Lessons Learned in R & R (Revise and Resubmit:)

Passive voice, filter words, and clichés

Recently, a publishing company a requested the full manuscript of my book, The Bridge to Nowhere, New Mexico. After reviewing the full, they rejected the book but asked me to resubmit after I edited it to reduce my use of passive voice, filter words, and clichés.

I was familiar with filter words and clichés and had tried to limit them while writing, but apparently not enough.

Filter words include saw, seemed, noticed, etc.—basically anything where you filter something through your character instead of describing it directly. Example: “He saw her jump.” vs. “She jumped.”

Clichés are sayings. “He felt like he’d been run over by a truck,” is a cliché. “His body ached all over,” is not. “He felt like he’d been squeezed through a pasta maker,” is also not because that simile is not a well-known saying. (However, “felt” is a filter word.)

The publisher’s feedback about my use of passive voice confused me. According to the online tools I checked, I rarely used it. The fantastic freelance editor, Holly, helped me understand that there are two meanings of passive voice. The one used by the online tools is a sentence where the subject follows the verb. For instance, “he was hit by the truck,” vs. “The truck hit him.” The second definition is overuse of “to be” verbs (was, were, had been.) “She was running,” vs. “She ran.” Or, “The TV was on while they were talking,” vs. “A news program played on the TV while they talked.”

I used find and replace to highlight filter words and to be verbs in my document. Then, I eliminated as many as I could. This improved the book’s pacing and made the language more specific and interesting.

At the same time, the manuscript got shorter. Given that my book was barely long enough to qualify as a novel, this was unwelcome. However, I realized that certain scenes needed to be expanded and a few new scenes needed to be added. Since writing the book, I had attended a class Jeffe Kennedy and Darynda Jones taught where they mentioned that the space a scene takes up on the page should be proportionate to the emotional impact it has on the character. I had rushed some emotionally important scenes. Fixing those brought my word count back up and improved the quality of the book.

I finished the edit, resubmitted the manuscript, and am waiting for the editor’s response. While I wait, I’ve been making the same changes to another book I’m querying, Sunrise Psychiatric. It has the opposite problem with length, so I rejoice at every word I eliminate.

Here is a link with instructions on how to use find and replace to highlight filter words: https://joynellschultz.com/2017/01/23/writing-tip-filtering-filter-words/

Here is a link to Holly’s editing page: hollyhawkediting.com