How to achieve your writing goals with editor and author Lisa Mangum

Have you always meant to get started on writing that book? Have you been asked to write an article and you didn't know where to start? Editor and author Lisa Mangum is the expert you need to help you get started and stay on track with your writing goals. Her new book, Write Fearless. Edit Smart. Get Published., combines all her 25+ years of expertise into a guide you'll want to dive into.

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because the worst thing I think you could do is say I'm gonna write a book and I'm gonna need to write 3,000 words every day for X amount of days and then when you have a day where you just can't get those words down it's so easy to beat yourself up over that and you feel like a failure and you'll start doubting yourself well I am so glad that you were able to make it tonight Lisa thank you I'm excited to talk to you it's been forever since we've actually talked in person so that'll be really cool I'm just gonna introduce everything and then I'll have you introduce yourself and by the way before we get started I just wanted to let you know you all know who are watching on the YouTube live stream that we can see your comments and I'll be watching them throughout in case you have any questions throughout and I'll share those with Lisa as the as the chat goes on but I just want to introduce myself first I am Stacy Whitman I am the founder and former publisher of Tu Books, an imprint of Lee & Low it's feels really weird to say former haha I'm now an editor-at-large and I'm now I'm also the owner of the Curious Cat Bookshop which is where we're coming to you from the Curious Cat Bookshop podcast in person, we're at 386 Main St. in Winsted, Connecticut that's up in the northwest corner of Connecticut so if you're local we'd love to see you and if you are local, I'm just gonna do a quick rundown of things that we have coming up tomorrow night we have a puzzle night because January is National Puzzle Month next week, we have Beth Revis right here on this YouTube channel, as well so if you love science fiction and fantasy if you love Star Wars and if you love young adult books that's what we're going to be talking about with Beth Beth Revis and if you need a link to it go to curiouscatbookshop.com/events and scroll down and you'll you'll find the link there we have story time every Friday morning at 11 next Wednesday night we're gonna have a new thing we're gonna start a writing group here in person at the store we've got book clubs. this month we have our first official meeting of our kids' book club, which we're reading The One and Only Ivan for, and for adults we have our read the Rainbow Book Club which is The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo this month and Assistant to the Villain for our other book club and we do a Silent Book Club the last Wednesday of the month and if you are interested in our book clubs, we've also got a lot going on for the next couple of months I'm gonna be having those put up on the website this weekend so keep an eye out for what we've got coming up and so while many of you are not local to us we do ask that if you love this conversation tonight and want to buy the book, please order it from us you can order online at curiouscatbookshop.com for home delivery and you can pick it up in store if you want if you're local okay so speaking of the book! I have mine too the whole reason why I'm here and Lisa is a little bit blurry I think we've got connection issues but we should be able to hear her but I'm so happy to welcome my friend Lisa Mangum to the podcast we've known each other forever it feels like not in college I don't think cause we went to different colleges I was at BYU I didn't leave BYU until 2001 cause I took the long way around and so I think we-- what was that? I went to the university of Utah so we were at different colleges yeah and and then you started at Deseret Book while I was still in college because like I said I took a long way around and I think we must have met like at an LTUE which was life the universe and everything for those who don't know it's a conference in Utah it's I'm I'm guessing cause I don't know it's been long enough that I don't even remember how we met but we've been colleagues for a long time on parallel trajectories and you've been at Shadow Mountain and I've been everywhere but you're also a writer yes and so we're coming at this from two different perspectives when we're talking about your writing goals and so you can come at this from giving advice as a writer and you can also give advice as an editor so introduce yourself and the book let us know how you got started in writing how you got started in editing and why you wrote this book and so forth yeah well like I mentioned I went to the University of Utah for college and I went determined to get a degree in English and to be a book editor it is what I had always wanted to be and and I did it in part because my mom was an editor she was a magazine editor for most of her career and so I knew that was a thing people did I knew that was a job people could do and it turned out I had a knack for it and Mom and I would always talk about the editing marks and how to develop an idea, storytelling and she gave me-- she was my first teacher and mentor when it came to creative writing and we had such a great relationship, my mom and I, and I wanted to to do what she did and so I wanted to be a book editor so after college I applied at Deseret Book and was one of their freelance proofreaders for a summer and then I was hired at Bookcraft as their editorial assistant in 1997 and then Deseret Book acquired Bookcraft in 1999 so then I was back at, under that umbrella and I've been there ever since! and I worked my way up and now I'm a managing editor for Shadow Mountain which is the national market imprint for the Deseret Book Company which means-- and if anybody doesn't know what an imprint is that's an imprint yeah the the publisher name on the spine and so what that means as managing editor is that I'm involved in acquisitions so I review submissions that come in and decide which ones are worthy to pass on and possibly publish and which ones sadly get a rejection letter and then I also do developmental editing with authors I