EDITING FAQs: What’s A Fix Note?

Sample responses to authors

The “Fix Note” is a common tool in the publishing industry, both for magazine stories and for book manuscripts. It’s essentially a shopping list from the editor to the author, assessing the work and pointing out any ongoing problems that should be corrected.

When I send a physical MS back to an author (i.e, an old-fashioned chunk of paper, now an increasingly rare phenomenon), it’s usually liberally covered both with red-pen comments in the margin, and with little stick-on notes pointing out various things to be aware of.

In addition, I also send a more thoughtful overview – the Fix Note. There are two examples below, both written for first-time novelists eager to have feedback and guidance before submitting their work to publishers.

Along with the specifics, they also contain a lot of general hints and advice for writers. Perhaps you can apply some of these hints to your own work, or glean a few useful tips to help improve your next story.

 

Dear Jenny,

This is a really, really good read. I like it a lot, and can see it going places – such as the “new releases” section in the window of my local murder-mystery bookstore! I have to say, nobody would ever guess that this is your first book. You write like a pro, in spite of your many minor problems with grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.

(You weren’t kidding when you told me cheerfully “My style is piss-poor”! I thought at first maybe you were just being modest and self-deprecating. But nope, by now I’d have to agree with your self-assessment. It’s lucky you’ve got me!)

However, those are just minor matters, the sort of thing an editor can easily clean up for you. What really counts is that your story is extremely gripping. It’s always a good sign when I get irritated when you haven’t sent me the next chapter yet – because I can’t wait to find out what happens in it! That tells me you’ve produced a page-turner.

The hard copy of the MS I sent back to you is bristling with scribbled marginal notes and sticky tabs, so I won’t repeat those. What I will give you here are some general points to be aware of throughout:

1) Names. Please write down the correct spelling of everybody’s name for me. You frequently give variant spellings: Cawl/Cawls, Marshal or Marshalls, Derek or Derrick, Piper or Pipher (Piffer?). Pick one and stick to it.

In particular, you need to restrict yourself to only one Michael. God gave us plenty of male Christian names to go around, so choose a few different ones. Pick Mike the dog, Mike Price, Michael T. Jones or Sgt. Bob Michaels – your choice. But all these different Mikes running through the plot confuses your reader.

As well, you often mix first and last names: “Michaels and Hunter went out... Hunter and Collins did that” – etc. This is fine if you’ve made a decision to refer to your heroine by her first name, and restrict everyone else to surnames. But sometimes you refer to Bob and Michaels as both names in the same scene, and it gets confusing. (In the text, I’ve amended Michaels to Sgt. Something. When you tell me the replacement name, I’ll plug it in.) Or keep him as Michaels, and change the bad guy’s name to Cedric T. Jones (or whatever).

2) Dialogue. It’s good that your dialogue moves briskly back and forth between people. But there are times when I can’t figure out who’s speaking – I have to go in and write “Wilf, Cundy, Wilf” next to alternating speeches, to figure it out. Then it turns out that you’ve broken one speech in half, so I’m attributing the wrong words to the wrong guy. This needs to be cleared up. Look over your dialogue with an eye to inserting a “said Cundy” or “Collins answered” once in a while.

Also, remember that real people in the real world use contractions when they talk. Most people, in ordinary conversation, say “wouldn’t” rather than “would not.” I’ve been putting contractions in as I go along – though sometimes, for special emphasis, I know you really do want to leave them out. (Cundy’s speeches, for instance, are very formal and non-conversational.)

I’ve also changed many of your interjections, replacing most “ah”s with “uh”s. There’s a subtle but important difference between them as. “Uh” is the most usual – it means a pause. “Ah” is used much less often; it’s rather more formal and tends to express satisfaction rather than nervousness or hesitation. You might say: “Ah, I see we’re having lobster for dinner!” But you’d say: “I, uh, have to talk to you, boss...”

