I assessed a promising romance novel. There was a lot to like, as the author was a competent writer at line level. It was an earlyish draft with a few substantial but not insuperable issues: that’s what rewrites are for, and what manuscript assessments exist to clarify.
Towards the end, the couple head towards the bedroom – and then get interrupted by the subplot. They get back on track – and then something else postpones sex.
And then something happens again, and the reasons are getting more unlikely, and I, as the reader, am feeling wound up and let down. It could all have been deliciously teasing, and instead I was bored and fed up. If I were in bed with this writer, I’d have lost interest and wandered off to watch TV ages ago.
When the sex scene finally arrived, it was tepid and apologetic, an underwhelming payoff after an extended run-up.
My feedback noted that all these aborted approaches to the sex scene were not working to build anticipation in the reader, and that one solution would be to cut some of the intervening false starts.
However, the category of this romance novel was still unclear, a question to be answered in further revisions. It might not be the kind that had sex scenes, so another solution would be to not have an explicit sex scene at all.
The author wrote me a long letter responding to my feedback, during which she passionately explained how incredibly nervous she’d been about writing a sex scene, and that this was why she’d had to have so many runs at it and chickened out so often.
But … so? I thought.
A constructive response from the author would have been to acknowledge there had been a reason for the section being the way it was, and then to engage with how it affected the reader’s experience and talk about what they were considering doing about it in future revisions.
Sure, writing sex can be nerve-wracking, that’s understandable, and so you can be nervous about it and write it anyway, or write it badly to get it down and fix it later, or you can decide you don’t write sex at all and just imply it – there are several possible choices here.
What the writer did instead was explain to me the reason they’d written this section badly, and then stop.
I don’t know why all this fruitless buildup wasn’t cut from the draft before sending it to me or what, if anything, the writer intended now to do with the sex scene and its attendant rigmarole, because they didn’t address that at all. Ok, there was a reason for this section being the way it was – why was that the end of it?
The writer’s squeamishness about sex may have been a useful piece of self-knowledge for an aspiring romance novelist, but I felt they’d missed the point: why was the reader made to go along with the writer’s repeated attempts at this scene? Were these anxious approaches to be preserved as important artifacts destined for the ‘making-of’ documentary? Was the writer planning to explain to every reader who bought it: ‘Oh, I know that bit isn’t good, I was so nervous. What do you mean you want your money back?’
The moral of this story is that an author’s reasons for making a writing choice don’t change the reader’s experience of that choice.
That explanation is only the beginning of the discussion. It doesn’t substitute for an examination of the choice, whether it works or doesn’t, and whether it should be kept, changed or replaced.
Learning how to use editorial feedback effectively means going beyond explaining your writing choices and examining whether those choices actually work.
Explanation is not examination
This is not an isolated incident; I’ve encountered it repeatedly.
On hearing feedback that something isn’t working, a writer may respond by explaining why they wrote it that way, what they hoped to achieve, or maybe what prevented them from doing it differently. But if the feedback shows the intended effect hasn’t been achieved, the explanation doesn’t resolve anything.
Even an editor’s misunderstanding can be useful feedback. The writer knows things about the story and characters that the reader cannot know unless the manuscript communicates them. So the useful response isn’t for the author to explain what they meant but to ask Why did the reader experience it this way, and what on the page needs to change?
Nor must they have all the answers immediately. But a writer who is engaging with feedback (and not just tossing it back to the reader) will indicate they’re at least going to address it in the manuscript, not expect to wave it away and then stop.
The editor’s question may not be the question you need to answer
In another assessment, I repeatedly questioned why a troubled middle-aged man was so interesting to a much younger woman when they seemed to have nothing in common.
The author had apparently noticed the credibility problem himself: the characters repeatedly wondered why the friendship existed, floating vague possibilities — perhaps she pitied him, fancied him, simply found him intriguing — without ever arriving at a convincing answer.
Having praised my astute and lucid manuscript assessment, the author took some time to think about my feedback. In our follow-up session he explained how he had decided not to make changes to the manuscript as he wanted to send it out to literary agents (oh wow, the only wrong response, I thought). But he would delete the other possible answers to the question and stick to one: ‘Maybe he reminds her of her father’.
But ‘Maybe he reminds her of her father’ was just a variation of ‘Maybe she fancies/pities him’.
Technically, he’d answered my question. Editorially, he hadn’t.
He thought the question was asking for a reason she liked him. The actual question was whether the relationship worked.
The useful answer to an editor’s question usually isn’t an explanation. It’s a rewrite.
Your editor cannot do the thinking for you
The writers of these manuscripts had facility with storytelling and writing, they weren’t bad manuscripts. They weren’t publishable yet, because they were drafts with substantial issues that would need to be ironed out, but that’s true of every manuscript in its earlier drafts.
However, there’s an important difference between manuscripts like these and the ones that eventually become publishable: the latter have authors who addressed the unignorable problems.
What was so disappointing about these manuscripts was the potential the authors seemed to have, which remained unrealised because at the crucial point the author stopped doing their job.
Instead of examining the issues the assessment raised to approach the necessary rewrites, they concentrated on defending their existing draft. Nothing could change; no forward movement was possible.
When a manuscript has three competing types of novel inside it, it is not the editor’s role to decide which one is the novel the author really wants to write.
If a memoir claims a transformation that isn’t supported by the text, it is not the editor’s role to choose the meaning of the author’s life for her – she must examine the material and decide what she has to say.
A manuscript assessment can show where a reader will lose interest, or get confused, or not believe in the character’s actions. An assessment can diagnose problems, ask questions for the author to reflect upon, and suggest possible routes forward.