do line edits and copy edits I go to meetings to talk about titles and covers and then check all the corrections and get the books ready for press and I work on 12 to... about 12 to 14 titles at any given time because we work on multiple years at the same time always a lot I never know what year it is I know I especially this time of year where I'm like is it 24, or is it 25 or is it 26? I don't maybe even possibly 27 it could be I just was I just sent an email to an author yesterday because her book is coming out in 2027 and we were talking scheduling so yeah it's I don't know what time it is but because I've been in the business so long I also loved storytelling so I wrote some novels in addition to being an editor I wrote the Hourglass Door trilogy in 2009, 2010, 2011, and then I wrote after hello in 2012 and they were all published by Shadow Mountain which was really fun so I do come from this topic both as a writer and as an editor and it's partly why I wanted to write this book and take all the things that I have learned from 25+ years about being a storyteller and being a creative person and being an editor and seeing how publishing has evolved and changed over the years it's very different now than when I started and really tried to condense it down into an easy, conversational, helpful book Write Fearless. Edit Smart. Get Published. so that and it's also nice and short so nobody has to be fearful about reading it yeah I tried to keep them really application driven so like here's something that you can actually do to help improve your manuscript right now here's something maybe that you you know here's something you can think the way to think about your work that maybe you haven't thought about before and really tried to give practical examples throughout the book one of the fun things that I did was I I label them Storytime with Lisa, where I'll present a a principle or a tip or a suggestion and then I can tell a story about how I learned about it or how I used that in my own writing or in my own career as an example because I think we learn best through story it's why we love to read and why we love to write and why we love to tell each other our stories because that's how we-- by the way this is Tabitha I don't know if you can see her oh how cute so cute it's it's definitely the Curious Cat Bookshop for a reason leave it hahaha and I also have a foster kitty running around here somewhere who likes to walk on keyboards so if I suddenly disappear I'll be back as soon as I can so yeah I I I digging into this as an editor I don't know that there's anything that is new to me but it's a useful resource because it has so many places where if I get stuck on this I can just reference it but if I want to read it through I can learn through story so like it's doing both so let's dig into the book what does it mean to you to write fearless? I think for me it means not being afraid to play and not being afraid to write something that eventually you might have to throw out because I know that I when I write creatively when I'm when I have my author hat on and I'm trying to tell a story or write a story or create a character or develop a scene I have this great fear that it has to be perfect when I put it down on paper and that is not true! it can be messy and ugly and not make a lot of sense in that first drafting stage because when you're very first approaching the story it doesn't have to be perfect that can all come later and I have to remind myself of that all of the time and I think it also means to have the courage to say what's in your heart to tell the story that you've always wanted to tell or that you are thinking maybe you're not capable of it because it means being vulnerable or because it means um being brave in a way I think that also is the other part of that writing fearless we've all got a story within inside of us that needs to be told or that we want to tell, and sometimes we just need to be brave enough to sit down at that blank page or that blank screen and just put something down, warts and all, and figure it out later to make it I think and ready to present I think that's a really great description of how it feels to sit there and stare at that blank page whether you're talking about writing fiction with or nonfiction I'm sure you've dealt with that even just writing a book like this or whatever my train of thought just kind of walked off in the middle of that sentence haha but whatever whatever medium you are being creative in I think it it holds true whether you're doing art art or painting or sculpture or music or even the sciences which are also a different kind of creativity whatever it is that you're pouring yourself into there there's that moment where you have to cross the the boundary of "this is where I feel safe sharing" to"I'm gonna lay this out for anybody and everybody to see and consume and participate in" and that possibly critique and you have to be willing and possibly not like or not understand but I think the greater reward is crossing that boundary and connecting with the people for whom that story resonates I think we all can pinpoint a book or an author or a moment or something that that touched us, that changed us that we have internalized and it made it a part of who we are and the book that you're writing could be that book for somebody else right exactly and okay so we're having this right now because we're talking about achieving your writing goals in the New Year and I'm not a New Year's resolution kind of person I'm not even a "this is my word for the year" kind of person but New Year's is a time that many people, you know they pull out that pristine notebook that's too pretty to write in and they go but what we were you were just talking about the fear of the blank blank page of messing it up can make people freeze and so what do you say to people when that happens besides you know be willing to be messy I think another part of it might even be be willing to let yourself not show it to somebody for a little while yeah yeah I I think it's actually really smart to not necessarily show it to somebody right away because it's still in the creation stage it's still in that messy playground stage I was I think a lot of people at the beginning of the year like you said we sit down and we're like New Year this is