David J. Williams

My post of last week on the writing process generated some follow-up questions; one of them centered on how much editing occurred to MIRRORED HEAVENS. Well, I was lucky to have an activist editor; I hear a lot of stories these days about how editors have hardly any time/bandwidth for editing, but I was fortunate in that Juliet Ulman of Bantam Spectra was nothing short of spectacular. There were two principal fixes she suggested to MIRRORED HEAVENS.

1.  Front-load the exposition. Frankly, I made the reverse of the mistake that many first-time writers make.  Wanting to avoid stuff like “as you know, Bob, the United States has been locked in a second cold war with the Eurasian Coalition for several decades, which has pretty much completely militarized America and created something that in name is a republic but in practice is essentially a military dictatorship in which the president (who we colloquially call “the Throne”) is supported by an Inner Cabinet composed of the heads of the various military commands who incessantly scheme/maneuver for power, and oh by the way, there’s lots of secret agents, and the ones who hack the zone are called razors, and the ones who kick down doors are called mechs, and by the way, the handlers mess with their memories, and the U.S. has occupied Latin America because space has been weaponized and equatorial launch real-estate is at a premium and did I mention–“. . well, I think you get the point. A novice would have stuck that in there; a novice like me who thought he was being clever would toss a few clues in there, but nowhere near enough, and the reader would be going WTF. Though my example above is more than a little exaggerated, striking that balance is tougher than it looks. But Juliet helped me to develop a # of smarter ways to do the exposition so that the necessary information is front-loaded (an obvious example:  put the Treaty of Zurich at the very front of the book).

And I’ve got a lot more to say on this, and I haven’t even got to Juliet’s other major change/feedback on the original manuscript—but it’s now a quarter to eleven, and the manuscript to book three is calling. . . . feed me. . . .feed me . . .  (in which respect it resembles my cat, who I might add has been itching to make an appearance in this blog for some time, and is unlikely to be denied for much longer.) More later.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 10:50 am and is filed under SF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.