The idea is that the author considers what they are trying to achieve, and what might need to be cut, changed, or replaced in order to achieve it.
A diagnosis is not a cure, and in the same way, a manuscript assessment is not a list of instructions on how to rewrite your book. It’s your book – your editor cannot understand it for you anymore than they can rewrite it for you.
Defensiveness stops the writing process dead
Of course, the emotional reasons writers get stuck at this point are completely understandable.
By the time they seek a professional evaluation, they may have been writing the manuscript for months or years, so they feel they know the characters and that they wrote them that way deliberately, or that scene has to stay because reasons. They may have rewritten the text substantially and, in doing so, feel that as they’ve already done a great deal of work, there can’t be much more to do.
There’s nothing wrong with having these reactions. The problem is stopping there and going no further.
No editor needs the writer to agree with everything they say. Most of us are perfectly okay with being disagreed with, because our job is collaborative – we’re not looking for some kind of blind obedience from a writer.
To work effectively with an editor, a writer needs enough curiosity to entertain the possibility that feedback has identified something real that needs addressing. If the writer’s every response to a criticism is a justification for why the manuscript is already correct, the manuscript is not being edited; it’s being defended.
A writer can’t get to the necessary curiosity, and thence to meaningful changes, until he stops defending the choices in the existing manuscript and starts examining those choices.
The hardest questions are usually about what you don’t know
Nor is curiosity and lack of defensiveness enough – there’s still huge amounts of self-knowledge and bravery to be cultivated beyond these things. Hey, no one said writing a book was easy, and writing a publishable book is a significant step beyond.
Sometimes the feedback feels exposing to the author because it reveals a gap or a lack: they decided something but didn’t have a reason or decided for the wrong reasons. For example, they put in a subplot because the main storyline was boring and they needed something to happen, not because it’s offering anything to the whole. Or they’re writing in a popular genre because they want success, but as they’re unfamiliar with the genre, they don’t understand what its readers want.
This can be extra tricky in memoir, where the author may report all the things that happened or that they did, but lack the self-awareness to understand what it meant and what it showed about themselves.
Writers need self-awareness. But that is not something you acquire once and have it ever after: you work on it, and gradually it can increase. Meanwhile, a writer may be very perceptive about some aspects of themselves or their story, and completely and maddeningly blind to others.
Nobody becomes a fully evolved writer in one giant leap: development happens by confronting the things you couldn’t previously see.
Hard work doesn’t prove the book works
Finishing a novel is an achievement. Redrafting it is also an achievement. Getting feedback and redrafting is another achievement.
Those achievements do not constitute evidence that the manuscript has become publishable.
Spending years on a novel, rewriting and editing it multiple times, querying agents and collecting rejections – these all demonstrate perseverance, which any writer absolutely needs to have.
Just don’t make the mistake of treating all that effort as though it provides evidence of publishable work, because it doesn’t. Effort is not the same thing as quality.
Nobody owes a manuscript reading attention because its author worked hard on it. Readers show that to be true – they don’t hang around thinking how your struggle excuses a lacklustre story, they just stop reading and find something else.
Writers who are receiving criticism or rejections from agents will, understandably, look for explanations. The market may be crowded. Your genre may be difficult. Publishers may be risk-averse. Any of these things may be true.
But if you’re going to examine your work honestly, another possibility always has to remain on the table: the manuscript may simply not be good enough.
Perhaps it’s good but not good enough yet. Perhaps you’re a good writer who hasn’t yet written a book that works. Those aren’t contradictions. But if you decide the problem must lie anywhere except the manuscript, you’ve stopped the process that might eventually make it better.
Remember, ‘good’ and ‘publishable’ are not synonyms. The case studies in this and my other recent articles about the problems I keep seeing in manuscripts are all based on a mashup of several good, often very competent writers who presented work that had plenty to enjoy in it – and despite their hard work, perseverance and skill there remained fundamental structural or character problems, or a premise that was insufficiently compelling, or the manuscript was too late to a trend or lacked enough distinction to make it in a crowded market.
The practice book is not a tragedy
Of course, one huge obstacle that so many writers face is that they’ve grown very attached to the book and cannot see beyond trying to get that book published. When, in fact, this may be too short-sighted of them. Life is long, and writing careers don’t usually start and end with the same single book.
And I’ve been telling writers this for years, especially the ones I think have promise: this might be a practice novel. Practice in writing is never wasted. You may need to write another book in order to get to something publishable. You may need to write several!
And I promise you, that is fine. A debut author is often not published with the first book they wrote, but the first they could get published.
Those earlier attempts taught them how to write, so they’re valuable, but it would be a mistake to insist that those run-ups should also be published.
How to use editorial feedback constructively
The writer who is ready to develop doesn’t get stuck on whether the editor is right about this or that.
They ask:
- Why did the reader/editor have that response?
- What part of the text created it?
- Is this feedback isolated, or is there a larger point here?
- What was I trying to achieve?
- Did I achieve it?
- If not, is the answer to cut, change or replace this element, or do I need to be rethinking more widely?
And, importantly, it’s ok if the answer to any of these questions is ‘I don’t know yet’ because, unlike a defensive explanation, ‘I don’t know’ allows for further thought.
Bravery, not obedience
The saddest editorial experiences I’ve had haven’t been about the weakest manuscripts, but the ones where I can see the writer has promise and could become good, but they remain stuck.
The writers I adore are the ones curious, detached, and brave enough to tackle the hard job of developing as a writer.
The real purpose of editorial feedback is to show you where you need to think again. Your editor can show you to that point. The courage and curiosity to go further must be yours.
If you’re ready for a professional manuscript assessment, contact me to tell me about yourself and your book.