the year I'm gonna write that book this is the year I'm gonna do it and I that is that is noble and that is a great place to start but I think it's really important when setting goals to be realistic about your time and your process and so you could say this is the year I'm gonna write a book and then plan for it to take the whole year don't say this is the year I'm gonna write a book and assume you're gonna have have it done at the end of January because it could take you the whole year to actually just even get that first draft down and that's fine it may take you longer than that when you're looking at your schedule when you're looking at your goals when you're looking at your calendar also take into account how much time you really have when are your kids in school do you have family vacations coming up do you have more time to write at night than in the morning like really look at your life and build the writing into those times and spaces where you have it available because the worst thing I think you could do is say I'm gonna write a book and I'm gonna need to write 3,000 words every day for X amount of days and then when you have a day where you just can't get those words down it's so easy to beat yourself up over that say well now I've got to write 6,000 words tomorrow if you feel like a failure and you feel like a failure and you'll start doubting yourself and feeling like well maybe this isn't for me so I think starting small and starting smart are ways to really get the momentum building in January, February, March so that late-- as the year progresses you have flexed those writing muscles you've built them up and to the point where maybe there are some days you could write 3,000 words or 5,000 words and really get in the groove exactly Whitney actually just commented I recently looked up the etymology of resolution and was so pleasantly surprised to see that it originally comes from the Latin"to loosen or relax" I thought that was really interesting that is interesting I cause like that I think that kind of ties into what you were just talking about is it's not so much the way we use it now I'm resolved I'm gonna go hard and go fast but to allow yourself like let's go right into my next question because this is kind of ties into what you were just saying you work full time uh huh and yet you found the time to do a lot of things outside work it's not just your writing you go off to Disneyland every now and then you know and you you run or whatever for me as an editor I've never really been able to separate out my creative brain with working with my writers versus my creative brain working on my own writing I haven't written since I was laid off in 08 other than you know just a blog post here and there you know I do short form I do social media it's not the same thing but also I'm starting a bookstore blah blah blah but I've been thinking about because I've got this transition in my life where I'm only working three days a week and I'm still gonna be dedicated to my authors during that time but I wanna allow myself a little bit more time for my own creativity maybe one of these days I'll write something myself but for that person who already has a full time job that person who has kids and a full time job I think that what you're saying is very important because it's not so much that you have to somehow carve full time writing out of a life yeah you need to you need to carve 10 minutes, 15 minutes, if you can carve an hour great and one thing that you said in the book that I think was a really interesting thing what also was not write every day but try to write every day can you talk a little bit about that? yeah and that's actually what I was gonna lead into because I think one of the things that also makes it hard to shoulder the burden of a resolution of a goal of writing a book which is a big thing is that we think the only thing that counts is the word count the actual number of words you put on a page or the actual actual number of words that stay on the page after you've edited them or deleted them or rewritten them but in reality everything counts when it comes to this and so trying to write every day counts there may be some days where in the middle of everything else that's going on you only have five or 10 minutes to think through a problem that's still working on your book that still counts as working and writing your book because you're-- it's such an act-- it's such a mental activity that that is long term there may be days where you sit down and you can put thousands of words down and that counts too but phrasing it and reframing it in a way of like I'm gonna try to get something done on my book today and then whatever however big that bucket is of time that you have you can pick and choose what it what it is and how you work on it today I'm gonna do character development and I'm really gonna get to know my my antagonist because right now he's just a paper wall-- a wallpaper character in the background and he needs to be more three dimensional so what can I do today in 15 minutes or 20 minutes or an hour to develop that character bring him to life that counts as as part of your goal when you're in the flow if you sit down and say okay I'm gonna try to write this scene and I'm gonna set a timer for 15 minutes and I'm gonna write stream of consciousness no punctuation no no nothing until it starts to click and then you can feel when that story starts to pour out and then great that counts too and I think going back to Whitney's comment about this idea of a resolution being a relaxation or a loosening it's giving yourself permission to to be loose to to pivot to dance a little bit to just have fun with it writing and creativity should be fun and why are you doing it otherwise yeah and other and now that's not to say it's fun all the time there are plenty of times right in the process where you're like I hate this book it it's absolutely work yeah it is it is hard and I don't understand what I'm doing and why did I decide to do this but even the challenge can be fun in overcoming it in figuring your way through a knotty problem or suddenly getting that bolt of inspiration that says oh my gosh I know what has to happen next because you've been thinking about it and working at it that's that's why we're in it for those moments someone