Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (35 page)

Setting and a sense of place add immeasurably to the texture of any story, but particularly to a true crime book. In McGinniss’s
Blind Faith
, the town of Toms River, New Jersey, is described with such clarity (its geography, appearance, and mores), that it assumes the impact of a character; so does the Kansas town in which the Clutter family is murdered in Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood;
Tommy Thompson’s
Blood and Money
is almost as much a book about Texas and Texans as it is about Joan Robinson Hill.

A true crime writer is well advised to take a crash course in libel and publishing law. All true crime books are legally vetted at considerable legal expense and time, both of which can be avoided if the author is aware of the kind of documentation needed and knows how to word material to avoid suits and the threat of suits.

A trial, by its very nature, makes a wonderful crucible in which character
and plot combine in an explosion of drama, yet it takes a skilled writer to
make
it dramatic. Nothing makes me put down a true crime manuscript faster than coming across endless pages of trial transcripts; if it were transcripts the true crime reader was looking for, we could simply publish the court records and it would be one very dry book. I want to feel as though I’m inside the courtroom as the prosecutor and defense attorney battle it out like gladiators in a Roman arena. Bryna Taubman, in her book
The Preppy Murder Trial
(St. Martin’s, 1988), about the Robert Chambers case, re-creates the war of nerves between two brilliant lawyers, Jack Littman and Linda Fairstein. While they spar, the life of a young man hangs in the balance—as well as justice for the killer of a vital young woman. A writer needs to make the reader feel the roller coaster ride of emotion as sympathy swings back and forth, as the families of both victim and accused killer—not to mention the actual defendant—react to events in the courtroom. It is the point toward which most true crime books build and it should be—must be—powerful.

So where’s the payoff, where’s my reward for reading 360 pages? In an age when true crime books are frequently contracted for before the trial even starts, it’s hard to guarantee that payoff. Although it’s possible to do a book where the accused is acquitted, it is not as satisfying if the real killer isn’t arrested by the book’s conclusion. (It’s like a mystery without an end.) Clearly, unlike the novelist, the true crime author is helpless in the face of real events, but I usually look for cases in which a guilty verdict seems likely.

What is the future of true crime as a genre? Writers, editors, and publishers have been predicting its demise from the moment this newest wave of popularity hit, and it is probably true that the marketplace will not sustain the number of titles now being published. The weaker books, poorly written accounts of less than fascinating cases, will fail no matter how well packaged. The genuinely good books will rise to the top. But one thing is sure: as long as wives and husbands gleefully kill each other off, and parents and children merrily rub one another out, there will be someone to write about it and someone to read what they write. True crime is here to stay. And for the right writer, true crime can certainly pay!

Ruth Cavin

R
UTH
C
AVIN
was a writer and a free-lance editor before she joined the staff of Walker & Company in 1979. The house was known for its mysteries, all of them U.S. editions of British books. Cavin began to acquire a number of American authors’ works, and bought the first crime novels of, among others, Bill Crider, Aaron Elkins, and Jeremiah Healy. Crime fiction became her specialty, and in 1988 (when she moved to her present position at St. Martin’s Press) she was honored by the Mystery Writers of America with the Ellery Queen Award for contributions to the genre
.

“No one can give you a formula for writing a good crime novel—and it wouldn’t be a good novel if one could, “says Ms. Cavin in her informed and informative essay. “Good crime fiction is good fiction with a crime at its center. I use the phrase ‘crime fiction’ rather than ‘mystery fiction’ or ‘mysteries’ because the first phrase allows the inclusion of works that one way or another go beyond the strict limits of the whodunit. But whatever you call it, the day of the pure puzzle with cookie-cutter characters is gone.”

Once Ms. Cavin buys the novel, her work with the author begins, and that work can range from just asking the author “to answer a few queries and straighten out a confusing sentence,” all the way to suggestions for “rewriting several episodes, rethinking some vital aspect of the plot, or re-creating a character.” By phone, fax, and editorial letter, she tries to offer solutions to problems in a manuscript that range from showing the author how to avoid digressions and lumpy exposition to how to increase suspense and build characters (by what they say, do, and what others say about them)
.

What she looks for, ultimately, is “a first-rate piece of crime fiction … [whose] appeal is that it is fresh, different, perhaps even quirky. When a manuscript has these qualities, an editor is willing to work long and hard with an author if necessary in order to make the book what it can ideally be. Indeed, realizing the work’s potential is the challenge that makes editing so exciting and so rewarding.”

Authors sometimes ask me if I have any editorial “guidelines,” and with a straight face I tell them I do: Prepare your manuscript on a typewriter or word processor/computer. Double-space it, use one side of the paper only, and don’t, please don’t, start a new sequence of page numbers with every new chapter. Probably the most extreme instance of the search for a magic formula for writing a crime novel was when a woman cornered me during a writers’ conference to ask me on what page the murder should take place.

Oh, dear.

No one can give you a formula for writing a good crime novel—and it wouldn’t be a good novel if one could.

Good crime fiction is good fiction with a crime at its center
. I use the phrase “crime fiction” rather than “mystery fiction” or “mysteries” because the first phrase allows the inclusion of works that one way or another go beyond the strict limits of the whodunit. But whatever you call it, the day of the pure puzzle with cookie-cutter characters is gone.

As a
crime novel
, a book has a plot that raises ingenious questions about a crime and about the characters involved. It has suspense and a logical conclusion that explains the heretofore mysterious happenings.

As a
novel
, a book has real characters, believable people who are unique human beings, with depth and layers of personality. They may be good or wicked or (cleverly) a bit of both. All of them must be real. How can you care what happens to paper dolls?