3) Deleted scenes. I like the way you jump the action around, shifting from one scene to another. But there are some scenes that we don’t get to see, and that we don’t even know happened (until we have to infer the fact later). It took me quite a while, for instance, to figure out that Hunter must have talked with Mike Price already. But the scene where she (and Bob M?) interview him at the police station doesn’t happen “on camera,” so to speak, and isn’t referred to afterwards. Be aware that your readers need to know what you know – roughly.

4) Fleshing out a bit. Some stories I’ve edited go on at great length about scenes and people, so your relative sparseness is quite refreshing. (Beginner writers, especially, often go into waaay too much detail, just to prove they can.) However, at times you’re a bit TOO succinct! If you can give us a brief one or two words of general or physical description of each main character, that would be a big help.

Dig into your adjective bag. Is so-and-so quiet, eager, withdrawn, lean, dark, tall, officious, grizzled, taciturn, whatever? I don’t even have much idea what Hunter looks like. (Except that men keep commenting on how good-looking she is – which is a Harlequin-romance habit that I’d drop, if I were you.) Is she tall, short, dark, blonde, hopeful, harried, quiet, exuberant? Tell!

5) Bad habits (not yours, your characters’). Personally, I have a hard time with your protagonists smoking and swearing. Maybe it’s just me, but I like a firm dichotomy between good guys and bad guys: bad guys do things the good ones wouldn’t – that’s how we KNOW they’re bad! Both your hero and heroine smoke, for example, which is generally a habit for low-lifes in today’s world – Linda would, but surely Hunter shouldn’t?

And while it may be OK for Reg McCarren to say “Shit,” I’m not comfortable with Collins doing it. (And I don’t think Hunter should in front of her son, either.) If you want to go ahead anyway, fine, but this is something you should be aware of.

6) Heroine’s career choice. How did Hunter get into being a P.I.? You might explain this briefly, early on. I want to know, so I suppose most readers would.

7) Point Of View (a.k.a. POV). Throughout, you pick one character to view the scene through – usually Hunter, but when she’s not around it can be Wilf or Michaels. This is good, but you need to be consistent with it. One militia scene, for instance, is told from Wilf’s POV; but part-way through, you insert some of Jones’ feelings in there too. That jars a little. Stick to one POV.

8) Flashbacks. These are always hard, even for the pros; so it’s no surprise to me that in some scenes you have a lot of difficulty going from the here-and-now into a flashback. The main thing is to make sure the here-and-now of a scene is firmly established before you leave for the flashback; and that you make sure the cut-off point is well delineated. It takes some work, I know. But it’s difficult for readers to figure out that a character is contemplating the past, when they’re not clear about what’s going on in the present.

9) “Show, don’t tell.” Several times, I’ve scribbled those words in the margin. That means we’re supposed to see what your characters see, not just what YOU tell us that they see. Get the difference? That’s one of the pillars of good writing, for both journalists and novelists. Don’t say that so-and-so looks nervous or hostile – tell us what they’re doing, so that we (the readers) can see them being that way. Is he sweating bricks? Is she chewing her nails and fiddling with her purse?

10) My contributions. As you read through the edited electronic version, you’ll notice a lot of text that’s inserted between [[double square brackets]]. Those are my changes / additions / comments / interjections, for you to review. (The idea is that those brackets are never used for any other purpose; so you can use your search/replace function to find them, evaluate their contents, and then either amend or delete them.)

Of course, you’re under no obligation to use anything I’ve inserted – the only reason it’s there, in most cases, is just to show you that this scene needs something else, something more; and THIS is roughly what the something should be. Obviously, it’s better that additions be in your voice rather than mine.

That’s about it. I’ll send some more notes shortly. And don’t feel bad about all these corrections – really, the story IS great! It just needs a bit of polishing.

Good luck,
Antonia.