asked, how do you stay in the writing mindset so that when you're ready to go, when you have those brief 10 to 15 minutes of writing increments that you don't spend that time gathering your thoughts? that's a really good question it's gonna be a little bit different for everybody I know for me when I when I was writing book two of my trilogy The Golden Spiral that was a book that I had to write in 15- or 20-minute increments and I I carved out the space when I was commuting to and from work on the train it was about a 20-25 minute ride and I just had to train myself every day to sit down and only like read the last paragraph not everything that I had written before but just like the last paragraph and then just go and not worry too much that if the transition was seamless or not I wanted it-- to be able to say I can patch that a little bit later I just kind of remember the next thing to do one of the other things that I would do is I would sort of make a shopping list of what needed to happen in a particular chapter or in a particular scene. I'd be like, okay I have a few minutes I know in this chapter these characters need to talk about this this and this I need to make sure I hit this emotional beat and they've got it you know I've got to have at least one zinger in here and so then every time I would open up that document I would look at my shopping list and say okay, what's the next little thing that I need to do in this moment? and I'd write that part and then the next day I'd open it up and I'd sort of just write the next thing on my list and I would try to fix that list on on a day on a weekend or a day when I would have time to say let me think about this chapter as a whole yeah so you're planning ahead but you're not necessarily you're doing writing process stuff but it's a plan as opposed to the actual writing yes in the moment which actually leads us right into the section that we're gonna be talking about writing process as opposed to just being fearless a number of years back-- do you know Kindling Words? it's a writing and editorial no uh and illustrator retreat I don't think I know it's on the East Coast so one of these days we should bring you out for it but it's the only retreat of its kind that includes editors as well and it's a lot of fun sorry I have to just check um my phone for connection for a minute okay I think I'm okay I'm back there okay so there's a retreat for everyone so we should go so this is a weekend retreat just you know you've probably been to some writer-- you teach at several writing retreats so you know what a writing retreat is so we had Laurie Halse Anderson and Linda Sue Park in the same weekend yeah so you know I don't know audience if you don't know who these people are you should be reading their books because they're amazing Laurie Halse Anderson has been awarded so many times she's won the Printz she's won the the Astrid Lindgren Award I think the lifetime achievement award in children's literature Linda Sue Park has won the Newbery along with a huge long list of other stuff so when we're talking about process these are people who know their process and Laurie gets up and she goes to give her keynote speech and talks about how important it is to just write the first draft don't stop don't edit don't collect $200 just write the whole first draft and then the next morning Linda Sue Park gets up to teach the writing workshop and she's basically says to Laurie, with all due respect that's not how it works for me and she then she goes on to talk about how her process is to read her entire chapter that she wrote the first the the previous day not to read the whole book but to read like whatever section she read she wrote the previous day and then that gets her into the mindset to then continue and so we got these multi-award winning authors who have completely opposite processes but those processes work for them so let's-- with that in mind you the book really gets into a lot of the structural stuff like character and plot and and all that kind of stuff but of all those things I'm wondering what do you think how can a writer figure out what their process is so that they can bring all these things together for themselves? yeah processes it's the question we always ask each other at writing conferences like how, when do you find time to write how where do you start you start with a character or a story or like how do you put it together because every book is different I think that's important to remember is that not only as a writer do you have a particular process but the the story you are telling the book you are writing may respond better to different kinds of process and being flexible enough to change is really important Hourglass Door I wrote out of order I wrote the first three chapters the last three chapters and I just wrote whatever I felt like in between and stitched it all together later Golden Spiral, I wrote Chapter 1, page 1, paragraph 1, word one all the way chronologically straight through to the end because that book did not play well when I tried to write the first chapters and the last three chapters and everything in between I'm like I don't know what happens in between these things and so finding my way through that story I had to do that chronologically and so I would tell people don't panic if what worked for you on book number one does no no longer works for book number two, that doesn't mean your process is broken that doesn't mean you have a bad story it just means that you're finding a different path through this labyrinth of the storytelling maze I think whatever process you do that gets you to the end of the manuscript where you can get all the way to the-- writing "the end" is the process that works personally I'm a plotter I like outlines I like structure I like charts and graphs I like lists so I always start with that but I have friends who pants their way through it and then later on apply a structure and that's okay too because we both end up at the same place with a finished manuscript and we will never entirely be on one complete end of that spectrum there will be times where you can be a plotter but you will still have your story wander take a hard left and you're like well I guess we're going here now and you may be a pantser who gets who has written yourself into a corner and