The Complete Guide to Editing Your Fiction [Paperback]

It is almost as if Michael Seidman sits down and goes over your manuscript with you. As a long-time editor, his insights and examples are right on target. He stresses the whole work as well as addressing the elements from which it is constructed, he also points out how a change in any one of the elements changes the larger entity in ways subtle or crucial. In a culture which cherishes sound-bites, we often want quick (if not excellent) fixes to everything. Michael Seidman's book points out that writing well is an end in itself, that there is no easy substitute for true craftmanship. His advice on revising and rewriting would almost seem to guarantee (if followed) a manuscript that is the very best any writer at nearly any stage of expertise could hope to produce. It is not a way to a quick-fix, but it is a way to a thoughtful and thorough one. The tone of the book is that of a considerate mentor, which makes it not only a work chock-full of great advice, but a pleasure to read as well.

The usefulness of this book will depend a lot on your personal style of learning writing. If you learn best by a case study as an example, this book can be very helpful. (Writing teachers will love this book.)

If you're more into just getting the concepts and then seeing how to apply them to your own work, this book is frustrating. (Self-taught or intermediate writer-types will not enjoy this book.)

The examples closely follow a few stories presented within the book. Since I'm in the latter category of learner, I found the 'corrections' may or may not be even vaguely applicable to one's own work, so it's hard to tell which suggestions to apply and which to ignore. Personally, for my learning style, I like "Self-Editing For Fiction Writers," "Fiction First Aid," or even "Revising Fiction" (David Madden).

Mr. Seidman may have years of experience as a valued editor, but teaching what one has learned is another matter, and a book like this will only frustrate many readers. To be sure, the chapter on "Three Case Studies" is good, as is the chapter on "Further Revising" and the "Checklist," but the rest of it is just a muddled wish-wash.

Take the chapter on Point of View. First he presents a full page of an example of omniscient first person, then he explains first and third person limited with no examples, and then he presents the intro to an essay he wrote - two entire pages of small print about looking out of an airplane window, and then repeats the whole thing simply to show how you can change "I" to "we" and get first person plural. He could have done that in two sentences. And is first person plural really a point of view in fiction?

Next he brings up an example of an argument at a party, in omniscient point of view, and instead of focusing on just that - point of view, the subject of the chapter - he says, "the characters have no dimension or depth" and so treats us to a full page and a half of creating backstory for each of the characters. About how "the male chauvinism that was normal to his teen years (or of which he would be accused, right or wrong) is tempered by what he's learned about women" and "Rose is from somewhere in Middle America, part of what he would remember as `the silent majority.'" That's character development, and useful for the main characters of a novel, but it's just insane to use it for the subjects of a writing example.

Finally, stumbling back to common sense, Seidman gets to the basics of point of view, saying you can't switch it in one scene. But he gives no examples of it, and certainly no examples of common mistakes to catch in your writing, such as your narrator saying, "My face went pale."

No, he again jumps way off track with a confusing full-page example he wrote about "a novella told in second person, present tense, from the point of view of two different characters." Say what? And how will that help one's writing?

There's nothing like in Gary Provost's Make Your Words Work: Proven Techniques for Effective Writing-For Fiction and Nonfiction which has sections on Viewpoint Mistakes as well as Describing the Viewpoint Character. And there's certainly nothing like in The Writer's Guide to Crafting Stories for Children (Write for kids library) by Nancy Lamb, which is one of the best introductions to writing fiction there is. Her chapter on point of view starts with six and a half pages on first person, broken up into very helpful sections such as Advantages of First Person, Disadvantages of First Person, Trick of the Trade, Which First Person Character Tells the Story, First Person Moods, and First Person Books to Check Out. And then she does the same with Third Person, and ends with a page on Second Person. Seidman's book doesn't even begin to come near that - it's not helpful at all about understanding point of view, and certainly not about editing it.

The next chapter is on Plot and it includes an astounding 41 pages of the second draft of his "Dream" story (of which you've already read an 11 page first draft). Why all this is in here, I don't know, because he makes an average of just two changes a page to the text, and many of them are simply fixing typos. A book on editing should have plenty of examples, but this isn't helpful at all.

In fact, the one thing this book needed was an editor. There's not only spelling errors, but he writes, "Things may have cropped up as you wrote that you weren't planning on - a bit of business leading to another and another - and because they were part of the ending you'd envisioned at the start, you will have lost them as you got back on track." He meant "they weren't part of the ending," and in so doing, loses us in the confusion.

At one point, frustrated with the book, I flipped ahead to the chapter on "Chipping Away, Word by Word." I wanted to get down to the nitty-gritty, hands-on tips. He covers word choice, point of view, presents an example in which he actually makes it longer than the first draft, goes back to word choice, and then switches to adding sensory detail. Again, there's no order or sense to it, and surely little about chipping away.

Next he gives a half page scene he wrote about a subject being questioned by the police, and then offers a paragraph on how he wanted to hide the person's gender. Again, what does that have to do with chipping away? In the next paragraph, he does get back to editing the piece, but in the end he takes out only one word: "then."

If he truly wanted to show how to chip away, he could've taken the part where the character, with a cigarette in her mouth, looks at the detective for a light - "He rolled his eyes, but then bent over, flicking a plastic lighter to life and offering me a light"- and changed it to "He rolled his eyes, but flicked a lighter to life." You don't need to bend over to light a cigarette of someone sitting, a plastic lighter (as opposed to a silver one with "Best Shot 2002" engraved on it) isn't worth mentioning, and we know he's offering a light, so you can cut all that out. And isn't "rolled his eyes" a cliché? But you don't see that kind of editing anywhere in this book.

Seidman doesn't get to active verbs till page 226, with just one example, and then mentions concrete words over adjectives without giving any examples.

That's probably because he had to make room for the final, 25 page draft of his story, stuck at the end of the book. How one is supposed to see the changes without flipping back to the earlier draft, a hundred pages earlier, and comparing each line, I don't know. I just know it wasn't worthwhile.

Also, in this final draft, again and again two characters will be alone in a cabin and say things like, "Is it a good time, David?", "I hope so, Peg," and "We've been moving a long time, David." Even if you allow them to say each other's names in moments of romance, there's still twenty-three times they use each other's names in dialogue. Renni Browne's Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print, David Morrell's The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing [SUCCESSFUL NOVELIST -OS], and Nancy Lamb's "Crafting Stories for Children" all tell you to avoid this. Lamb says, "It's another way to identify yourself as a novice," and Browne says, "It gets old very quickly." And it does, especially in a book on editing.

To sum up this review, you need only look at the last page of Seidman's book: "It's time had come," he writes. Here's one of the most common manuscript errors, using "it's" instead of "its," and it's not only here in his book, but there wasn't one mention of checking your work for this mistake in this "Complete Guide to Editing."

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