Karen Sandler

Category: Strongly Held Beliefs

  • Why God Made Editors

    I’m not writing this to kiss up to my editor. Really. I’m writing it in response to that “wall-banger” book (which shall remain nameless) that I abandoned last night.

    You know what a wall-banger is. It’s that book in which you invest some time reading. You try to plow your way through it and maybe even read it all if you’re one of those people who feels compelled to finish every book you pick up. But at some point in that process, the lack of writing craft or the poorly structured plot or weak characterization or crappy ending gets to be too much and you fling that book against the wall in disgust.

    Of course, since the book in question was on my Kindle, I didn’t literally fling it against the wall. Those suckers are pretty sturdy, but I’d hate to see my Kindle meet its end due to my fit of pique.

    And I should mention that there are readers out there who considered at least one of my books a wall-banger (they didn’t like how one of my characters met his end). So I’m not guiltless in enraging readers.

    But the thing is, the wall-banger I gave up on last night was actually a pretty good book. That is, it had some great world-building, a fascinating premise and interesting characters.  About the first third of the book kept me riveted.

    But then a peculiar literary affectation started jumping out at me more and more. The author seemed to be enchanted with gerunds in lieu of verbs. Many, many sentences started with a gerund, and never got around to becoming a complete sentence by use of a verb. Going on and on. Running one sentence after another in this way. Driving the reader a little bit crazy. Creating an irritating narrative.

    You get the picture. If the author had used this literary device only occasionally, interspersing it with sentences with nice, active verbs as he did in the first third or so, he wouldn’t have gotten on my last nerve. As it was, I started editing his prose in my mind as I read. I’m pretty quick with mental editing, having written a fair number of books, but it does get tedious. It didn’t help that about the time this gerunding was going into hyperdrive, the plot slowed to a crawl.

    And now back to why God made editors. I took a peek at who published the book after I’d abandoned it. Best I can tell, it was self-published. This is not a commentary on self-publishing, because I do see that as a perfectly respectable way to get your book into the hands of a reader.

    But I firmly believe that without an independent professional editor laying eyes on that manuscript, it’s going to have problems. This book’s author might have had writer friends give him feedback (I’m guessing yes, because much of what I read was quite well-written). But I’m guessing a professional, working editor never worked on the book.

    If she had (and I say she because all but two of my editors have been women), she would have noticed the author’s overuse of gerunds. She would have suggested he be more sparing in his use of that method of laying out the narrative. She would have cut back on those long, overwritten paragraphs that caused my eyes to glaze over, would have showed him ways he could cut to the chase and allow the gem that lay beneath his verbosity to come to the fore and sparkle.

    The book seems to be doing quite well on Amazon, if its ranking is anything to go on. So maybe I’m just full of it in my opinion that an editor can make a difference. Maybe the quality of your prose doesn’t matter as long as you sell books. But I doubt I’ll ever pick up another book by this author. And I doubt I’d recommend it to anyone.

  • Can a Heroine be Weak?

    Mindy Ruiz blogged yesterday about weak vs. kick-ass heroines. In response, a commenter on G+ wondered why a strong heroine has to show her vulnerabilities, but the same didn’t seem to be true for heroes, i.e., that male characters don’t always have those same weaknesses.

    Here’s what I think. Characters in your stories, whether they’re male, female, or some fictional other-gender, have to be complex. They have to be complicated. On the surface they can be simple and seemingly one-dimensional, but as the reader gets to know them, as they peel off layer after layer in the course of the story, the character should become more and more compelling, more and more relatable and appealing (if we’re talking hero/heroine) or more and more repellent (if we’re talking villain).

    So that kick-ass character Mindy was talking about, if she’s able to use her strength and martial arts skill in every situation she encounters, if she can immediately solve every problem that she encounters, your story is gonna be b-o-r-i-n-g. (Side note and confession: I found the first HP book a bit boring because Harry seemed to solve his problems too easily.) If on the other hand you set your heroine up as that kick-ass girl/woman, seemingly invincible, then introduce her Achilles’ heel, whether it’s physical (think kryptonite) or emotional (think Katniss’s sister Prim), the reader will care about what happens to that character and will be more engaged in the story.

    In my opinion, an emotional Achilles’ heel trumps a physical weakness every time. Katniss faced innumerable physical threats in The Hunger Games, but her love and caring for Prim, Peeta, and Gale made her far more vulnerable than did anything thrown at her in the Arena.

    In my own book, Tankborn, Kayla is physically abused more than once by the enforcers. But while those blows are painful, she shrugs them off as part of her life as a GEN slave. Where she’s truly vulnerable is through the threat of having her self ended by the trueborns. She’s terrified of being wiped away, her personality erased by trueborn enforcers. I would think that any of us can relate to the fear of our mind, memories, our entire being torn away from us in retaliation for the most insignificant infraction.