the way out of it is to say well, let me step back and look at it from a larger viewpoint and say where structurally what beat am I missing? what what pivot point isn't here? what relationship what yeah yeah what conflict do I need to enhance that will unlock the story for me and that I think comes back to why it's fun and why it's playful because you get to try a lot of different things you get to try a lot of different mediums it's painting with a number of different brushes and a number of different colors to get to get the result you want so I think you might have known back in the day before you even got into supernatural how into supernatural I was and then you kind of you took it and ran with it and you kind of blew everybody else who was in your friend circle who is into supernatural completely out of the water it's my favorite show haha it's my it's among my favorite shows but it's not my favorite the way it's your favorite and I do believe you wrote a whole book about it I did what you can learn from supernatural storytelling wise yeah so I'm wondering for the people who love a series like that I my example for years and years with my authors was Buffy because it was a great I was working at Wizards of the coast and I was doing all of these long series within series within series Dragonlance the New Adventures and Dragon Codex books you had to know the entire history of Dragonlance to be able to work within this but also you had to create a little arc little arc little arc anyway so I would love for you to tell us briefly what that experience of really diving into supernatural taught you about your own writing and editing and what you think like breaking apart some other story can help a writer in their process yeah supernatural is my favorite TV show like full stop yeah I hadn't planned for that to be my favorite TV show it just you really you really dove in I watched 11 in 30 33 days I don't know what to tell you it was I fell into it and here I am but what it taught me after I had watched it several times and I had this grand idea to write a little blog post about each episode for plot character and theme plus than a writing tip it really made me look at the story both on an episode level and as a season level and as a series level to start picking out the threads and saying oh I see what you're doing here I see how you are utilizing repetition or I see how you're building a scene and sequel oh I see how you've layered a redemption arc over four or five episodes because I was looking at it I loved the story so much that I wanted to see how it worked and so that's what I that's what I did and so I watched I watched it through one season one time through looking for notes of foreshadowing and I watched it through once looking for character nuance and how they were building character arcs and being able to do that kind of analysis on a story that you love whether it's supernatural or something else you could do the same thing with the Harry Potter series or Lord of the Rings or Buffy or X Files or Friends or whatever it is if you sort of take a step back and say okay, I recognize I'm having an emotional reaction to this episode or to this story. why is that? what did they do to make me feel this way? and then when you can say, is it something they said or something they did or something that a description the way it looked on the screen? you can start putting those tools in your toolbox to say okay well then if I want my reader to have the same reaction then I should mimic that path I should follow that path I should use this kind of language I should utilize that kind of metaphor because that's that's a tool that will help get to the emotion of it all and exactly I accidentally wrote 12 pages about supernatural in 6 months so haha accidentally kind of like Brandon Sandersen accidentally writing a middle grade book in the middle haha um and then in the rest of the book you well not in the more like in the middle of the book you've given us some math equations we get a whole chapter on voice um and I love that you included a chapter on writing endings because so often writers they rewrite, and they workshop those first three chapters but they don't do a whole lot of work on the middle and the end and they forget how important it is to stick the landing and so what do our listeners need to know about the building blocks of story how will this book help them to dive deeper well I really first of all I want to say I'm on my phone and I can see my little battery bar goes down so if you lose me oh no I will try to get back on it just as fast as I can just okay speaking of abrupt endings but while I still have battery um the equation that I sort of built out was like I said I like charts and graphs and I like the structure of it so I I have this equation where um the story is made of of plot and theme and plot requires a character with a goal whose motivation is greater than adversity who has a relationship that is under stress that will provide the conflict and then you put that character through try fail cycles and so I sort of you know built it all out with my brackets and my parentheses to sort of make it look like a math equation but it also helped me break it down into individual steps okay, what do I need to know about a character what do I need to know about a goal what do I need to know about motivation and that helped me step back and say all right I don't have to know everything about everything all at once I just need to understand a little bit more about this one part of the equation and then when I've mastered that or at least feel a little bit more confident in it I can work on the next part and see how they relate see how they're connected or see how they play off against each other and if I feel really, really strong on character great that part could be done and I can move on to another part that maybe needs a little help and then that way again we've broken it down into digestible, achievable you don't have to do everything at once you do not have to do everything at once and writing your first draft may just be building character and then you go back through on a second pass and layer in a little bit more of the conflict or you go in and make sure everybody's motivation makes sense and you go back through and say okay how do I put more