Fix Note #2

Dear Colin,

I thoroughly enjoyed reading your manuscript. It’s a good story, with excellent dialogue (usually the sticking point for first-time writers) and some sharply drawn characters. The adventure element – particularly the sailing – is really exciting. I bet the book will sell well to sailors looking for a gripping novel for a long trip!

So let’s take all the good stuff as read, and move on to the stuff we can improve.

I’m putting a whole bunch of scribbled marginal comments and post-it notes on your MS itself, to deal with specific points; so I won’t repeat those here. The issues I'm raising here, though, are major and ongoing ones – some things for you to be aware of throughout, and fix as necessary.

They’re in no particular order, just as they occur to me. You’ll notice that I’ve colour-coded them, here and on your MS – that will help you figure out what problem needs addressing at which point. (You can see that some sections have multiple colour stripes – those are the parts that really need work!)

1) Pacing. Your “speeding up” and “slowing down” both need work. This is a purely technical thing, and it’s always hard. Just remember that the reader must shift gears quite a bit to go from following a story minute-by-minute, to then being told: “two years later” or even just “the next day.”

2) Flashbacks. A side effect of the last point is getting in and out of the flashbacks. This problem bedevils you right from the opening. The first para is very good – nothing like a body bobbing by one foot off your dock to set a scene. But instantly, without having properly established a presence in the here-and-now, you leave it and go dashing off into the background of Pip and Gus’s childhood.

Flashbacks do have their place, to provide a backstory; but try to use them sparingly. Much of the Gunn background, in particular, is excessive (see my point #11, below, about over-embroidering). I often feel you’re writing two books at once, and trying to squish everything into one. Your material is mostly well-conceived, but it doesn’t mesh very easily with the present action – and the tumult of detail is too much. Tell us only what we need to know.

3) Show, don’t tell. When a writer handles dialogue as well as you do, it’s particularly irritating to be told something rather than shown it. You do the showing well, so keep at it.

4) Make your action scenes bigger. From the reader’s viewpoint, these parts often just don’t have enough punch. You go from accompanying Pip in a non-violent situation, to all of a sudden keeping him company in a violent one – and your tone and pace don’t change. Figuratively speaking, your breathing is still calm, your pulse is still steady, etc. You need some Shock! and Wow! and Help! and Yikes! and How the hell do I get out of this? (A tip: single lines and lots of new paragraphs are simple tools to help the reader feel the full force of your dramatic scenes.)

A prime example of this “lack of punch” is the explosion on the ship. I literally had to read that section several times before I figured out a) that there really was something bad going on; b) what exactly was happening (the mechanics of the situation); c) why this was happening; and d) exactly what Pip feels and thinks at the time. The nightmarish feeling of “My God, a moment ago this was a pleasure cruise, and now I’m about to die!” doesn’t come through as strongly as it should.

You need to set aside your own knowledge of the scene, and examine it carefully from the reader’s point of view. You, the creator of this moment, have a clear idea in your mind of what’s happening. But the reader needs to have things explained, in a way that makes all the details clear – and inspires strong emotion, of whatever kind. Your tone in this section is so matter-of-fact, it almost has the effect of making an exciting, pivotal scene seem quite dull.

I also don’t think you make quite enough of the creepiness of standing on something you later realize is a dead body, which later still you realize is actually the dead body of your missing brother. This is a lovely touch, but I'm sure you could execute it better.

5) Love and sex. The relationship between Pip and Alba is something I personally have a lot of trouble with. Maybe it's just me, but I simply can’t see what it is about him that Alba likes so much! He seems to be quite passive, and lets her do everything for him and to him. Unless he’s a really, really good-lookin’ guy (which you don’t indicate), it’s hard for a reader to see just what the attraction is. (Granted, he saves Mandy’s life in a state of dire physical extremity himself; but that’s about it.) And at the end, after they’ve become lovers, he sneaks off in the most cowardly manner – that’s very hard to handle! Is he meant to be an anti-hero, as she’s an anti-heroine? But even so, there ought to be something about him that we realize is attractive.

