piece for us on developing a stronger editorial sensibility, and we were immediately intrigued. She wrote:
Editing is something so many authors dread, but to me it’s where the magic happens. Like any other part of learning this craft it’s a skill that improves with practice–but it can be really hard to practice it objectively in our own work. I’ve found that authors don’t always realize how much value there is in editing others’ work and seeing it edited.
More about Tiffany from her bio:
Developmental editor Tiffany Yates Martin is privileged to help authors tell their stories as effectively, compellingly, and truthfully as possible. In more than 25 years in the publishing industry she’s worked both with major publishing houses and directly with authors (through her company FoxPrint Editorial), on titles by New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestsellers and award winners as well as newer authors. She presents editing and writing workshops for writers’ groups, organizations, and conferences and writes for numerous writers’ sites and publications.
Connect with Tiffany on her website, and on Facebook and Twitter.
How to Train Your Editor Brain
One of the hardest skills for a writer to master is editing her own writing. Assessing your work objectively when you are so deeply familiar with it can feel like trying to do your own brain surgery—but it’s a skill you can learn.
The best way I know of to switch on “editor brain” is to see others’ work edited. This is because you automatically come to others’ work with the mental and emotional distance it can be so hard to achieve with your own writing. With someone else’s story, you see—and evaluate—only what’s there, a crucial skill to develop in editing your own writing, spotting the things you’re often blind to in your own work.
Here are some of my best tips for how to do that:
Find a crit group—and home in on its hidden value
Participating in a critique group with other writers offers a regular opportunity to learn to analyze and assess effective writing (with a number of caveats, primarily that you find one that’s supportive and constructive, among lots of other baseline requirements; a bad crit group can do more damage to writers than almost anything else. Here’s a great article on red flags for unhelpful crit groups).
Yes, you’ll get the chance to receive feedback on your own work—revealing potential flaws you may never have considered—and gain direct experience critiquing others’ work. But the hidden value of a critique group is the opportunity to listen to critiques of others’ work. Observing multiple critiques of the same submission is an invaluable way to see not only what objectively works and doesn’t in a piece of writing, but to notice subjective differences as well—one reader’s Romeo and Juliet is another’s Fifty Shades of Grey.
Learning to edit your own writing is also about knowing when to stick with your vision even if it doesn’t work for every beta reader, and those variations of opinion are a […]
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