stress on this relationship and you can go back through and say okay how do I put in the symbolism to build a theme and then by the end your book is beautiful and strong and thriving and we don't have to know the reader doesn't have to know that you went through it time and time again because the end result is beautiful yep quick question from Joan in the comments she's wondering how how we get the book that you wrote about supernatural what's the title oh and is it available in print anymore no I I did a short run in print but I just have it as an ebook that I sell directly I don't have it on Amazon or anything yet so email me or contact Stacy and she can hook us up it's I called it Saving Stories, Hunting Themes, The Writing Business which is a play on "saving people, hunting things, the family business" I have a T-shirt from supernatural and so if you're interested in that book, I sell the the ebook that has all 327 episodes and all of the comments and all of the analysis it's designed so that you can watch the show watch the episode then read the the little section and then watch the next episode and read the next section so it was definitely a labor of love and so you've also got a chapter on writer's block and I think that is a really great topic for getting beyond the fear of the blank-- blank page yeah so there's all sorts of ways that a writer might be blocked and I think you've talked I think the main thing that we ought to get out of this today is your point on playing--allowing yourself to play but anything else that you might um advise as far as writers block goes yeah I think I always try to reframe it and I say this in the book but I reframe try to reframe it as saying it's not a block so much as it's an opportunity for me to creatively solve a problem because that's really what it is there's some problem that's happening in your story that is causing it to stall or to stop and you don't you don't know how to get through it but you are a creative person and you have the ability to solve problems and so that puts the power back in your hands to say I can fix this I don't know how yet but I'm gonna fix it and the different ways you fix it can be part of that play one of the things that I really like to do when I'm stuck like that is I will change up the place that I write even if it's just moving to a different room in my house or I will change up how I write if I've been on the computer for a really long time I will try to write the next part by hand I think that's a really important one for people who work on the computer a lot yeah like the the even like I read for a living I read on the computer most of the time I'll developmental edit-- and we're gonna talk about editing in a moment-- on paper so that the line edit feels like a different part of the process but when I'm reading it's all audiobooks because I need to switch it up as far as that goes or I'm just gonna be fatigued and I think what you're saying about the writing process is very similar change up your process so that it feels refreshing to you yeah even sometimes as simple as changing the font on your screen can do something to your brain to say oh, this looks different I'm interacting with it different oh my gosh suddenly I see something I haven't seen before and that's a fast change and if you don't like it you can always change it back but anything that can kind of break up the how you see, how you hear, how you-- how you actually write it, on-- with a keyboard or with pen and paper can be a way to get around that writers block some of the other ways of course are then digging into maybe there's a problem with your character development maybe there's a motivation that is unexplained you know something that's bigger or more concrete that you can dig into and say oh yeah that doesn't work I have a huge plot hole here let's fix that or let's take that let's move it over here and actually change up the structure of your story and I think that Jessica has a really great question as we move to the revision part of the discussion because her question is at what point in going through your book to improve do you decide that it's done I've edited books to death by trying for perfection and I think that your whole book is kind of about getting past that fear of perfection so let's talk about revision and also how do the writers that you know approach the process of editing yourself in the in the first place yeah so revision can revision I think is actually where a lot of the actual writing come comes into to play first draft is running around the playground without any rules on the swings on the slides it's all fun and then revision is now you're at like the Olympics and there are rules and there are judges you're trying to get everything just so but the important thing to remember is that you will never be done and it will never be perfect so don't hold out hope for that I published Hourglass Door and I loved it and it was amazing and I opened it up and I realized that there was a mistake on the first page I had used the wrong word on the first page of my book and I was like uh okay well well, I can tell you as an editor okay and I'm sure you can as well that we also are kind of like I want I want more time with this like we're constantly striving for perfection on the editing side as well and yeah so my advice is when I when I think about had that question of how do I know when I'm done how do I know when I can move on you have to let go of this idea that it will somehow be perfect when before you send it out because there will always be problems with there will always be mistakes in it and it's just a degree of embarrassing mistakes or technical mistakes, and for me, if you are still building the house if you still building a room for a character or a second level of your plot or doing the landscaping of your setting you are still in that process of revising but if you're just rearranging the furniture if you're hanging up blue curtains instead of green curtains if you're fussing with commas if you're just debating the merits of brown over chocolate then you're done you're done, friend, send it out! do the thing because you could spend your whole life just fussing with those small things and the point is not to do that the point is to write it and get it out and let other people