As a
novel
, a book has a sense of place. Readers are given not only a description of the setting and its various locations; they are made to feel
that
landscape or
that
room, the peculiar character of that city or town or house. This happens because the author feels it and knows how to bring a place to life on paper. You accomplish this by selecting the details—and they may be very small ones—that form a kind of shorthand of the place, and eliminating all those general descriptions and universal details that tell you really nothing.

As a
novel
, a book is well written. I don’t care if the style is as succinct as Hemingway’s or as complex as Proust’s; I do care if it’s clunky and fuzzy. I value the kind of accuracy of language where the words say exactly what the author intends to convey and not some approximation of it.

A good crime novel, therefore, not only is about a crime but has all the attributes of any good so-called mainstream novel. When I take on a novel for publication, it will have at least the potential of developing these characteristics; the aim is that by the time it is published, the potential will have been realized.

Okay. Now we have this manuscript, which I have read, admired, seen promise in, and bought for publication. But my buying the manuscript doesn’t necessarily mean that I consider it finished and ready to go to the copy editor to have its commas polished. To extremely varying degrees, the manuscript will need more work. I may just ask the author to answer a few queries and straighten out a confusing sentence, but I could suggest rewriting several episodes, rethinking some vital aspect of the plot, or re-creating a character.

The first phase can be done in person (often over lunch, courtesy of the publisher), by phone, or most often—in my case, at least—with an editorial letter, a usually fairly long exposition of just what I feel is wrong with the manuscript, what needs changing, and what might be done about it. Not every author gets an editorial letter or the equivalent; not every manuscript requires one. If the story works well, I put some penciled notes in the margin and the author can make minor corrections when the copyedited manuscript is sent to him or her.

Remember, we’re talking about a manuscript that has been selected (usually from among the fifty to a hundred currently in the office) for publication. This means that basically I am pleased with the writing, the people, the atmosphere. And if those characteristics are okay, but there are problems with the plot, never mind. Plots can be fixed; bad writing, paper-thin characters, blank backgrounds are harder to salvage. Any manuscript I’ve already bought, unless I was suffering a temporary loss of wits at the time, which is always a possibility, is going to be fixable.

The editorial letter, therefore, almost always deals with matters of plot, action, suspense. If I had to say, “Your people aren’t real,” I shouldn’t have bought the book in the first place.

The author receives the editorial letter and possibly goes into shock. He or she has worked so long over the manuscript, fixing and polishing, maybe showing it to friends for comment, until it seemed perfect. Now it has suddenly become the equivalent of a first draft. It’s not quite that drastic, of course, but when we’re talking about one’s own precious creation, perceptions can be skewed, at least temporarily. So far, all my authors have
recovered confidence in their skills and have survived—often to write again and again.

In my letter or conversation or whatever, I not only point out what I don’t think works well, I suggest ways of fixing it. “Here he could tell her about the missing file, so that she can have some motivation to look in the walk-in refrigerator.” Other editors may simply say, “As written, she goes into the refrigerator without any reason for doing so; you have to find one for her.”

Sometimes a structural problem will require rewriting, but often one can easily be dealt with just by switching material around a bit. I had a manuscript recently in which the individual parts were fine, but the sum of those parts was skewed. The book’s protagonist was Jan. Yet the story began with Carol, a secondary character not nearly so interesting or important, and for the next thirty pages, Jan was just present at the edge of Carol’s thoughts. So Carol took first place in the reader’s mind. As the story went on and Carol had no real part to play, the initial emphasis on her became a source of confusion. “Start out with Jan instead,” I told the author, “and Carol will sink to her own place.” It worked.

Authors—and editors—are subject to what I inelegantly call the “subliminal itch.” That’s the nagging feeling that there’s something wrong with what’s on the page; nothing obvious, just
something
not quite right. It’s a temptation to leave the knowledge lying there in your subconscious, and authors often give in to that temptation. It’s easier for the editor, aware of the itch him or herself, to be firm about acknowledging it and asking the author to revise.

I find that the aspect of a novel that inexperienced authors often have trouble with is exposition. You’ve got to get certain facts across to your reader about happenings that took place before the story began. If you just relate them, you will probably go on at more length than you need to, and you will probably be pretty boring. Remember, this information isn’t part of the action; it’s just setting the stage, as it were. You’ve got to get it across seamlessly and painlessly. There are various ways of accomplishing this, some more effective than others.

Your story opens, say, with the protagonist, Joe, walking around New York’s SoHo district, looking in shop windows, greeting friends (which, incidentally, is one way of indicating he’s a familiar figure in that neighborhood), stopping to read the For Rent cards in the supermarket entryway. It’s important for the reader to know:

1. His marriage has recently broken up, at his wife’s instigation;

2. He’s been living at a friend’s house on the Upper East Side; and

3. He’s now looking for a room of his own in SoHo because he wants to move out of the friend’s place.

You can open the story and then go back …

I had been staying with Barbara in her row house in the East Seventies since my wife threw me out. Now I was planning to move on.

You can bring up the before-the-story facts in conversation between two characters, although it is tricky to pull this off without sounding forced and phony …

“Isn’t your brother the one who has been staying with Barbara?”

“Yes, but there’s nothing going on there. He needed a place when his wife threw him out. Now he tells me he’s moving.”

“Why? I know he’s a SoHo type. He doesn’t like the Upper East Side?”

“Not at all. It’s just that he’s a considerate guy and doesn’t want to impose on Barbara anymore.”

If you find yourself writing pages and pages of exposition, stop and consider whether it might not be best for you to start your story further back in time, so you can tell all this directly. That may mean putting an earlier date on the first chapter, but that’s acceptable.