This week, I’m joined by Eric Smith, a writer and literary agent. He's the author of contemporary YA gaming adventure Don't Read the Comments, among other fantastic books, and he's a fount of knowledge about how to navigate the challenges of the publishing industry.
Music: Harlequin by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3858-harlequin
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Show Notes:
@ericsmithrocks on Twitter
Don’t Read the Comments, https://www.ericsmithrocks.com/books-by-me
You Can Go Your Own Way, out from Inkyard Press in 2021
Cinnamon roll character trope: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCutie
Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9361589-the-night-circus
Alison Stine, Road Out of Winter: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/49374466
Farah Naz Rishi, I Hope You Get This Message: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43699608-i-hope-you-get-this-message
Sam Maggs, https://www.sammaggs.com/
Transcript:
Ariel: Hi there and welcome to Edit Your Darlings, a podcast that tries to take the sting out of editing by talking with darling authors about their experiences. This is your host, Ariel Anderson. And this week I'm joined by Eric Smith, an author and literary agent living in Philadelphia. He's worked on award-winning and New York Times bestselling books, and his own latest novel Don't Read the Comments was published in January 2020 with Inkyard Press. Thank you so much for making time to talk with me, Eric.
Eric: Of course, thank you for having me.
Ariel: I just finished reading Don't Read the Comments. And it's been on my TBR shelf for absolutely ever. And I'm so glad I finally had this kick in the pants to read it. Your characters were so endearing. And that main conflict with Divya made me so furious again and again.
Eric: Oh, goodness. Well, thank you for reading, and yes, I'm glad it made you mad because it's something that happens all too often to people on the internet, particularly women, people of color, folks in the LGBTQ community, and yeah, it's, it's supposed to make you mad.
Ariel: Let's talk about some of the ways that your editing team of critique partners beta readers, agent, dev editor, copy editor, proofreader, they all helped shape this fantastic YA adventure, right? So first, can we talk about your characters a bit? Did you get any feedback for any of the characters that helped shape them along the way?
Eric: Yeah, absolutely. Um, I feel like the most feedback I got about the characters were about the people around them and their various motivations through the story. So with Aaron, you know a lot of the feedback I got about him when I was initially working on it with my editor at InkYard was that we didn't really know much about his family when the story starts. I was pretty vague about the father in the story, the mom was just kind of...you know, the mother in Don't Dead the Comments, Aaron's mother doesn't want him playing video games and doesn't want him dreaming of working on video games. And that was it, you know, and my editor was like, well, why? Like, you can't just have someone or a parent or anybody pushing against what somebody wants without a real reason. Giving reasons that are “well, just because” are bad reasons, right? So, you know, I had lots of encouragement to kind of dig deeper there with her character.
Same thing with Divya’s mother. You know she's a single mom hustling to try to pay the bills while also finishing graduate school. She's really torn up about the idea that Divya is working so hard to try to help support her, and the question was, well, why? Why can't she just, you know, pack it up and not do this thing and not follow her dreams? For me initially the answer was, well because. But there had to be a deeper reason. So yeah, my edits are mostly deeper reasons for the actions of the characters surrounding the main characters.
Ariel: The six-year-old little sister, Mira, she was the one who stood out the most to me because she's the only character in this age group for this book. And her dialogue was realistic and hilarious. So, how did you come up with Mira and the funny little things that she said?
Eric: Yeah! She's based on my nephew really. Let's see, oh goodness, when I was writing this... I started writing this five years ago. So he was... How old is he now? So he was 10 then, but he was still very fresh in my mind as like a six-year-old. So uh, a lot of a lot of Mira came from my nephew. And you know, it's funny, she's like another one I got good editorial feedback from because in the original draft, she just kind of disappeared like she's in that one scene in the beginning and then was kind of gone from the whole story. And my editor was like, well, families don't work that way. She has to be around more.
Ariel: Yeah, and I loved how she was another way to show how absolutely sweet Aaron is. Because he's so indulgent of her.
Eric: Yeah, he's a bit of a cinnamon roll.
Ariel: Yeah he is! Cinnamon rolls are my favorite.
Eric: Me too.
