Elizabeth Lyon – Manuscript Makeover: A Review
Manuscript Makeover: Revision Techniques No Fiction Writer Can Afford to Ignore is a wonderful tool for editing, light on theory and full of technique and examples. It is easily the best book I have read on revision with specific suggestions on all aspects of fiction writing.
Lyon writes both for planners and seat-of-the-pants-ers, with thoughts on structure, style, characterization, and punctuation and syntax. I am reading an advance copy, which came just at the right time (Thanks, Universe!) to help me with the WIP.
Lyon’s style is conversational, clear and supportive. Her examples come from contemporary literature rather than from movies or television, and she assumes that the reader has a manuscript in process. Her book has many good suggestions for creating a first draft, but that is not her focus.
My favorite technique is in the first chapter, called riffing. Here’s her explanation:
It is similar to what has been called free writing or writing to a prompt–a picture or word or memory–or free association on paper. These methods fill your pages with writing, they help loosen you up and stick it to the censors, and they generate ideas for manuscripts. Riff-writing differs from these methods by being expressly applied to revising a portion of your writing….Riff writing helps you expand your imagination around a particular problem or need–to lengthen a section, to add images or to develop more characterization for example.
Starting with a sentence or paragraph that needs work, pick one aspect of craft–feeling, object, memory, attitude, setting–and develop it with whatever comes to mind: “overwriter; dont’ stop when you have the first impulseto. Keep writing; keep writing.”
Lyons goes on to tell the story of playing jazz with professional musicians, and being mortified when she played wrong notes. She was told, “There are no wrong notes. you work them and they become part of the riff.”
Each chapter has a handy summary-checklist to keep the reader on track with revision. The book is designed to be used as a reference, so that the reader is directed to the chapters which deal with specific approaches and specific difficulties. She is careful to discuss pitfalls of any approach to writing, such as advantages and disadvantages of single point of view, dual points of view, and author intrusions. She discusses the differences in structure between the hero’s journey, as described by Joseph Campbell and the heroine’s journey described by Maureen Murdock, and how each fits into a different genre and approach to storytelling.
Lyon writes from two decades experience as an independent book editor at her freelance editing company, Editing International, http://www.4-edit.com. Her other titles are The Sell Your Novel Took Kit, A Writer’s Guide to Fiction, National Directory of Editors& Writers, and Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody Can Write. She is available to speak and instruct at writers conferences and will present private custom-made workshops for groups of writers called “I’ll come to You.”
Elizabeth Lyon, Manuscript Makeover from Penguin Books, ISBN 978-0399-53395-2
I am so grateful for the review of my most recent, and last of six, books for writers. I am a latecomer to the blogs and have to wait until my websites are updated (from the Middle Ages to the 21st century) before I can blog too. I have this vision of all of the individual authors in connection, between each other and with the world of readers. When I read of Amazon’s move to control POD and of other policies involving the Big Guys, I am heartened that individuals count, one by one. Writers count, one by one. One blog at a time. One review at a time. In the end, we all hope many satisfied readers. Thank you!