Category: The Editor’s Hat

When I critique and edit writing, there is one common flaw that comes through time and time again. Sometimes, it's subtle and easily overlooked. But then there are times when it hits you in the face.

I'm talking about he said — she said.

You're staring at a manuscript that you have spent countless hours, days, weeks, preparing for publication or submission. It's as stellar as you can make it. Or is it?

Here is just one of the tricks that I occasionally pull out of my hat when editing. It can be slow going, but it can help you isolate those awkward, sticky sentences and eliminate those beasts.

During a backwards edit, you read a manuscript from the last sentence backwards to the first. When you do this, you're unable to focus on the story; sentences lose their contextual meaning. As a consequence you focus entirely on the words.

Recently, I was skimming through a fellow editor's website (who shall remain nameless) and encountered a page where people were listing the titles of their manuscripts and their respective genres. OMG, the number of people that listed their genre as FICTION...

People, FICTION is NOT a genre. It tells us nothing about your story, except for the fact that it's made up. And it's not good enough to tell us the you write Young Adult or Middle-Grade either. All this tells us is who your target audience is.  Let's face it, a science fiction story is very different to a western. (However, you could have a Western SciFi — Firefly is the perfect example of this sub-genre.) A Young Adult SciFi and a Middle-Grade SciFi, on the other hand, will contain similar elements, all related to the SciFi genre.

Whenever someone tells me they write young adult (often shortened to YA), my first response is always, "That's nice. So what genre do you write?" More often than not, I get a blank stare in response. The look in their eyes says it all.

"I just told you. I write YA."

At this point, I normally chuckle. "So you write fantasy." Most of those I meet who have made this young-adult-classification mistake write fantasy of some flavour, commonly urban fantasy.

However, sometimes I'll get that affronted look. "No. I write YA." To this, I bow my head in shame.

The confusion between genre and category is something that plagues every new writer. We're told that we have to categorise this piece of work that we have spent months, if not years, working on, but we don't want to fit into a box; we want to be in a circle. So… the question is, what does young adult really mean?