At my most recent public event to promote my debut novel Then, Again, I chatted with the news director at WBOI, Fort Wayne's NPR station. Rebecca Green, for full disclosure, is also a dear friend of mine. We met back in 2008, when I started as a features writer at The Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne.

Being on this other side of interviews is odd. I'm a journalist by trade, and I love interviewing people. I love the permission to be nosy, and I love it when someone answers one of my questions, then keeps going, and the Q&A turns into more of a conversation, and then they stop mid-sentence and say, "I can't believe I just told you that." I swear, I never try to get a gotcha moment, but it always feels nice to know that I made someone so comfortable, they felt like they were chatting with a friend.
As I was thinking about my and Rebecca's shared journalistic background, I marveled at what a fantastic major newspaper journalism was to prepare to write a novel. That's because it teaches you these lessons:
Write short
Many writers are so precious with their words, struggling to handle the need to cut anything. They take these cuts personally, like a soul-wound instead of an effort to make a story as readable and emotional as possible. However, just because you get 70,000 words to tell your story in a novel doesn't mean you shouldn't cut out what's unnecessary; you absolutely should, especially if you want a reader to turn the page and have a prayer of getting to all those 70,000 words.
Shoutout, of course, to William Strunk Jr. for putting this lesson as concisely as humanly possible:
"Omit needless words."
Handle edits with grace
A book goes through a bonkers number of edits:
There are the friends who agree to be your first-reader guinea pigs, to tell you what works, where they got bored, and what questions remained at the end of the book.
If you have an agent, especially an editorial-focused one, they'll have edits for you.
If they sell your book to a publisher, your editor will have edits.
As will the developmental editor, who's looking at the novel as whole, paying special attention to continuity tweaks, such as if Marie's purse at the beginning of the night is gold and, by the end of the night, is silver.
Then there's a copy editor, noting things like spelling, commas and grammar rules.
And the proofreader, a hypothetical final set of eyes to find what everyone else missed.
As a writer, you know your story better than anyone, and not every edit will be right for your story. But you will need to be able to ID which changes will improve your story without letting your sensitive heart get bruised in the process.
Done is better than perfect
One of my absolute favorite bon mots. For newspaper reporters, if you miss a deadline, then the story doesn't run. You don't have time to overstress about every word. It's a writer's job to make a story--or a novel--as perfect a they can, but then to move on to the next thing. To get stuck in that yearning for perfection is a great way to ensure you never even finish your first draft.
Let the other person have the last say
This is one of the best lessons I learned from J-school. One of my professors, Carl, warned us that readers would call us and tell us off. They'd hate what we wrote. They'd think we were stupid idiots who should be fired, and they'd tell us so.
Don't explain yourself, he stressed. Don't respond. Don't stick up for yourself. Just say "Thanks for reaching out."
Because, Carl said, someone who'd go through the trouble of calling a reporter to tell them they're a stupid head doesn't really care what that reporter says or thinks, so don't waste your breath.
My friend, I cannot stress how freeing that lesson has been for me over the years. And it's wildly helpful for a published author, too. I don't pay much attention to reviews--I look at my star rating, mainly because I'd like it to stay high enough that publishers want to publish me again; but I don't read the written reviews. As a nice result of Carl's college lesson, I find that I'm good at letting reviewers have the last say.
So long as my ratings aren't tanking, what individual readers I've never met think of me isn't any of my business.
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