Ariel: You also themed this book pretty tightly with lots of gaming references and music thrown in, even a joke about Tron, and it made the setting feel realistic and contemporary without being generic. Did you get any feedback or help with those little eggs? Did your editing team challenge you on any of them? And will the kids these days get it?
Eric: I definitely did, and I got a lot of challenges from my critique partners as well who read before it went off to my agent at the time and then my future editors. Sometimes I just got, I got really lost in my references and just made too many. One of the notes I got was that it was starting to feel like I was writing for myself, and not really writing for the audience, writing for the teenagers.
Ariel: Ouch!
Eric: Yeah, but that's a good piece of feedback because you know, we can be very tempted to treat ourself when we're writing our stories, just like popping lots of jokes that only we get or references to music that a teenager isn't gonna understand because we're, we're old, and we're writing books for a younger audience.
Ariel: Double Ouch!
Eric: Yeah, so I got challenged in very good ways to rework a lot of what was in there. In fact, like originally, the video game, Reclaiming the Sun in the book, the way it functioned wasn't
possible, and I had some really great editors on hand saying like, you know, if this is supposed to take place now and kids who are playing games now or in like two or three years are reading this book, this game isn’t gonna make sense. So I was I was challenged to keep things really grounded both in terms of my references and the way the world worked.
Ariel: Yeah, this isn't Ready Player One. These are games that you could conceivably be actively participating in.
Eric: It’s really funny you mentioned like the references, and staying focused. So I have a book coming out next year called You Can Go Your Own Way.
Ariel: Yeah!
Eric: And about half the book is set in a Philadelphia pinball arcade. My first bundle of notes from my very talented editor, Rebecca Cuss, said you need to cut some of these pinball jokes cause there were so many references to like very obscure pinball games from the 70s and 80s, and I went a little overboard. Editors rein you back in, and it's really great.
Ariel: And when you cut those references, do you like put them in a secret file somewhere hidden in the corner of your computer that's like “Add this somewhere else”?
Eric: Oh, I do. I save my little nerdy jokes for another book, maybe. I don't know if I'll ever writer about pinball again, though, so I don't know, they might not end up anywhere but...
Ariel: Pinball fan fic?
Eric: Maybe maybe
Ariel: Quick aside: For a good time, Google “pinball fanfic.” I was not all disappointed by the stories I discovered.
Ariel: The characters use different forms of communication, right? Because this is a contemporary YA and teenagers talk on all sorts of different apps today that I can't keep up with. So in Don't Read the Comments, we see text messages, emails, an in-game chat application. Who made the decisions about how to format those, and was it a headache or easy peasy to keep it consistent?
Eric: Really good question. So when I write, I tend to format stuff the way I hope it might look in the manuscript. I had this book come out a few years ago called The Girl in the Grove, and a lot of the stuff in the book takes place on a message board and I actually like painstakingly formatted the discussions to look like it was on like an old message board in the 90s.
Ariel: Mmm, the timestamps and the signature line with all of the images.
Eric: Yes, exactly! There was a lot of that stuff. So I like to do that in advance, but I do it knowing that there's going to be an art director at the publishing house who's gonna say, like, this looks cool. Now let's fix it so it actually works in the book, you know? So yeah, I format it partially for me and to give my team a vision of what I hope it'll look like, but I don't get very precious about it, you know. Like, I know that it's gonna have to change.
Ariel: Very specific question here: Do you use Word’s Styles to make a template for those?
Eric: That's great idea, oh my god. No, I cut and paste, like after one text message and the way I like it, and then or one like social media post, I'll just cut and paste it throughout the entire book. But making a template is kind of brilliant, Ariel. I'm gonna have to get to have to do that. I'm writing that in a post-it note right now.
Ariel: I'm a copy editor, and so I'm used to getting the Word document, and it has those styles. It's like, this is how we're using italics, and this is what we do for... you know? I don't think that styles are used enough by authors to keep their work consistent for themselves. So since we're getting more and more specific, to transition from Don't Read the Comments to just your general process, there was a line that I really loved and it stood out to me. It was Aaron's mom, saying, “I don't want your passion to be what wears you down. That's the quickest way to stop loving what makes you happy.” And it made me think about how wildly busy you are as a writer and an agent and a father. And I wondered how you make time for all of it without burning out.
