Something I’ve seen people talking about on the #Pitchwars hashtag as people digest mentor wish lists is the notion of being ready to make “big changes” to your manuscript.

I think for some people, that might be causing some angst. I even saw one person say that mentors were encouraged to ask for big changes (which is totally untrue. We’re not given any guidance whatsoever about how to do critique/edits). So I thought I’d dive into what it means to see if I could ease some of the stress.

I can’t talk about everybody else and what they do, but I can talk about how I work with someone on revisions. For reference, I’ve probably worked on 50 or so full manuscripts belonging to other people. That’s a combination of pro writers and querying writers, critique partners and mentees. I’ll talk a little about how all of those things are different.

Let’s start with the one of those 50 books where I recommended the biggest change. Once…exactly once…I recommended to someone that they remove a point of view. That’s a HUGE change. They had three, but one of the POVs wasn’t pulling its weight, and the story really, really felt like it belonged to the other two characters. Every POV character needs to be a main character in their own story, and that just wasn’t there. That writer didn’t make that change, which is cool. It’s their book. But I will say that more than a year later, that same writer got an R&R for that book with an editor from a Big 5 publisher, and the editor also recommended removing the POV. So…I probably wasn’t wrong. And that’s the thing…sometimes a book needs a big change to bring it to its highest potential.

But like I said, that was one time in 50.

So let’s talk about the most common “big change.” One that I’d estimate happens in maybe half the books I critique. Many of my critique partners could tell you that they’ve got a note that reads something like this:

This scene/chapter isn’t doing anything. There’s no conflict or character growth, and it’s not moving the plot forward.

That’s a brutal comment, right? I’m condemning an entire chapter.

Here’s the thing…we all write scenes like that. Maybe we were trying to transition between two things that were important and just put it in there. Maybe we *thought* it did something, but what was in our brain didn’t make it onto the page. Maybe something *was* happening but it was too subtle and needs more attention. There are a lot of reasons.

And let me say, if you have a CP who is astute enough to see that for you and confident enough to tell it to you, you should keep that CP. Not trying to toot my own horn here, but trust that I’m not afraid to tell you what I really think about your work. Neither one of us needs to waste our time like that.

But let’s look at the comment itself, and what I’m saying. This scene isn’t doing anything for you. What big change am I recommending? I actually didn’t recommend anything. I told you what was wrong. If you’re a CP, you’re on your own from there, and you’ve got several choices. You can leave it as is…but I probably wasn’t wrong, so that’s not a great plan. You can delete the scene. Or, you can change the scene so that it accomplishes something. How big is that change? It’s hard to say. Depends on how much you need to change it.

But that’s where it’s different for a mentee. First, with a mentee, I’d provide more information. I’d explain why it’s not accomplishing anything. I might talk about what I thought you were trying to do, and why it didn’t work. I’d give you as much as I could about it. And when it came time to revise, as a mentee, you can either choose to fix it yourself, or you can ask questions. We can talk through your options, and you can tell me your concerns. Maybe you want to delete it, but there’s one critical piece of information in the scene that you need (this happens to me personally all the time when I’m drafting). I can help you find somewhere else to put it. Or we can talk through what you’d need to add to the scene to make it do something.

And again…you can always choose to keep it. It’s your book. By the way, that really doesn’t change when you’re a pro writer. You’ve still got to deal with these things. Let me tell a story.

With my second novel, SPACESIDE, the book I turned into my agent wasn’t very good. She had brilliant notes, and I did a massive rewrite before turning it into my editor. And I felt pretty good about what I turned in. He felt pretty good about it, too, and my edits were pretty light. Really, David (Pomerico, my editor) only had one major note. He told me that one of my chapters was redundant, and I should delete it.

I was mortified.

The chapter he wanted removed was the key emotional moment for the main character–the thing that drove his overall change in the course of the story. Couldn’t David see that?

Of course he couldn’t. Because it wasn’t on the page. But I needed that scene, because it absolutely *was* central to the character arc. David hadn’t seen it because of my poor execution. So I was stuck. The editor/writer relationship is a partnership…both bring something to the table, and both need to be satisfied with the final product. And with SPACESIDE, my editor had really only asked me to do one thing. And I needed to say no. That’s not a comfortable situation. If he gives me ten things and I’m going to do 8 and say no to 2, that’s easier. But he only asked for one.

So I dug into what he was telling me. He’d said the chapter was redundant, and it was. But I had an idea. It takes two scenes to make one redundant…what if I cut a bunch out of the other scene so this scene was no longer redundant. At the same time, I’d add to the scene he wanted to cut so that the emotional impact came across more. I had a plan. So I emailed my editor and proposed it. I believe I said let me try it this way and see what you think, and if you don’t like it, I’ll go back and do it your way. David acquiesced. The truth is, he doesn’t have much choice…like I said, it’s a partnership, and we both have to be happy with it. And just like I don’t want to say no to his one edit, he doesn’t want to say no when I’ve got an idea that might fix the problem.

Now, between you, me, and everyone else on wordpress, I don’t think at the time he thought it was going to work. But I appreciate that he was willing to let me try. And it did work. I sent it back to him, he read it, and responded ‘You’re right. This is better.’ And he triggered acceptance, which is a contractual sign that the book is good enough and I got the second half of my advance, and everybody was happy.

