Lyon spent the last twenty years teaching writing and mentoring writers in classes, critique groups, and through her editing services. Manuscript Makeover is a distillation of what she has learned in the process.
The parts of this book that will benefit you most will depend on the areas of craft you most want or need to work on. The idea is to customize the techniques to meet your individual needs.
Chapter One (Inside-Out: The Voice of Style) has a section on riff-writing meant expressively for the revision process. You already have your story ready to go, and riff writing can help you expand your imagination around a particular problem or need, such as adding images and developing more characterization.
Chapter Five (Whole Book: Five-Stage Structure) lists the most common traps writers fall into when crafting story problems. I especially like the chapter's sidebars and Makeover Revision Checklist for what can go wrong and how to fix it.
Chapter Eleven (Character-Driven Beginnings) helps you define your story goals (outer and inner) in concrete terms so that the reader always knows how close or far the hero is from reaching them. It also urges you to make clear what of value and importance will be lost or gained should the hero fail or succeed.
Chapter Twelve (Character-Driven Scenes and Suspense) gives one of the best explanations of subtext I've come across to date. It also goes into detail about showing character feelings as expressed by the body, using sensory reactions.
As you can see from the short summaries above, the chapters in this book are jam-packed with ways to improve your novel, but my personal favorites are Chapters Seven, Thirteen, and Fourteen.
Chapter Seven (Movement and Suspense Techniques) deals with action and change--the heart of successful fiction. It explains the form of movement that comes from reactions in response to action, which include:
- actions in response
- thoughts/quandaries
- narration/informing
- actions within thoughts/decisions
- visceral emotions expressed by the body.
Chapter Thirteen (Character Personality and Voice) deals with distinctive descriptions and traits of characters. It offers suggestions on how to give your characters "attitude" and "passion," make each of them distinct in vocabulary, idioms, phrases and sayings, etc. It offers ways to draw your characters in distinguishing detail (physical appearance and emotional/intellectual disposition). This chapter alone is worth the cost of the book.
Chapter Fourteen (Character-Driven Narration). We're always being told, "Show, don't tell." However, story needs narration. Good narration. And here, Lyon shows you how to tell well.
At the end of each chapter is a makeover revision checklist covering that chapter's revision tasks. I plan to choose one task, make the changes, and then choose another task until I've made it through my entire novel.
How good is that?