Eric: I give myself like a set amount of time to do work. I work 9 to 5 and that's it, then you're done. Workday’s over, if there's another email that you got to get to, it'll still be there tomorrow—it'll be okay. You can keep writing tomorrow. So that's kind of been my approach. It sort of forcibly stops me I'm getting burned out. So that's kind of how I go about it.
Ariel: And when it comes time to focus on edits for your book, do you compartmentalize or are you still multitasking?
Eric: When it’s like self-editing, I feel like I'm really bad at it because I know that I should just like dig in and go the spots I need to fix and do all that. But I always just go back and reread the entire book. I know that that’s bad, but I do it, and it's my awful process.
Ariel: How did you mark those places? do you have? Do you have comments throughout your work? Do you have like carats or brackets or XXXX?.
Eric: I highlight lots of stuff. I use the publishing editorial speak of “TK”; I put that in my own stuff, that way it’s easy to find it.
Ariel: Quick aside: TK is publishers’ shorthand for “to come,” and it’s often used as a placeholder. For instance, I’ve seen it on copyright pages before an ISBN is available. It’s great that it’s easy to type and search for in a document, but if you’re using it in the middle of a paragraph, you might be frustrated when you come back through and aren’t sure what sort of detail you meant to put there, so a bracket comment might be more useful in drafting. Whatever helps you get words on the page! OK, back to Eric.
Eric: Just notes to myself.
Ariel: And how do you stay motivated and uplifted through all of those rounds of revisions and critiques? Because you're writing it, then you send it to critique partners and beta readers and all these different people. So you're going over the entire book like a million times, just approximately. How do you still love your work after all of that?
Eric: Ooh, I don't know. You know, I feel like every writer I know at some point starts to hate their own books just a little bit, ya know, no matter how much you love it initially. I feel like that's normal. There just has to be something about your own story that you love enough that you want to keep pushing through with it, you know? You wouldn't be working on it, and at the point where you're getting beta readers and critique partners, if there wasn't something there. I hope whatever you’re working on, people who are listening right now, that you love it enough to stick through it while a lot of people are tearing it apart, because that's what’s gonna happen. And one thing you learn really quickly in publishing is that once you're done with that book and once it's off to be published, it's kind enough yours anymore. So there...
there's a whole period of letting things go. So if you can, if you can let it go a little earlier and still love it, that'll be great.
Ariel: How do you decide what to let go and what to hold on to?
Eric: I feel like I'm a bad person for those kind of editorial questions because I am... as embarrassing as this is, I'm kind of like a Yes man when it comes to edits. I trust my editors entirely, you know, like they, I've been very fortunate where they give me just spectacular notes and spectacular edits. I feel like I've never really had to fight for something that I want in one of my books. I'm pretty lucky that way. There's no fight to be had when It comes to like critique partners and beta readers. Like, if they don't like something then sometimes it's just not for them and it's okay. When it’s with my editors, I don’t know, if they don't like something it means there's... there's a good reason for it. Oh man, that just made it sound like I don't trust any of my friends to read my book. But I do!
Ariel: How do you learn to trust? You’ve surrounded yourself by people who are really good at what they do, obviously. How do you know that they're good at what they do?
Eric: Yeah, I feel like that's something you learn in a critique group, you know, with your writer friends and your beta readers by reading their work. My critique partners who I work with the most, I've read their books and I read their writing and I think I've been reading their stuff since before they were even published, so I kind of know that they're good. I wish there was a way to suss that out before you get into writing group like you kind of can't like you can't audition people to hang out and write with you.
Ariel: Sure you can!
Eric: I guess you could, but you’d be a monster right? “I don’t know, I guess I could let you read my work, but first I need to meet some of yours.” I don't know. It's hard. You'll find your people, and sometimes a lot of a lot of guess work and sometimes disappointing folks, you know, because you might just not... you might know you're not gonna work well with somebody, and they might disagree and... yeah. Writing groups implode all the time. It's normal.
Ariel: Let's talk a little bit more about the YA genre and how editing in the YA genre might be different in other genres. Do you have a take on that?
