Three craft books I'm reading while editing my novel
There are two liminal moments I chase like it’s my job: the space of absolute possibility between finishing a book and figuring out what to read next, and the time between completing the first draft of a novel and beginning a round of revisions.
Today I’m in the expansive and reflective latter space. I’ve finished my shitty1 first draft and am gearing up for the first round of edits on the novel I’m working on. It’s suggested by many writers, agents, and editors to let your draft sit for some time before editing.
What I like to do during this “break” time is read.
Last time I was in this post-writing and pre-revising space, I read the three craft books I write about below. They each got me to look at my draft from different angles. That those disparate angles made me realize that particular novel was no longer of interest to me is neither a problem with the authors nor a testament to the quality of the craft books. I actually think it speaks to the impact of those craft books that they made me realize it was time to pause the book I was on and start the one I kept thinking about.
My writing teacher has a different suggestion for the time off between finishing a draft and beginning revisions. She suggests re-reading a few novels that take on something specific I’m trying to achieve with my new book. It could be a particular tone or the portrayal of a specific relationship. For example, if I were trying to write a book with serious subject matter but narrated with humor, I might reread Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason. If I wanted to rip readers’ hearts out, I could reread Heart the Lover by Lily King.
The last time I was revising, I referenced these three novels to see how the authors execute their witchcraft:
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.
I realize now as I’m writing this that the reason I probably haven’t selected the novels to reread yet is because I am actively chasing that first liminal space I love: the time of possibility when choosing what to read next.
While I finalize the list of novels I want to read, I will be revisiting these three craft books, which served me beautifully the last time I was in this space.
Refuse to be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts by
I refer this book to anyone who’s editing. 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 reminding us that writing a novel is a massive accomplishment and we must own it:
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.
After the empowering bit getting us re-amped about being a writer, the book is to-the-point and as practical as a reference book (I use it as a reference book, in fact). He gives us little one-liners that should be written on sticky notes and posted all around our desks:
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.
He also 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 a million things more. He also 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; etcetera.
The single most impactful suggestion in this book is what Bell does when he approaches his second draft. Instead of saving his document as “version 2” and making edits in the new draft, he retypes the entire book word for word, the idea being that you can copy/paste a shitty sentence easily but you’ll have a hard time rewriting one.
I can attest to how transformative this part of the process is. The physical act of retyping word for word sparks something different in my brain and turns me into a decisive, confident editor who knows exactly what to do. Last time I revised a book, I retyped my second draft. This time around I plan to wait to do the retyping for my third draft, once I’ve addressed the issues I know need attention. It seems like a better application of this part of this transformative revision process.
If I had to suggest one book to help with revision, this would be it. 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.
The authors made an acronym for resisting the urge to explain: R.U.E. “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. This stuff is important and somehow so easy to overlook.
Unless you really need italics they’re just plain irritating, aren’t they?!!!
Ugh, I have so many italics I need to cut in my novel. This is such good intel though, right?
And they also smack us with 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 especially great for helping you get your manuscript in shape before sending it off to agents. It helps you resolve the embarrassing red flags that agents and editors will pick up on immediately.
How Fiction Works by James Wood
I originally picked up this book when I made the spooky decision to change my entire first novel from first-person to third-person POV. I wanted to reference Wood’s famous essays on free-indirect speech before making the exhaustive overhaul. The book 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 —assume the intelligence of the reader — and I typically love that. There were many references in this book that went over my head the first time I read it, but I’m curious to see if they’ll make sense to me this time around.
All that said, I am HERE for 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 differently about my work (I repeat, I abandoned a novel and moved onto one that actually meant something to me!) and I plan to revisit it again now to remind myself what good literature is.
Wish me luck. I need all of it!
Questions for you:
What are your go-to craft books?
What novels would you reference for things like playing with time, a creative use of words, a specific tone, or interiority?
Do you have any psycho-analytic theories about why I chase these liminal spaces like it’s my job? I’d be so curious to know theories on what it is about those floaty, unmoored moments I (and others, I imagine) so love.
Thanks for reading! Love, Kolina
- What are you reading? What are you underlining?
- What I’m reading: Vera Stein is Fine by Julie Murphy. Such a fun read! It’s about a 40-year-old who moves into a fabulous retirement community with her (very sexual) grandma in Palm Springs. It comes out July 21!
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I’m not calling my draft shitty; I’m reminding myself and others that first drafts are meant to be messy. Writing is rewriting, as writers love to say. That’s when the good stuff happens.