read it and see it and experience it I also always recommend giving yourself space before you revise if you've just finished your first draft you've gotta let yourself have space to have new eyes on it the whole point of an editor is to have a separate pair of eyes on your manuscript like, that can give you good feedback as the first reader and the same goes for editing yourself that if you're going into it immediately I mean it can be a oh I meant to do that thing I'm gonna go back and fix that thing that's great but when you're talking about something as big as a full length novel you have to have a little bit of space between it before you dive into it yeah with the revision goggles on and that's because your brain will very helpfully fix the thing that's wrong with it your brain will say oh I will put in the missing word here oh I know what you meant to spell here oh yeah I remember what I was thinking about even though it's not on the page and so you have to get that hot mess poured out of your brain and you have to let it cool so that when your brain comes back to it it's looking at it with fresh eyes it's looking at it and with a more critical eye to say well there's a word missing here and I don't understand what that means that this is misspelled so that you who is that person who came out of nowhere? who is that person again and why did they disappear on page 7? I don't know! and so you're doing yourself a favor and you're doing yourself a your brain a favor by setting it down putting it in a drawer closing the file whatever it is and giving yourself that space to rest think about something else consume other things you know binge your favorite show, binge supernatural and then come back to it and be like oh now I can approach this and work with this in a much more technical analytical fashion and then you find these yeah and I think it's important that you point out in the book that being a writer and being an editor whether you're talking about you know an editor like you and me working at a publishing house or editing your own book those are two different jobs they're two different part--creative processes yeah editing is still very much a creative process because I have to not only make sure what's on the page is correct and accurate and doing its job but I also have to say what's not here that could be better how can I help the author find their voice and strengthen their voice how can I make sure that the reader experience will be seamless and so at some point and and doing all of that without inserting myself as the editor into the process cause that's not my job your--the author's name is on the book it's the author's job and I want the author to get all of the glory and so I'm responsible to help say well maybe we could fix this here could you consider revising or rephrasing this? did you did you realize that this is how this-- this is coming across? is that what you meant? and that is very different process than writing but equally exactly which brings us to the get published part of your title and you go a little bit into the how the editing process works after you get acquired by a publishing house can you give us a quick summary of what that editing process looks like yeah it'll be different at every editing house and with every editor you work with you know your mileage may vary across the across the the path but generally what happens is after you finish your manuscript for most publishing houses you will need to work with an agent and so the process of finding an agent means that you write a query letter which is one page tells me everything I need to know about the book which is daunting but doable and then you send that out and when you find an agent who wants to represent you then the agent will submit your book to an editor at a publishing house and you sort of go through that whole process again and then once an editor has acquired your book at a publishing house then you'll get through there's a number of approvals that have to happen within the company itself based on content, based on financials, based on what other books we have on the schedule, marketing, publicity, availability, things like that that have nothing to do almost nothing to do with you or your book but are all the business parts of it that you can't control and then once all of those hoops have been jumped through and the editor now has your book and you're working together as a as a partnership then you'll do developmental edits which could have several rounds and that's where the editor will say Chapter 14 doesn't work this character arc needs to be strengthened it's all the big picture stuff you'll do a several of those rounds and then you'll go into line editing where you will look at every single sentence and every single word and decide does it need to be tightened is this the best thing we'll do those rounds as well and then the third layer is copy editing

which is the nuts and bolts: 48:43

commas, punctuation, spelling, making sure the-- typos typos all of those things get cleared out because editing is always that top down process go from the very, very big to the very very small and then and at most houses that copy editor is an entirely different person because the editor has been staring at that manuscript for so long yeah because the editor and the author again at that point you're like I hate this book I don't know why we acquired this book no one's ever gonna read this book because we've been looking at it for months and and diving in deep and it's all you think about and it's all you see and so handing it off then to another person to do copy edits or to do a proofreading or to do another pass on it can also give you those fresh eyes to find the mistakes that have managed to make it through which is why I tell people don't worry that your manuscript isn't perfect or done when you submit it because there are gonna be layers and layers and layers and people upon people upon people to help you get it in better shape than when you submitted it try and avoid the worst of your typos and and stuff like that because obviously you want it to look professional when you're submitting it but if you don't know how to use an m dash we'll fix it that's a fixable mistake running making sure you run your spell check there are plenty of editing review