Eric: Yeah, you know, I feel like something you edit a lot for in YA is that voice. You know, you're writing for teenagers, writing from the perspective of a teenager. Oh goodness, I feel like voice in YA matters so, so much. So you spend a lot of time editing for that. You spend a lot of time making sure you're not talking down to your reader. You spend a lot of time making sure you're addressing the audience In the right way.
You know, you're spending a lot of time trying to make it—I guess, depending on how you're writing—making it feel very immediate. You know, I feel like the best YA feels very close to the chest, feels very very urgent, even if the story is like light and fluffy, ya know. I love my light and fluffy romcoms just as much as I love my like epic intense fantasy thrillers, you know. It's all about trying to make stakes that feel world-ending to the character, even if they're not gonna be world-ending to everyone around them. So that what you're editing for. You're editing for that voice, you’re editing for that pace, I guess is what I'm trying to say, when it comes to the stakes and everything. And you know, you're editing for the audience.
Ariel: Yeah. And how do you know you got it right so that it doesn’t fall down to MG and it doesn't come up to you adult?
Eric: Ooh. It's all about trying to do it right out the gate. Like, you can't write a whole YA novel and then have someone say, “Oh no, this is a middle grade book,” right? I’m sure maybe it happens, you know, but like you're writing for a very specific audience right away. So my best advice there is before you start writing that book, just read a ton of books in the category that you want to be in. You know, if you're gonna write YA, read a ton of it. You're gonna write middle grade books, read a bunch of it. If you wanna write an adult book that happens to have younger characters, there’s a ton there. I feel like Erin Morgenstern writes some of the best adult novels that just happen to have younger characters in them. Pick up The Night Circus. If you haven’t, it is one of my favorite books of all time.
Ariel: I have been on a waitlist for The Night Circus at my library through something like 300 people.
Eric: Oh, wow!
Ariel: I’m coming up on it! I’m number 22.
Eric: Yes, almost there!
Ariel: So close!
Eric: That book is magnificent. I love that book. I've also worked with an author named Alison Stine in my agent life who has a book called Road Out of Winter that has a younger character. So yeah, it depends on where you want to be, dear listener.
Ariel: I was also surprised that you have hard cuss words.
Eric: It's true! Someone on—and I know I'm not supposed to look at Goodreads. I mean the book is called Don't Read the Comments and I'm on Goodreads reading reviews. But someone on there had like counted the amount of swear words in the book, and it was something like 130 something and was like very upset about it. But it's a book about cyber harassment and racism and trolling and that kind of stuff bleeding over to real life to the point where it's almost assault, right? So like there have to be strong words in a story like that. There's no telling a story realistically like that without there being the realness of strong language. Which is funny because whenever I slip and maybe use a swear on social media, people are shocked because I don't curse very often at all, but you have to be true to your characters and the story that they're trying to tell.
Ariel: Yeah, and it's not like these are 10-year-olds dropping f-bombs.
Eric: My book comes out next year, the pinball book, there's very little swearing in that. It's more of a quirky romcom
Ariel: Yeah, so theme matters.
Eric: Yeah, absolutely.
Ariel: Let's move on to the questions that I asked every author I talked to. What do you hate about the editing process?
Eric: Hmm... So sometimes I feel like I hate that process where you know an editor or critique partner is like, “well, you need to give me some motivation, you need to give me some reasons behind what characters are doing.” Earlier I said that. like, “because of reasons” is bad, right? Like you can’t, that can’t be a reason for something. But sometimes in life that is the reason for something. Sometimes I struggle a little bit with digging back into all of that stuff.
And I then guess... I guess maybe the amount of time it takes. Like, a good example of this is my new book that comes out next year, you know, I turned it in... oh dear, sometime in the summer, and you know that book’s not gonna be out until like November of next year. And I know how publishing works, I know that things take a long time and you have to do things in a certain order, but like, I just want to, I want my friends to be able to buy it now!
Ariel: Are there ARCs out yet?
Eric: Oh, no, it won't exist as an ARC until probably the summer next year.
Ariel: So what stage is it in?
Eric: We are in... line edits right now.
Ariel: Oh, okay.
Eric: Yeah, so I did my first big, giant overhaul edit, and now we are in the line edits, yeah.
Ariel: And that's still with the same editor?