    So your main characters have to be complex. They have to be the actors in the play you’ve set for them. They can’t drift along in the story letting others take action while they stand back and watch. That’s the danger of a “weak” heroine/hero. While they can appear weak, they have to be layered enough to have an inner store of strength  so that they can be the one to change their world.

  • Tech and Big Brother

    While returning from San Francisco for a weekend trip, we stopped for lunch in Emeryville, just outside of the city. As we were about to pull back onto Interstate 80 from Powell Street, a white light flashed on the nearby left turn lane as the red light camera took a picture. The drivers in that lane were being obedient, all of them legally behind the limit line when the arrow turned red.

    That flashing white light set off a discussion between my husband and me. Were the light flash and the camera capture triggered by the green arrow turning red or when someone crossed the limit line after the light is red? We figured it was probably the former, but that would mean that plenty of people are having their pictures taken when they’ve done nothing wrong.

    I don’t like the idea of an automated camera capturing my image while I’m at a stoplight. Of course, people shouldn’t be running red lights. It’s against the law and could be dangerous (I witnessed a nasty collision once that was caused by someone turning left on the red). But are those images collected used for purposes beyond checking for red light running? Like to establish the whereabouts of a certain person at a certain time and place to build a case against them?

    While my husband and I talked about the possibility of the images being misused, it led to further discussion of our expectation of privacy when out in public. There’s a case currently being considered by the Supreme Court in which police attached a GPS device to a drug dealer’s car in order to monitor his movements. They installed the device secretly while the car was in a public parking lot and tracked the man’s movements for a month.

    Many of the justices were troubled by the actions of the police. Justice Scalia in particular considered it trespassing since the police attached the device to the man’s car without his knowledge or permission.

    In the course of this conversation, I wondered: what if police could use technology to track this individual without affixing a device to his car? What if that device was already there?

    What if every car manufactured were required to have a GPS installed? And let’s say it’s installed within the car’s electrical system in such a way that it could not be easily removed or its removal would disable the car. I can imagine this “every car must have a GPS” being sold as a way to minimize car theft. If a thief knew every car could be tracked, that might make them think twice about stealing one.

    So we’re all happy that no one is stealing cars, until we realize that cars are not just being tracked when someone is suspected of breaking the law. We have the equivalent of red light cameras on every street corner that sense and record the location of every car that passes. The cars are identified by their VIN numbers which are read when the car’s location is noted. All this data is dumped somewhere in a server farm and whenever the police need to know the whereabouts of someone, they can scrape out that data.

    Okay, I’m paranoid. I wrote about essentially this sort of thing in my book Tankborn, except it’s people being tracked instead of vehicles. But I do think there’s a slippery slope here with attaching GPS devices to cars, even if that car belongs to a bad guy police want to catch. Because I just have too good an imagination of where it could lead.

  • RTW – How far would you go to get published?

    Today for Road Trip Wednesday, YA Highway is asking, How far would you go to get published? In my case, I’d have to answer the question How far did you go to get published? since I’m already published and have been for 13 years.

    Along with the blog prompt, the RTW post shows the graphic here of a baseball field on which is represented four escalating options for how far a writer would go to get published.

    I’m here to say that getting every one of my 18 books published has always required a trip to home plate. While I haven’t chased a trend (first base), and not all my books were agented and so did not include agent feedback (second base), while I wrote and published romance, my editor always put in his or her two cents (and sometimes a whole dollar) before the book was ready to be published. I learned to go with the flow (except for my dirty little secret below) and make those changes that would improve the book.

    Then came Tankborn. Young adult wasn’t the big hot new thing when I started writing Tankborn, or if it was, I didn’t know that fact. All I knew was that I wrote five proposals for my romance editor (each one comprising three chapters and a detailed synopsis) and he turned down every one. I was starting to think that maybe it was time for a genre and market change. YA science fiction sounded like just the ticket.

    So maybe I hit a double and I went straight to second base. Once I wrote, edited and polished the manuscript for Tankborn, I went on the agent hunt. Thirty agents and four months later, I signed with my agent and it was time for that mad run to third base. My agent wanted some fairly extensive changes, much of it cutting back on the “throat clearing” in the opening chapters.

    So now I’m done, right? That sucker must be polished so shiny, it’ll put your eyes out looking at it, huh? Um, no. Because I’m still stranded on third base. I need to make one last all-out run to home plate.

    My agents submitted Tankborn, and Lee and Low bought it for their new Tu Books imprint. I galloped toward home, along the way performing one, two, three major revisions (luckily three strikes and you’re out did not apply). Maybe I should have scored three runs during that process. Instead I got the MVP award of seeing my book in print.