Aside from that, there are also far too many sudden changes in Pip’s feelings for Alba. He likes her, then he doesn’t, then he does again, then he finds something new to dislike.... To use a nautical metaphor, too many tacks! I think many of these could be jettisoned, and the idea of it being a complex and changeable relationship would still be there. There ought to be a discernable overall pattern.

6) Useless verbs. Sadly, you have a terrible fondness for prissy words that don’t contribute anything. The major offender is your overuse of “proves”; runners-up are “offered” and “appeared.” (Others are served, seemed, attempted, returned, provided and remained – to name only a few.) Try to find more active, telling verbs than these; I’ve circled the ones that strike me. Use your Find function to locate every appearance of “proves,” for instance – 98% of them can be replaced with a better, more active verb.

7) Authorly omniscience. Although you have quite a number of nicely set-up moments (the prime one being the broken hatch hasp), several times I got the feeling – not a comfortable one for a reader – that you’re making it up as you go along, and not always backtracking to make the new material congruent with the old. I’ve flagged several of those places.

Coupled with this is another reservation: I think there are just TOO MANY plot twists and revelations. There’s one, and then another, and then another, and then, gosh darn it, another one – until the brain is just reeling from all this new information, which throws a new light on everything that had gone before... (see below, when I return to this subject).

8) Past tenses. You frequently confuse the past and imperfect past: so and so “did” something, when in fact he “HAD” done it.

9) Your title. I hate to be a party-pooper, but I don’t think Thin Blue Man works. We learn only late in the book that the name refers to Gus, but he never really comes into any sort of focus for the reader. For all his presumed importance to Pip, he isn’t really a powerful enough character in the book to be the title figure. (Also, that title bumps into the familiarity your readers may have with The Thin Man as a movie character.)

I’ve often found that in creative work, a useful piece of advice is that line from children’s counting games – ”Take away the number you first thought of.” The fact that some person, thing, act or scene is the original inspiration for your work, doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to wind up in the final cut. Your story can move beyond it. I think this one has. I suspect there’s a lot more in the book now than there was when you first thought up this title.

10) Chapter breaks. You should review these, since often they seem to occur bang in the middle of a scene – which afterwards carries on just as it had before.

11) Over-embroidering. You have a tendency to tell elaborate stories, apparently just for the sheer joy of invention; and you often throw in minor characters who do nothing but clutter up the narrative. Like most neophyte writers, you love inventing things and throwing them in. But the result is like a sundae with so many toppings, sauces, cherries, nuts and sprinkles that the ice-cream itself gets lost. A talent for invention has to be used sparingly, especially in a mystery novel.

Enjoyable as these bits may be to you, they don’t always connect well with the plot; they detract readers’ attention from the story. Your plot is complex – don’t succumb to the temptation to make it even more ornate by throwing in more hints, red herrings, incidents and characters. Sometimes, less is more.

12) The body on the dock. Thinking it over, the whole business of Nosy/Dennis Parker, which opens the story, seems curiously unintegrated to the rest.

13) Prepositions ahoy. You tend to use “as though” when “like” is the proper word – the exact opposite of the usual fault. “Like” is overused, granted, but it has a correct function: to set up a metaphor. It's an adjectival phrase (“His mouth felt like the bottom of a bird cage”), while “as though” is an adverbial phrase (“He leaped from his desk as though jet-propelled”). Use your Find function to search for and correct these.

14) Simplify the relationships. As I’ve said throughout in my notes, the major simplification I’d like to see is the open avowal from the get-go that Alba is Brody’s daughter, that Val is his wife and Alba’s stepmother, and that Mandy is Val and Brody’s daughter – and hence Alba's little sister. You can hold these pieces of info back a little, but not excessively – it places too much of a burden on Alba’s character if she’s required to lie, cheat and conceal all the time. (You can’t make a character believable if she’s merely a plot device, acting as an information bottleneck to your readers.)