Eric: Yes. Although I'm getting some like light copy edits. We have this amazing copy editor over there, Stephanie, who like... So my next book is... there's a lot of stuff about pinball in it, and I got some stuff wrong in the first go about, and she found some obscure things that I would have never found, and she’s just brilliant.
Ariel: Fact-checking is an art!
Eric: It really is.
Ariel: What's the most common bit of feedback you receive on your writing?
Eric: Usually it's vary up certain bits of language. I definitely have words that I like to use again and again and again. My characters scoff a lot. They sigh a lot. I use the word wildly way too much.
Ariel: Same!
Eric: Yeah, I love the word wildly, but I get called out on it. I’ve had people make fun of me on Twitter for it. Oh and the ways people look at things, like I'm always saying like, so and so glance at something, their eyes flit over to this thing and we look down at X and Y, and like I don't know why but I'm always very interested in what people are staring at at any given point.
Ariel: It's all ways to swing the camera.
Eric: Yeah!
Ariel: If you think about the reader’s mind as being the camera, then your point-of-view character has to be looking at it in order for the camera to swing that way.
Eric: It's true but I just like sometimes I sway the camera way too much.
Ariel: Shaky cam!
Eric: It’s supposed to be like a romantic moment, but instead it's like the... it's like a battle scene in a war movie, with the camera swinging all over the place. So I need to work on that.
Ariel: Any last words of advice
Eric: I guess depends on where our listeners are in the writing process. You know, if you're someone who's gearing up to pitch your book around and find an agent, just, my biggest piece of advice if to be patient and to spend a lot of time with your writing community. I feel like the publishing process is a lot easier when you have a lot of friends or you know internet associates who are kind of on that journey with you and supporting you along the way. And if you're in edits, my best advice is to just, you know, listen as carefully as you can and do what works for you. I hope you and your editor are getting along really well and that your books ends up being the best it needs to be. That's an editor's job, right? They are there to support your story and help you tell the best version of your story. Work together, be a team. You got this!
Ariel: The last portion of my program is a hot and wholesome gossip corner. Are there any other writers or creators doing something you're excited about? Any shoutouts you want to give or people you want to lift up?
Eric: Ooh, writers and creators who I adore. Oh dear, there are so many!
Ariel: I know!
Eric: There really are. Farah Naz Rishi is a young adult author from here in Philadelphia. Their first book, I Hope You Get This Message, is just this wonderful YA science fiction story about three teens who are basically facing down the end of the world. Aliens are about to come wipe us out. What do you do with your last days? When she's not busy writing, she does voice-over work for video games. I think it's so cool. And she's writing like the screenplay, the TV adaptation for the book right now. That's not like top-secret information. You can Google that. Otherwise, I’d probably get in trouble for saying that. I highly recommend looking her up and following Farah, she just does really, really awesome work.
Let me see. I'm like staring at my own bookshelf right now. I always recommend following Sam Maggs on social media. She's a young adult middle grade graphic novel comic author. Does just about everything, has written for Marvel, writes Transformers comics, has a bunch of books out. And she just does such great work in the geek community. I just admire her so much and I feel like you'll learn a lot from her if you follow her and see what she's up to.
Ariel: She was the inspiration for one of your characters, wasn't she?
Eric: Yes, so Sam actually makes almost a shameless cameo in the book. She's amazing.
Ariel: Yeah, I read acknowledgement pages like they’re candy to me, and as soon as I saw her listed in your acknowledgments, I was like, “I know what you did there!”
Well, if you want to check out Eric's work, you can find him on Twitter as at Eric Smith rock, or go to his website, Eric's rocks calm. Don't read the comment is widely available wherever books are sold, and be sure to look for his upcoming novel. You can go your own way, which is coming out of your guide press in 2021. Thank you again for talking with me, Eric.
Eric: Oh, well, this is lovely. Thank you for having me on to chit chat. I love talking YA and I, this is something that people don’t really get to hear a lot about, the editing process behind the books that they're reading. So this is fun.
Ariel: If you loved this episode of Edit Your Darlings, why not share it with a friend? Remember to rate and review on Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast fix. For show notes go to edityourdarlings. com, follow us on Twitter and Instagram @editpodcast, or I'm @arielcopyedits. Until next week, cheers!