I normally do Instagram posts on books I value, and the sometimes roundups, like The Best of 2020 Women’s Fiction, but this book (targeted at writers honing their craft), is too important to fit into one Instagram post or Goodreads review.
I’d like to tell you a story about my own writing progression, starting with my biggest strategic error. When I finished the first draft of my debut novel four years ago, before starting revisionsbI read every writing craft book I could lay my hands on. No joke: twenty plus, entire shelves of them!
What I came across were a whole lot of rules:
Don’t start in the car driving and don’t open with the weather
Avoid dialog tags
Don’t use adverbs
Remove all the ‘that’ and ‘just’
Don’t spend too much time on internal thought
Avoid flashbacks or info dumps
Do you notice a common words in those rules? Don’t. Avoid. Remove.
But what about the real question – how do I take the story in my head and transform it into a compelling, immersive, story for readers?
I’m not dinging all craft books (in case you’re wondering here are some of my favorite writing craft books on Goodreads), but with many others, by simplifying into rules about what you shouldn’t do, they avoid the true hard work of explaining how you create a compelling novel.
How do you take a protagonist your beta readers are saying is unlikeable and make them relatable? (this was one of my challenges). Or take a set of scenes that is moving along, but just ho-hum in terms of the reader being immersed, and make them truly live and feel your characters’ emotions?
I was blessed to choose Tiffany Yates Martin as my developmental editor. Over the course of a year and three rewrites she prodded, advised, and inspired changes that were needed in my debut novel (The Exit Strategy – releasing July 8th, 2020!).
What Tiffany taught me is that true skill requires honing your intuition, to critically look at your own work and ask how to let it flower into the beautiful story it can become.
And I knew that if she could get a hundredth of what she taught me into this book, it would be a winner. I was also lucky enough to be chosen as a beta reader for Intuitive Editing (which was actually kind of meta – critiquing a book on editing!).
What Tiffany effectively gets across is intuition matters because there are no black and white rules to story.
Example: the rules say don’t start with your character alone in their office. My debut does exactly that and yet the opening pages won an award for best unpublished book– so in this case going against the rules must have worked?
Yes, you can still take a methodological approach to analyzing and revising your story, but most importantly, it starts with a sense of compassion for your own work. My favorite quote:
Don’t expect your first draft—or second, or fifth—to be perfect, any more than an actor expects a first table read to be ready for an audience, or a violinist would expect to play a new piece of music with the nuance and expression that will grow into it as he rehearses and rehearses and rehearses. Beating yourself up for failing to fully achieve your artistic vision on your first swing shuts down the very part of you that can achieve it. Be gentle with your artistic soul. Nurture your talent and inspiration and skill.
If you planted a seed in the ground, you wouldn’t stomp out the first tendrils that unfurl because they aren’t a flower yet. Be kind to yourself, friends—and respect and admire the rich turf you’ve sown and that first beautiful green shoot. Now it’s time to grow.
Tiffany’s book will walk you through how to achieve the growth that seed and those first tendrils of story deserve, by looking at your work one layer at a time, starting with character, stakes and plot, before diving deeper into more micro-level edits involving point of view and pacing, and structure.
It doesn’t surprise me that this book is already a # 1 new release and best-seller among writing books on Amazon (and if you’ve been on a writer zoom or chat with me I must have convinced about 20+ people in the last weeks they need this book !)
The appeal is that Tiffany’s paradigm is different. Stop being so hard on yourself and thinking about your book or your early work as broken (I struggled a lot with this concept of self compassion - a blog post here about it). Instead hone your intuition by looking at other great storytelling, and approach your work one layer at a time, with the love and care it deserves.
Closing thought - that list of The Best of 2020 Women’s Fiction I reference at the start, or my new IGTV series on The Best of Women’s Fiction? I’ll let you in on a secret. Many of them use Tiffany’s advice as their not-so-secret weapon.
With this book you get a ton of that same insight, but for a teeny tiny price. Happy editing my friends - and please be kind to yourself and those first tendrils of creativity.