15) The shape of the story. I’ve made up a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the book – what happens, where the scenes take place, who’s involved, etc. From this, I’ve broken your book down into four phases:

I) In L.A. before the accident (your main characters are Pip, Gus and the kids)

II) After the Elysian accident (Pip, Alba, Brody, Mandy, Val, etc.)

III) At sea aboard the Mahia (Pip, Alba, Mandy)

IV) The finale on Gunn (Pip, Alba, Mandy, Rita, Brody)

Each phase has its own separate problems, in addition to the ones that are common to all. In Phase I, for instance, the interaction between Pip and Gus never quite gels for me – I never get the feeling that I know Gus, that he’s a believable character rather than a collection of adjectives. The action with the kids is good, though maybe a bit prolonged. Opal and Rosie are effective characters.

In Phase II, you introduce Alba – then seem uncertain what to do with her. In one sense, the action bounces around like a ball in a squash court here, from locale to locale. In another sense, it rather bogs down; between suspicion and counter-suspicion, dodging Brody, looking for Gus, visiting Val, etc., etc. – it’s a big relief when the three main characters finally take to the open sea.

There’s not much wrong with Phase III, except that the talking-over of events – which in itself is quite appropriate to this relative lull – goes around in circles like a spider in a bathtub, which can get a bit wearying for the reader. Also, you really don’t quite seem to know where Pip and Alba’s relationship is going. However, the Mandy-overboard scene is great, as is the storm itself; those are the real stuff of adventure.

Phase IV should be thrilling and gratifying, but instead it too gets bogged down. Some parts are just plain unbelievable: if a son sails two thousand miles to see his mother, she’s unlikely to just hector him on the dock for a few minutes before sending him and his friends on their way. The series of revelations is also a bit too much – well, a LOT too much. A good climactic scene ought to be deeply satisfying: everything is explained, the bad guy gets his comeuppance. But this needs some major re-conceptualizing, and then a careful rewrite – keep in mind your characters’ various motivations.

16) Conclusion. The end of the story, on Gunn Island, is messy (and not just when Alba takes an axe to Brody). I couldn’t shake the feeling that Philip and Alba really should have foreseen Brody’s being there – they may have been in limbo, cut off from the world, during their weeks at sea; but surely there are planes several times daily between L.A. and Seattle. Your grand finale needs shortening and tightening; and personally, I always have a weakness for the kind of scene where some character asks all the questions that have puzzled the reader throughout the book, and the omniscient author patiently answers them.

17) Cut, cut, cut. Then cut some more. Cut with a brutal hand. Cut where I’ve indicated, and where I haven’t. Cut many of the reminiscences and flashbacks; cut rumination and reflection; cut repetition; cut aimless meandering dialogue. Cut the dull bits. Cut anything not strictly needed for character or plot development. If you can get this 300-page MS down to 200 pages or so, you’ll be doing your editor, your readers and yourself a big favour.

18) Reconceptualize. Then, when you’ve chopped everything not absolutely necessary or desirable, you can start to add material back in. Some scenes – such as your opening and ending – will require quite heavy rewriting. Other parts should clarify and explain. You can expand parts of the story to better capture your characters’ actions and thoughts. I often felt that you hadn’t fully thought about how the characters would best react to some event or news. At present, even Pip doesn’t react as strongly as he should (except for where he over-reacts, as if to compensate).

OK, I’m done now. Are you still standing, after all these attacks on your baby?!

Please don’t take it personally: as I said, the basic story is really, really good. Big chunks of it are quite memorable. It’s just that when I think back on it, I remember the scenes and characters that drive the action – but not the long stretches that contained only desultory chat, or seemingly unrelated flashbacks. Much of the charging to and fro is forgettable, and just clutters up the good stuff – it drags the story, slowing it down like barnacles and weeds on a hull.

So scrape it all off! Follow all my advice, go back to work, and put your talent for invention to work again. If you do, I’ll be reading those glowing reviews yet.

Good luck,
Antonia.