Some Thoughts on Editing
Dear All,
This is the latest episode of Don’t Press That Button, a newsletter about books and music and movies and cats and baseball and whatnot. As the name would indicate, we are very cautious about buttons around here. We’re not about to encourage you to go pressing buttons willy-nilly. Does that ever work with the various television and DVD remotes in your remotes basket? OK, like, once, but that’s the exception that proves the rule.
However, I’ve investigated the button below, and all it does is subscribe you to this newsletter. If you’re new here, and you’d like to stick around, you can safely do so by clicking on it.
Editors Are the Best
Writers complain about their editors; editors complain about their writers; it’s one of the most perfectly symmetrical designs in all of nature.
Listen, though, if you write a book, you need an editor. I can’t say enough for all the editors who’ve labored to bring the best possible versions of my stories and books to print. I hope we can agree that quality line editing speaks for itself: really good writing needs its syntax in order.1 That’s certainly something a top-notch editor helps to fine-tune, but just as importantly, they excel at pointing out the pits and weak spots in a piece’s narrative logic, and at chasing down its thematic concerns and suggesting ways to highlight them.
To take a (spoiler-free, and thus somewhat vague) example from The Curator that’s still fresh in my mind: Joe Monti, my editor, gently assessed that a key piece of characterization at the center of the novel was missing. Joe asked a pair of simple, but precise questions. “What is motivating X here? What does X believe he is going to accomplish?” My own nose had been so close to the book for so long that I had looked right past something that I knew for myself — X’s motivation and intention — but had not explained, or at least not explained clearly enough.
Now was this issue, which required threading information and perspective into a couple of chapters that I had set aside as settled, a little bit annoying to deal with? A little!
I’m tempted to share the cliché that a problem is an opportunity, because that’s often true, but to be fair, if the problem is big enough and horrible enough, it’s just a big, horrible problem. If your house spontaneously splits in half, and you’re left with half a house, you have an opportunity, I suppose, but it’s an opportunity that entails building an entirely new house. I’ve had stories, screenplays, and novels all come asunder in exactly that way. To solve the issues these pieces had, I’d have needed to begin all over again.
The issue that Joe (seen above, perhaps laughing at my promise to finish with the proof pages in “just one more week”) flagged was most definitely not that serious. It warranted repairing, though, and once I got past the initial anxiety that comes with opening up the middle of a novel for minor surgery, I took a lot of satisfaction in building up the weak characterization. I’m sure it made the novel stronger.
Now, I didn’t make every single change to The Curator that Joe suggested, but I earnestly considered them all — and did make most of them, because he’s almost always right. That’s maybe the point I wanted to get to here. You should never think of an editor as a threat to your work. They want to make your book better and, if you let them, they will.
The Latest
The Curator got a lovely review from Booklist: “King’s strange, terrifying novel is part gothic thriller and part absurd, Bulgakovesque government satire. Wildly creative, this novel weaves and dips into class struggle and resentment, dark comedy, bittersweet romance, and the specters of body horror… an absurd, frightening novel that will delight fans of twisty dark fantasies.”
It also landed in a couple of winter/spring book roundups, and both lists are worth sticking a bookmark in, because there’s a lot of great-sounding fiction to keep in mind for your next trip to the bookstore and/or library.
If you’d like to win a free copy of the book from Goodreads, you can enter here.
I’m going to be signing some copies of the UK edition of the book, so please stay tuned for details on that.
My March 8 Mysterious Galaxy virtual event with Tom Bissell is now open for registration if you want to come hang out with us from the comfort of your own home. There are also details about how to order copies of the book with the signed bookplates that I had mentioned.
Recommendations
A couple of dear friends, Sean Doolittle and Charles Lambert, have new novels that are out, or just about to come out, and I loved them both.
Sean’s Device Free Weekend is a wonderful thriller, a face-off between a group of friends and everything that a modern techno-wizard can throw at them. It’s a rush of a read, and it’s also highly amusing. If you are an Elmore Leonard fan, you’ll definitely enjoy Sean’s work, and I think this is his best yet.
Charles’s The Bone Flower is an unsettling Victorian-set tale, it’s constructed with the most extraordinary sense of place. I was transported. You really feel that a person from 1885 could pick up the book and not find anything that was off. It’s another A+ novel of the supernatural from a writer who specializes in them.
To all the people who have been saying that Only Murders in the Building is great: I agree with you. It is so great. The extended bit of physical comedy by Steve Martin in the last episode of season 1 was glorious.
As always, my thanks for subscribing, and in case you ever have a question or a comment or just want to say hi, if you reply to the email, I will see it. I’m also over on Instagram if you want to follow along there.
All Best,
Owen
I do recognize that the pressure is hereby on me not to dangle any clauses. That’s why I’m going to ask my friend Jen, a professional copy editor, to look this one over. No fool I, as some old Mainers like to say.