    Let me tell you the little secret about all those revisions that I alluded to above. When I receive my agent/editor notes, I don’t bounce around saying, Thank you, thank you, thank you. Well, sometimes I do when they point out something that makes a light bulb come on and I realize, Doh, that’s why that part wasn’t working.

    But usually my response is (a) sheer terror that I won’t know how to fix the problem, (b) anger that they have a problem with what I’ve written, or (c) a sense of being totally overwhelmed by the amount of work required to make the change. It’s kind of the stages of grief, I guess. I’ll often let myself wallow in those emotions for a few minutes.

    Then I’ll put on my big girl panties and start working.

  • 5 Things I’d Tell My Teen Self

    A lot of time has passed since my teen years. They were decades & decades ago, and you would think the memories might have been washed away by the intervening events in my life. I’ve finished college, worked at all sorts of interesting jobs, met my now-husband, bought a house, got married, had two kids, moved from my birthplace in Southern California to Northern California, sold my first book, then many other books.

    I’ve cried innumerable tears, have had many hours filled with laughter, had to say goodbye to a dog, several cats, a few horses, and most heartbreaking, my mother. I’ve seen my father decline until he no longer knows me.

    So my teen years should have been washed away. How could those seven years have compared to the decades that followed?

    And yet, I remember so much of that time. Some experiences seem as real and immediate to me today as they did then. I haven’t forgotten the turmoil and the triumphs (however few they seemed at the time), the heartache and the joy (however infrequent it was).

    I started thinking about what I would tell that confused and often heartbroken young girl I once was. I came up with the following thoughts and advice:

    1) Other people’s opinions of you have nothing to do with who you really are.

    If they think you’re ugly, stupid, awkward, dorky, screw them. They know nothing, nothing about what’s really inside you. You might be just as klutzy as they say you are, but you have beautiful ideas. Maybe according to them you don’t wear the “right” clothes, maybe you don’t even like them yourself, but your Mom/Dad/financial situation made you wear them. But that can never change your heart, your soul, your dreams.

    I was a frequent target of derision and torment by a certain group of girls back in junior high. It hurt terribly and made me feel worse about myself than I already did. But I was smarter than those girls. I had a wild imagination their worst bullying could never touch and I channeled that creativity into stories and later, books.

    2) The pain doesn’t last forever.

    If it does, if it’s unrelenting, then you need some help outside yourself. If you can’t share that pain with your parents, find someone else you trust to talk to.

    But if it’s heartache because the boy doesn’t like you back, or you’ve been made to feel like an idiot once again by that same cruel bully, the hurt will heal. It takes time, it seems impossible sometimes to get past. But your heart will let go of the pain eventually. It will find a new focus, whether it’s a new love or a new passion. The hurt will lose its grip on you, and you will look at the world with fresh eyes.

    3) You won’t die from embarrassment, even though sometimes you’ll wish you had.

    I was a pretty smart kid in school. Maybe not straight A’s, but I got a lot of good grades. Teachers liked to hold me up as an example.

    But that meant nothing when I did some awkward, bonehead thing that made me feel like the biggest idiot in the world. It often had to do with me regularly blurting out something that should never have been said out loud. When I’d do something like that, I’d want to just crawl under a rock and disappear.

    But I lived through the mortification. I came out on the other side, still me. I learned, one agonizing experience at a time, to count to ten, hold my tongue, and rethink my words. I’m not perfect (still planting my foot in my mouth upon occasion), but I’ve learned to live through the awkward moments. Teen self, you will too.

    4) You can’t always get what you want.

    Not every dream is going to come true. Not everything you wish for can become reality. Some of your dreams might rely too much on what other people will do. You can’t make someone like you. You might never be one of the popular kids, because the gatekeepers might never want to let you in. Instead you have to walk right past their gate, and find your own meadow that isn’t confined by certain rules of what popular is.

    You can’t wish your way into winning, because the ones judging are outside yourself. You can work your hardest and still fall short because that dream just wasn’t meant for you (sorry). And sometimes, you’ll let go of that dream to pursue another. Or you’ll put a dream aside for years, then when you take it up again, you’re ready for it, you have the skills you need, you know the right people who can help you, you have all the information at your fingertips. And everything will fall into place.

    5) Love yourself. Love yourself. Love yourself.

    Even if your nose is too big, or your hair always sticks out everywhere, or it seems like everyone is beautiful except for you. It is impossible to feel the love of others, to believe you’re worthy of that love if you don’t love yourself first. Yeah, this might sound phony and woo-woo, but it’s absolutely true. If you can’t bring yourself to do it, pretend. And hopefully, someday, you’ll really feel that love, you’ll really know it.

    That’s it. That’s all I’ve got, teen self. I’m glad to have known you. And glad to have been you.