Review: MANUSCRIPT MAKEOVER (Craft)

October 14, 2009 on 8:00 am | In ERD, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Dear FTC: This is a book I purchased with my own money. No bribes or incentives were provided to secure my reading or my recommending.

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TITLE: Manuscript Makeover: Revision Techniques No Fiction Writer Can Afford to Ignore

AUTHOR: Elizabeth Lyon

BUY LINK (If you’re so inclined) (The book is, at the time of this writing, bargain priced at $5.98. Also: You can’t click to look inside from this post. You have to go to Amazon to do that. Forgive my lacking image skills.)

From the outset, Lyon states that MANUSCRIPT MAKEOVER (MM) is not a book designed to be worked through page 1 to the end. MM isn’t a work book. It’s a collection of chapters and sections within chapters that target a variety of aspects of a manuscript, from the “small” perspective of sentence-level revision to the “large” project of whole-book revision. It’s a revision book for writers of all levels and for writers with differing needs.

Because my revision problems tend to root themselves in big issues like conflict and structure, I skipped the chapters on narrowed-down revision and went straight to Lyon’s treatment of my problem spots. First up? Conflict. In a trouble-shooting fashion, Lyon addresses the foundation of conflict and discusses what it should be, then she breaks problems down into commonalities like “too little conflict,” “too much conflict” (yes, it’s possible), and “conflict without enough intensity” in a very comprehensible manner. I won’t give the inner workings away because I believe Lyon has earned her sale with the insight she provides but I will say I’ve gone back to that chapter repeatedly, both in a literal pick-up-the-book fashion and a mental remember-what-Lyon-had-to-say fashion as I’m thinking about what I’m writing.

Among the repeat-read chapters for me was MM’s chapter on story structure. I often hear “three act structure” and immediately feel my ears shut down, not willing to listen because I’ve been-there, done-that. Lyon doesn’t push a particular structure so much as she identifies different structures and suggests if the one that’s currently being implemented isn’t working, it might be time to try a different one. To her credit, as much as I’ve resisted X-Act-Structure discussions in the past, after reading MM, I have developed a greater understanding of the importance of beginnings, middles, and ends. I also think I’ve developed a better understanding of how to craft mine. Another thumbs-up from me on this aspect of MM.

Passage of time – another of my problem areas. Another thumbs-up to MM.

Stakes? Again, I’ve achieved rudimentary understanding of stakes courtesy of other craft books (WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL, among them) but I didn’t really get stakes as applied to MY projects until examining the concept through Lyon’s words.

She includes a section on voice, which is important, and I mention it in relation to my previous point about stakes and the understanding I achieved via MM. Lyon not only writes about author’s voice in fiction, provides pointers on how to develop it, but she also possesses a very readable voice. She’s the instructor who isn’t too soft-spoken or frou-frou, while also not being too abrasive or self-important. Her voice, maybe as much as her advice, is imminently accessible to me.

This might be an odd closing recommendation, but for whatever it’s worth to you as a consumer and possible buyer: the short of it is, MM is a book that lives beside my bed. I open it, at random, read a paragraph or two, and I learn something. Every time.