When I'm doing editorial reports for aspiring writers, all I have is the manuscript, and perhaps a letter giving me some idea of what kind of help they're looking for, and perhaps what their writing background is. It can still be quite hard to know how to pitch the report: do I need to tell them what they're doing right in detail, because they're writing on instinct, or is it wasting words I could be using on what's wrong? Can I use standard creative writing vocabulary (show/tell, passive/active, point-of-view, first/third person, voice/dialogue and so on) without taking half a paragraph to explain each idea? How thin-skinned are they, or have they grown ways of dealing with the cold, hard truth that - as is the case 99% of the time - their novel may have their heart or their overdraft stapled to the page, but it doesn't begin, as it stands, to be submittable.
But I make my best guess about such things, and I send off the report, and two thirds of the time I hear nothing more, though I've never grown ways of dealing with the worry about how they're taking that cold, hard truth. The other third, we arrange to talk through the report on the phone, and that's the bit I enjoy most. Interestingly, it is usually the better writers who want to talk, who have thought about what they want to ask, and whose minds I can feel grabbing what I'm saying, and mapping it onto their knowledge of themselves and their work, and formulating a plan for the next stage.
So it's always a surprise when that novel reappears at the agency for a re-read and turns out to have hardly changed at all. A few months ago I heard that the writer of a particular novel - which I'd enjoyed dealing with a lot, since it had both lots of promise and lots of big flaws, and was also funny - had just had a third report. All three reports, by three different editors, say much the same about what the flaws are, and why they're holding the book back, and what needs doing about them, before it's worth sending out.
There are people who only want a report (or indeed a teacher/class/editor) to tell them they're wonderful - usually because they haven't learnt to be bad - and go deaf to the rest at the first suggestion that they're not, but that's not the kind of wannabe writer I'm talking about here. I spoke to this writer at length after my report, and would have sworn that what I was saying they'd taken on board. It's true, it's not nice to realise that you're going to have to pull a whole strand of your novel - or even the whole novel - apart and revise it to the point of re-writing it. But editorial reports are not cheap, so why on earth would an aspiring writer - serious, commited and not unsophisticated in their approach - spend well over a grand, have three experienced people say much the same, in detail, about what it needs, only to tinker at the margins, over and over again?
All I can think is that I know from my own experience that when you're revising a novel it can be very difficult to see the wood for the trees. Yes, you know that the middle sags, but when you look at each paragraph, each sentence, each word, they all seem to need to be there. After all, you put each one in there for a purpose in the first place, and it's still performing that purpose. There it stands, looking up at you, eyes just the colour you wanted them, mouth drooping with heartfelt emotion at one corner and smiling upwards at the other, that curl of hair stuck to its cheek with just the poignant gamine look which wrings the chapter's heart. Yes, it's gazing into your eyes, humming the tune which lingers in your mind from the opening: it needs to be there. You can't easily stand back, see how it stands among all the others, the surplus one, the one that doesn't fit, the one whose expression is just a little too sad, one giggle to many, a little mawkishly sweet, the one which means you must reach behind you for the knife, and cut its throat.
This darling that you're murdering isn't the one which cost you pain or effort, or the one which preaches something external you've been wanting to say for years, or the one which has your absolutely favourite word in it. It's a much subtler candidate for homicide: the good but surplus friend. Unfortunately, with friends like this you can't just not phone them, or drop them from your Christmas card list, because they're a drag on the whole thing: they're taking up space that's needed for a real friend. But you need the ruthlessness of Jonathan Swift to put these surplus children to the knife.
