Editor Interview ~ Chris Roerden

Chris Roerden is completing 44 years in publishing. Authors she's edited are published by St. Martin's Press, Berkley Prime Crime, Viking, Walker & Co., Rodale, and many others. She taught writing at U. Maine-Portland and U. Wisconsin-Milwaukee and served as president of a Midwest trade association of 250 commercial and university presses.

Tell us about your experience as an editor.

When I meet new people at parties, I get one of two reactions. One is, "Oh, I bet I could be an editor, too, because I love to catch mistakes." The other is, "Gosh, I (or my significant other, my boss, my _________) could really use you because I am (or they are) comma impaired and can't spell worth a darn."

These reactions reveal that people think of editors as spending most of their time fixing spelling and punctuation errors. Almost any high school English major could do that.

The challenge of editing, whether fiction or nonfiction, is to know the market for a particular genre or subgenre, and thereby agree to either edit the manuscript so its content, organization, scope, and quality of writing meets market expectations, or decline to edit the manuscript because it won't sell and your ethics won't permit you to profit from the writer's naiveté.

How does your non-fiction book challenge writers to turn out stellar proposals manuscripts?

I tell the truth about how manuscripts are handled and screened, and I explode the myth that every manuscript is read. I don't want writers to have unrealistically high hopes, yet I want them to understand the factors under their control that give them a chance to improve their work before it becomes one of the 99 percent of submissions that suffer almost instant rejection.

What mistakes do you most often see in submissions?

I don't like talking about mistakes or right and wrong or good and bad, because those words suggest rules. There are very few rules. The big one is to follow the guidelines each individual agent and editor specifies.

There are, however, preferences and expectations, and there are thousands of decisions the writer makes for the telling of a story that involve techniques for doing so effectively instead of less effectively.

I've analyzed 24 categories of techniques that most writers use ineffectively, such as a hook that doesn't sustain itself; a prologue that disconnects from the main story that follows it; too much backstory too soon; too much description too soon; points of view that don't work to the advantage of the story; the inappropriate use of time, flashbacks, dreams, and stories-within-the-story; dialogue that isn't dialogue even though the writer puts quotation marks around it; buried agendas; dull tags, gestures, body language, and beats; telling not showing; the amateur use of clichés; what I call adverbosity, adjectivitis, and slow death; the use of certain words that drive editors nuts; and much, much more.

Because there's no point in simply listing negative techniques, as above, what I've done is to collect, in one place, 230 extracts from 215 published authors as positive examples of a variety of techniques. These examples offer writers more options than they imagine exist for meeting the challenges of producing a successful work of fiction.

What is the first thing you recognize in a proposal?

Voice. The sound of the writing. Neatness counts, too. But character development and plot will count later only if the first reader gets past the first page and reads far enough into the manuscript to appreciate the writer's handling of those story elements. But most manuscripts are eliminated from page 1, or even paragraph 1, because an average voice is a dead giveaway to the level of craft the writer has achieved.

What’s something you wish writers knew that would save them time/frustration in the publishing business?

Understanding what voice is, even though it's hard to define.

I believe that everyone has a voice. The problem is that the majority of writers smother their natural voice under layers of ineffective techniques—the same kinds of techniques listed above.

I have no idea how so many individuals manage to pick up the same poor habits, but the reality is that most writers use the identical expressions and ruin their work in identical ways—no matter that their plot and characters are different. For example, onee manuscript after another is filled with the same meaningless body language, the same redundancies, the same unnecessary adverbs, the same meaningless descriptions, and on and on.

Do you agree that reading the work of others helps a writer grow?

Absolutely. Not only do I believe it helps a writer grow but also I'm convinced that writers absorb the sound of effective writing by immersing themselves in the writing of others. I believe that if you hear effective voices, especially from a young age, you cannot help but write with an effective voice.

What is your best advice on maintaining a good editor-author relationship?

Honesty. Editors have to be frank with writers without being hurtful, though at times it's not easy to find something positive to say. We have to work more on pointing out the good.

But writers have to be open to taking suggestions. Some are predisposed to hearing any feedback as negative criticism. I've read the rejections received by writers who come to me with the complaint that everyone they sent their work to hated it. Yet the letters themselves don't support such a conclusion. Often, those letters are filled with praise for the writer's strong points and state only that the editor or agent is not currently accepting work in the writer's particular genre. This is not being "hated."

We often hear how important it is to write a good query letter to whet the appetite of an editor. What tips can you offer to help other writers pen a good query?

Get a voice. Actually, get rid of the junk that's smothering the voice you already have. Whether editors are looking at your query letter or at page 1 of your manuscript, give them no reason to stop reading. Voice is the first and most obvious evidence of your writing ability. Use it well.

Any advice to writers in the area of marketing?

In addition to your having read everything, including the classics, since childhood, be sure you read what is being published now in your genre and subgenre. Those books are the nearest thing to a reflection of today's market. Also go to the library and read the New York Times Book Review, Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal, and other respected reviews, and see what the critics are saying about the books in your field that you are reading. Get a feeling for the type of work being published today. By the time your own work is likely to hit the stands, the market will have shifted. Still, this is the kind of market research you can be doing.


If what you are writing is unlike anything being published today, you have two options. One, since your own book, if published, will never have a shelf of its own in a library or bookstore, you have to figure out where in those places it is likely to be shelved. Ask the librarians and booksellers to recommend specific titles that appear somewhat similar to what you are able to describe of your own work (describe concept, not plot), and read the books being published today that will become your book's neighbors.

Your other option is to be just a little out in front of everyone else's work but not too far. Most agents and editors are not looking to break the mold. Marketing is a compromise between what you want to do and what others are likely to buy.

Parting words?

Yes. Earlier I mentioned that in addition to analyzing 24 categories of techniques (okay, call them mistakes), I also collected in 230 examples of how others used those techniques effectively. The place to find all this is between the covers of Don't Sabotage Your Submission, which I wrote for the sole purpose of helping you replace the poor habits that make your voices all sound the same. My goal is to increase your odds of getting published. If this sounds like a commercial to get you to part with your money, it isn't. It's a request to have your library add the book to its collection. The book is the 2008 edition, for all genres, of the Agatha-award-winning Don't Murder Your Mystery. You see, I knew I'd be retiring one of these days, and I realized that I could reach more writers with one book and a series of workshops than I've reached in a long career of editing thousands of manuscripts.