Manuscript Triage by Erica Vetsch

There’s nothing like typing “The End” on a manuscript you’ve labored, sweated, cried, griped, toiled, and lost sleep over.

In that blessed moment, you sink back in your desk chair, wrists limp, mouth slack, and you sigh. When three seconds of afterglow have come and gone, you’re bolt-upright, opening your email, and sending that beautiful precious manuscript off to your critique partners where they shall tenderly receive it with tears of gratitude. (snort!)

Then you sit back and wait for the accolades to roll in, right?

Not if you have my crit partners. (Big old grin here.) Not that they don’t give me lots of atta-girls and way-to-gos, but they also tell me the truth—a truth that is sometimes difficult to hear.

“Um, dear, your baby is ugly and in need of some serious work.”

Owie.

Then the rewrites begin. (Well, after a little pouting and panic on my part.)
Twice in the last year, I’ve had to do serious rewrites on one of my manuscripts. Once at the behest of one of my editors and once at the behest of my crit partners who each pointed out some glaring problems with the stories. It was NOT pretty.

When staring into the gaping maw of the editing monster, it is so easy to get paralyzed by feelings of fear, discouragement, and an overwhelming desire to stuff your face with Lady Godiva Chocolates (or plain old baking chocolate if that’s all you’ve got on hand) and call it a day on this whole writing thing. Your mind races with so many questions.

Where do you start?
How will you ever fix it?
Should you scrap the whole thing and begin anew?
Is there any life left in your manuscript?

After your head stops reeling and your ego pulls its tattered self together enough to think straight, it’s time to get busy on editing. It’s time for some manuscript triage.
First of all, what is Triage?

Triage: the process of sorting victims, as of a battle or disaster, to determine medical priority in order to increase the number of survivors.

Pretty apt description of what needs to be done to a first draft, eh? Issues need to be attacked in the order of “most likely to result in the death of the patient.” Just as an emergency room doctor wouldn’t treat a stubbed toe before a gunshot victim, or aid someone with a sore throat before a car accident victim, so you shouldn’t be worried about punctuation before characterization or formatting before plot.

So, how do you go about triaging your manuscript and attacking the biggest issues first? I use the L-CARP method. (Coined by me and pronounce El-Carp, not Le-Crap, which is what you might consider your manuscript when you start the editing process.)

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A. Logic & Plausibility – This involves the entire manuscript. You’re editing with a broad brush here, searching for holes in your plot. Fortunately for me, I have an editor, Rachel Overton, who is so logical, she makes a slide-rule look sloppy. She picks out the places in the manuscript that lack logic or stretch plausibility. There is nothing that will kill your manuscript faster than an illogical, never-in-a-million-years kind of plot that doesn’t hold together, not even in your fictional world. Inconsistencies in the plot and plausibility will destroy your credibility with your readers. When you read through your manuscript, you should be able to map out the plot points, turning points, crisis points, and points of character change. See if they flow logically and plausibly.

B. Characterization – Again, fortunately for me, one of my crit partners, Katie Ganshert, is very gifted a dissecting and diagnosing character issues. One of the manuscripts I had to rework recently had serious character issues. The heroine was a wimp, and the hero was un-likeable! Yikes! Katie gave me some awesome ideas for motivating my hero so the reader would sympathize with him, and ways to make the heroine more interesting, less long-suffering and full of real emotions. Characterization issues will sink your manuscript. Pay particular attention to what an objective reader says about your characters. Make sure the people in your stories are properly motivated for the way they are behaving, as this will make even the most recalcitrant hero understandable and relatable. Make sure your characters are interesting, unique, and memorable.

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C. Action – This is where you move from considering story-wide issues to individual scenes and paragraphs. Author Elmore Leonard is credited with this sage writing advice: “Leave out the parts people skip.” Good advice! Evaluate every scene, every paragraph. Is it necessary? Is it passive? Is it boring? Is it loaded down with too much description or narration? Are you showing or telling? Are you in deep POV or are will your reader feel remote from the action, watching instead of experiencing? Keep the action moving, and don’t sacrifice story on the altar of beautiful words. A passage may be the most poignant and stunning piece of writing you’ve ever created, but if it isn’t active, necessary, and moving the story forward, it’s got to go.

D. Repetition – This is the step where you go from scenes and paragraphs to sentences and words. My critique partner, Georgiana Daniels, is phenomenal at picking up on the words I tend to use, reuse, and overuse. I seem to have a new handful of words and phrases for each book. (Example, in the most recent round of critiques, everyone’s jaw was tightening, falling open, clenching...After awhile, it got funny...I kept hearing JAWS music while reading the critique! She finally said, Enough with the jaw action already!) And Katie picked up that I had described someone’s touch as ‘light as thistledown’ three or four times over the course of the book. When you’re writing, you’re so close to the work, you can’t always see repetitive words and phrases. This is where critique partners are invaluable. This is also the time to check for overkill. Trust your readers to ‘get’ what you’re trying to say. Use a light touch with themes, spiritual lessons, clues, etc.

E. Polishing – This is the final step of the process. You’ve solved the major issues, straightened out plot and logic snarls, properly motivated your characters and made sure their actions are consistent, double-checked POV, showing vs. telling, and weeded out the slow parts. You’ve killed repetitive words and phrases, resisted the urge to hammer home the ‘meaning’ of your novel. In this last step, you’re tweaking here and there, checking spelling and punctuation, formatting and spacing. This is the last chance to make the story really shine.

There you have it. The L-CARP method of triaging a manuscript in need of editing. Start with the places that are bleeding the most, the ones that will kill your manuscript first, and gradually work toward the less-serious issues. Just as you wouldn’t treat a hangnail before a knife wound, tackle the biggest issues first, working your way down to the more cosmetic issues by the end of the process.
Happy Editing!

ERICA VETSCH is married to Peter and keeps the company books for the family lumber business. A home-school mom to Heather and James, Erica loves history, romance, and storytelling. Her ideal vacation is taking her family to out-of-the-way history museums and chatting to curators about local history. She has a Bachelor’s degree from Calvary Bible College in Secondary Education: Social Studies. You can find her on the web at On the Write Path

Leave a comment describing your editing process so we can learn from each other, and you’ll be entered to win a copy of Clara and the Cowboy, Erica’s May release from Heartsong.

From the back cover of Clara and the Cowboy.
Alec’s had to prove himself his entire life.
From his abusive, alcoholic father to the townspeople who treat him as if he’s cut from the same cloth to the insecurities that fill his own head, nothing he ever does is good enough. So how can he possibly let himself be in love with the boss’s daughter? And why on earth would she have declared her love for him?
In a fit of pique, Clara did indeed declare her love for Alec. And his flat, decisive rejection—even as his face and hands and lips denied his words—nearly broke her heart. Why can’t Alec look beyond the circumstances of his childhood to see the honorable man he’s become?
When Clara’s life is threatened by dangerous cattle rustlers, will Alec finally discover the answers he’s been seeking? If he lets go of the past, can he trust God for the future?

Thank you to all the lovely ladies of Seekerville for having me here again, and special thanks to Mary Connealy. You’re such a gracious mentor and friend. Can’t wait to see you later this summer when they FINALLY let us do a book signing together again. 

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Clara and the Cowboy is available through the Heartsong Presents website. Because it's part of a book club it's hard to get anywhere else for the first few months, but you can find Erica's first book, The Bartered Bride