software programs like perfect it or even Microsoft Word's editor that even just a quick pass of those are going to catch the most egregious of errors and then you can feel confident sending it out and be like okay, maybe not 100% of my commas are in the right place but I don't know 75% of them are close to the right place yeah, exactly that's fine so Valerie asks how long does the editing process take from manuscript request to publish date and that I think is a trick question that is a trick question because there it depends so much some books are more obedient than others I've done some books that only take a couple of passes and they're good to go I've had some books that we've gone back and forth on months and then I still have to cut 5,000 words out of it and it can takes quite a bit of time I, for Shadow Mountain, I can give you sort of a general once we acquire a manuscript once we say yes, we wanna publish it we try to have a good solid four to five months where we are working on the editorial part of it and we want to have the book excuse me we want to have a finished a finished manuscript roughly a year before the release date of when we want it so if we want a Christmas book to come out so I want things in at least a year before its release date so if we want something to come out in July I want the manuscript at at the very latest in the July before now submission and acquisitions could take up to a year at times to do that as well and all right well and when you're talking about a New York house a year before pub is when they're doing arcs yes because they have to get everything out to and for those who don't know arcs is the advance reading copy that goes out to reviewers and promotional and so we're at Lee & Low trying to get on that schedule so that we can send our books out to like whatever the most anticipated books of the year kind of thing and so we're trying to get copy edited, final copy to the design and typesetting team by a year before pubs so that we can have all of that done so we're looking at three year process at this point for some books yeah it's the other reason why when you're making a goal there's a goal to write there's a goal to edit and there's a goal to get published and those might take years for each step they might not but be prepared that it just it just the books we're saying yes to right now we're scheduling for late 2026 27 like we talked about at the beginning of the conversation that's just how the business goes exactly we're actually nearly out of time so I think we've made it with your phone yeah you mentioned a surprise for people who registered ahead of time yes so this if you registered ahead of time if you're here on the call and I'm gonna let Stacy figure out how to pick a winner but of everybody who's registered you have now been entered and somebody's gonna win and I will edit either your query letter if you're ready to submit or I will review the first 5 pages of your manuscript and give you feedback--sort of developmental feedback on the first 5 pages of your manuscript and so I wanted to give back a little to say thank you for coming to the podcast and for asking good questions and for being great writers that is amazing so um I have all the emails of people who registered on the Eventbrite and we can contact people on Facebook if they registered on Facebook as well so we'll just do a random number drawing and we'll let you know in the next week or so who won let me see if there are any more questions before we wrap up you guys have had some really great discussion on the livestream by the way thank you one thing that I'm gonna note as far as this livestream goes I'm gonna go ahead and leave this up because we've got some really great comments on the livestream that I think can be useful for each of you but the connection has been really bad tonight as far as video goes and it actually records locally for both of us so I think we might have better video on Lisa's end when it uploads so I'm also gonna upload a slightly edited I don't actually edit like the ums and ahs or anything but I'm gonna upload an edited version of it with fingers crossed better video so just FYI this will be this is being recorded and will be on our YouTube channel and I am working on the audio portion of the podcast because this is supposed to be a podcast but I haven't gotten that far yet because as I said two jobs etcetera so it's still in process but I will be letting people know on social media and our email list etc when that is available as well but I'm looking at the comments and seeing if there's any more questions and if you have any questions now's the time because there's also a little bit of a delay in coming from the YouTube comments over to the comments because we've only got a few minutes left so go ahead and ask your questions if you haven't yet Whitney says and once you tell yourself perfection doesn't exist then you edit trying to get it as close to perfect perfect that *does* exist I like that I like that I think we've caught most of the questions Lisa do you have a website that you want to have people--direct people to Not yet, I need to build one but people can find me on Facebook you can find me on Instagram @authorlisamangum and on TikTok, I am now a TikTokker as the kids say. kids don't say that for however long that lasts we'll see@authorlisamangum on those sites I'm also still on X @lisamangum so you can grab me on the socials anywhere and I'm happy to engage and answer questions or give advice and talk about books it's my favorite thing! That and Supernatural. perfect and the book is Write Fearless. Edit Smart. Get Published. and you can order it at curiouscatbookshop.com or really anywhere books are sold but I'm asking you please order it from Curious Cat Bookshop if you haven't gotten it yet and I think that's it oh and curiouscatbookshop.com, you can also follow us from there to all of our socials as well we're on pretty much everywhere at this point except for Twitter and I'm gonna call it Twitter till the day it finally dies it will always be Twitter to me haha exactly but thank you so much to everybody who joined us we had a nice crew tonight it was really great and we really appreciate you coming here and thank you so much Lisa for joining us thank you it was delightful thank you bye everyone