So what does that have to do with big change? It’s that you never know how big it’s going to be. His request for change, on the surface, wasn’t really that big. Delete this chapter. That’s really not that hard. You may have to work the transition a little between the chapter before and the chapter after, but deleting…that’s easy. In theory, that’s less than an hour’s work. Instead, I significantly cut an earlier scene, rewriting the entire thing, and edited the entire chapter in question to better bring out the emotional stakes I’d tried to put in there the first time. It took many hours. It also made the book significantly better.

And that’s why you read about the 2019 mentees taking a survey about how much they rewrote in their novels and a good percentage of them say they rewrote more than 50%. Because all changes can be big.

Here’s an example of a small note that can lead to a lot of work. I mentor SF and F. Say there’s a scene where a character dies, and it’s an emotional, gut wrenching moment for the main character. And my note is ‘I don’t think you’re getting the impact you want from this. It would work a lot better if I cared more about the character who died.’

This isn’t an unreasonable thing. On the surface, it’s a small note. It’s a secondary character, probably. I know I don’t always get my secondary characters fleshed out as much as I should during early drafts, and if they’re not developed with their own arc, readers aren’t going to care much about them.

But let’s look at what my little note is asking you to do once you think about it. Holy crap. I’m asking you to go back through the entire first two thirds of your book and revisit every scene this character was in make me care more about him. That’s a lot of work. And wait…there’s a comment or two like that in almost every chapter. AAAAAAAAHHHHHH!

But with a comment like this, it’s almost always right. And even if I’m wrong, and it works well enough, and you punch it up and make it even more powerful, that’s not a bad thing, right? Have you ever read a book and thought, oh, no, that’s just too good. It should hit me a little softer. Of course not. Those are the kinds of moments that we gush over when we read them.

So you want to do it. Of course you do. But it’s so much work. And that’s where the mentorship part comes in. Because maybe you’ve never received feedback like that before. I would say, in fact, that most Pitch Wars mentees are going to get feedback beyond most anything they’ve gotten before. So it can seem daunting. But you know who *has* gotten feedback like that before? Me.

So yes. It’s a lot. But you’re not alone. When I got my edit letter for COLONYSIDE (coming December 29th to a retailer near you!) it was two email screens long filled with things that needed work. ARCs that weren’t complete, plot threads that were unfinished, motivations that weren’t clear. It was a lot. And just for fun, there was a note at the bottom that said that it kind of needed to be done in thirty days if I wanted to keep my release date.

The thing is, the notes were right. More than right, they were brilliant. In every case, I could see what David was saying and that he was right, and they would make the book better. So I built a plan. If I tried to go through his points one at a time and revise them individually, it would have taken months. So I took each point and made notes on how I was going to fix it, and what ripples I expected that to cause and what other notes it intertwined with, and where I could knock out multiple points with one fix. Once I did that, I sent it to David to show him that I understood, and he offered a call to talk about things, but at that point, I thought I had it. His notes had been clear and I had a plan. (I did send a couple of follow up questions once I got into the revisions).

I ended up rewriting 60 or 70 percent of the book. And I didn’t make the 30 days. I had to ask for another week, because I was a high school teacher and as luck would have it, we were preparing at that time to be ready to teach online school because of Covid 19, and I was just a bit stressed. He gave me the extra week, and I turned it in, and it was better. We did a second, much smaller round of edits to smooth out the stuff I’d broken during the rewrite, but then we were done.

Maybe you’re not ready to do that. But that’s okay. Again, that’s where the mentorship comes in. You’re not alone, and you don’t have to do it alone. We can make that plan together. And yeah. You’re going to have that agent showcase deadline hanging over your head, and for most of you, that will be the first really big deadline you will have to deal with, and that can be scary. But hopefully, that won’t be your last big deadline. And hopefully, that experience will do exactly what it’s supposed to: make you into a better writer.

Look, I’ve seen the stuff people have said online as they take their shots. That Pitch Wars isn’t publishing, it’s a contest. Sure. It’s got some artificiality to it. But if you think that learning how to revise better doesn’t help prepare you for a career as a writer? That’s ridiculous.

Is every note on every manuscript from every mentor going to be perfect? Of course not. We’ve all got different levels of skill when it comes to critique. But is every note that I get from my very successful professional Big 5 editor perfect? I mean…he’s better at it than I am, obviously…it’s his job, and he’s good at it…but still no.

And it doesn’t matter. Because regardless of the changes, as you go through it, you’ll gain experience with the process of accepting feedback and edits, figuring it out, making a plan, and revising. Yes, you’ll come out the other side with a better book. But that’s really secondary to coming out as a better writer.

So. Big changes. I’m not sure where I was going with that. This has been a little more serious than most of my blog posts, so I guess I could turn it into a Hallmark movie…She started out to make big changes in her book, but then she learned that the big changes were in herself.

I guess what I’m trying to say is not to get too stressed about making changes to your book if you’re selected for Pitch Wars. Nobody is going to make you change anything you don’t want to. But what you’re going to find is that when someone gives you good notes on your book, you’ll want to. Because you’re an author. And when you see a chance to make your book better, it’s going to energize and excite you, and you’ll probably be able to do more than you think you can.

Good luck, and be good to each other.