Three craft books I'm reading while editing my novel

Plus three novels I reference to see how the authors execute their witchcraft.

Hi friends! Welcome back to Words on Words, where we discuss what we love about literature.

Today I’m coming for all my writer friends. As some of you may know, I am working hard on my second novel. And with a self-imposed deadline of next week, I am scrambling to make sure I’m cutting superfluous words, filling in holes, and not making critical mistakes that my agent will have to point out to me.

Café-Concert (The Spectators) | Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas

I’ve been referencing three books as I — pardon the Olympics pun — make my last lap, and I want to share them with you. The first two I read while editing my my first novel before querying agents and am revisiting now, and the last one I just finished this week.

Refuse to be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts by

Matt Bell

I have raved about this book before and I will continue to rave about it. It is, in my opinion, the easiest, most enjoyable book that will radically change the shape of your work in progress.

Bell starts off by giving us writers a big old hug:

I implore you to continually affirm that you are writing a novel, that you are writing a book. Don’t diminish, don’t equivocate, don’t find some way to keep from claiming the work.

Makes you feel kind of good, right?

But the book isn’t all feel-good; it’s all practical. Behold:

When your characters return to places they’ve already been, either they or the setting needs to have changed in the interim.

Emotion is usually better delivered by scene than by exposition.

Too many metaphors or similes can make a story seem abstract or removed: if everything is like something, then nothing is anything.

The most impactful part of this book for me is something I have yet to do for my novel in progress. When author Matt Bell is ready for his second draft, he doesn’t cut and paste; he retypes everything. The idea is that you can copy/paste a shitty sentence easily, but you’ll have a hard time rewriting one. I did this for my first novel will do it for every novel henceforth.

He saves writers a ton of time and agony by pointing out unnecessary wording writers typically include in their manuscripts but don’t need: thought tags (I thought); sensory verbs (I saw); variations of “to be” (is, am); and more. Finally, he provides us with a list of “Weasel Words” to search our document for that need to be diminished, including that (while editing his own novel, he deleted 800 uses of it); perhaps; merely; even; almost; and many more.

This book is invaluable, honestly. Go buy it.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to edit yourself into print by Renni Browne and Dave King

This book was written by Renni Browne, who was formerly a senior editor at William Morrow, and Dave King, contributing editor at Writer’s Digest. The approach in Self-Editing for Fiction Writers is to provide readers with the mistakes they, as editors, commonly see. They explain what the mistakes are, why people make them, and how to avoid them. I bookmarked probably 40 pages in this book, each full of practical, actionable tips. Here are some of my favorites:

You don’t want to give your readers information. You want to give them experiences.

It’s nearly always best to resist the urge to explain.

(Or R.U.E.! They later say: “When you come across an explanation of a character’s emotion, simply cut the explanation. If the emotion is still shown, then the explanation wasn’t needed.” See Matt Bell’s quote above about emotion — they are onto something here.)

Unless you really need italics they’re just plain irritating, aren’t they?!!!

And a hard truth:

Readers today have become accustomed to seeing a story as a series of immediate scenes. Narrative summary no longer engages readers the way it once did.

This book is great for helping you get your manuscript in shape before sending it off to agents. Definitely check it out if you are in the revision phase.

How Fiction Works by James Wood

This is a new read for me. I touched on it briefly here, but I picked up this book when I made the very un-fun decision to change my entire manuscript from first-person to third-person POV so I could reference Wood’s essays on free-indirect speech. It’s helped me look at my novel in a different way than the previous two books. How Fiction Works focuses more on what good fiction is — touching on things like consciousness and empathy — rather than work on a line level. It is quite cerebral and left me confused in many instances, though. He does something authors should do — he assumes the intelligence of the reader — and I typically love that. But in this case, there were many references that went over my head, even though they were about books and writing, my two favorite things.

All that said, I adore the author’s passion. He loves words! He loves good sentences, and he loves to point out what he loves about them. He spends a whole page talking about this sentence in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: “The day waves yellow with all its crops.” A whole page!

Most importantly, to me, he hammers down on what literature means.

He says:

Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice — to notice the way my mother, say, often wipes her lips just before kissing me; the drilling sound of a London cab when its diesel engine is flabbily idling; the way old leather jackets have white lines in them like the striations of fat in pieces of meat …”

Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.

This book is less practical than the first two but useful all the same. It got me thinking very differently about my work.

While the books above buoy my work on the craft, there is nothing like reading fiction to see how others execute their witchcraft. These are the novels I’ve been referencing:

• Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead to see how she plays with time;

• Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo for her otherworldly ability to use words in creative ways;

• The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante — translated by Ann Goldstein — for her use of interiority.

What I’m reading: There’s Nothing Wrong With Her by Kate Weinberg, plus the craft books above.

What are you reading? What craft books can’t you live without?

Love,

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