Interview with Deborah Halverson
a former editor at Harcourt Children’s Books for 10 years
before becoming the award-winning author
of Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies,
Welcome Readers and Creatives,
Let's welcome Deborah, writer and editor extraordinaire. If you're in need of a book editor, she's the one! With over ten years of experience as a professional editor for Harcourt Children's, Deborah knows how to help your words soar. And being a writer herself is a huge plus in my book (or books, wink wink). Read below and let us know what you think about her advice in the comments.
Thanks and read on...
Hello, Deborah, and welcome to the Writing Teazurs blog!
You’ve written quite a few books in various genres. Which genre is the most difficult, and which is the easiest for you, and why?
I tend toward verbosity, so I am drawn most strongly to writing novels. But picture books are great fun to write too! I’m working on a picture book now.
What are the strange or odd must-haves on your writing desk? Example: I have a tiny singing bowl that I ding before each chapter.
The singing bowl ding is wonderful. I like to write with a hot cocoa at my side for sipping. My real must-have, though, is my Sofia + Sam lap desk– it’s the perfect size and height for me. I like to write in beautiful spaces, such as at the lake near my house, rather than in an office. I set up a lawn chair lakeside, under a beach umbrella, and work with my laptop on my lap desk. It’s glorious.
You are an award-winning author and editor. You know awards, how might writers get their work judged for awards?
You can research awards, of course. But sometimes your networking can surface opportunities: My book Writing New Adult Fiction won a San Diego Book Award for nonfiction. A friend of mine had won an SDBA a few years before, so I knew to submit my book for consideration the year it published.
My YA novel Honk If You Hate Me was a Gayle McCandliss Literary Award Winner. A local librarian told me about that award possibility.
So I guess two tips come out of my awards story:
1) the year your book publishes, look for local awards.
2) get connected with a writing community and let folks know that you’re publishing so that they can share award submission opportunities.
I love to be active when I’m not sitting still to write or edit, so I bike, swim, or walk every morning before I start my work. I keep up with my reading by listening to audiobooks during those activities. I even have an underwater MP3 player so I can “read” while I swim!
Why do you think there are more and more writers than ever before? And what does this explosion do for the book market?
I don’t know if there are more writers or if we’re just more aware of them because we can discover and connect with them so easily online.
But let’s go with the idea that there are more: This is a greater reason for making sure you are submitting your best work to agents and editors. That may mean not submitting everything you write.
Work on your craft, accept and weigh feedback, then incorporate what’s helpful, and be willing to put any good-but-not-great projects “in the drawer” so you can focus on your strongest projects.
You were an editor for Harcourt Children’s Books for over ten years. What made you change course and write books instead of editing them?
I gave birth to triplet sons and could no longer work in-house full-time! I still edit, but now I do it freelance, helping authors perfect their manuscripts for submission to publishers and agents. I’ve been doing that for eighteen years now.
I started writing during my final year at Harcourt, finishing the first draft of my debut novel before I left.
I always knew I wanted to write,
and I felt it was finally time to do so.
When should writers stop revising and editing their work? How can they know it’s good enough to start querying?
That’s a common question, and there’s no single answer. I do like how my friend Kathleen Krull summed it up. Kathleen wrote dozens of books for young readers, and when I asked her this question, she replied,
“I know I’m done when I’m just
moving commas around.”
For me, that says it all. When the changes you’re making are sentence-level ones that are more about perfecting than anything else, you’re ready to either submit to agents and publishers or hire an editor to bring in a fresh, trained eye to help you know what more needs to be done, if anything, to make it submission-ready.
How can other writers learn to edit like a professional?
The trick is to go beyond knowing that something isn’t working
to determining
exactly why it’s not working.
Editors love to suggest revision ideas, but sometimes it’s enough to articulate the problem well and then let the author devise a creative solution.
In Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies, I teach writers how to assess their manuscripts/stories, and I arm them with various revision strategies they can try out. Writers can hone their assessment skills by participating in writing/critique groups, where they can give and listen to feedback on others’ manuscripts.
I am not a member of a critique group, but I do participate in two separate writing groups each week.
It’s appointment writing!
One group is in person, writing side by side on our own projects for two hours. The other is virtual: A group of writers “meet” in Zoom, telling each other what we’ll work on at the beginning of the session, then sign off to write and then report back online two hours later.
These groups are more about support and encouragement than accountability—no one gets busted for not accomplishing their stated goal. That’s what I need.
Other writers do well with critique groups, wherein everyone shares their manuscripts so they can give and get feedback. I encourage writers to try out writing or critique groups. If neither turns out to be right for you, that’s okay! Everyone develops their own work style.
If a writer wanted to hire you to edit their work…what is it you look for before taking on a new client? And how can they find you for editorial work?
On my website DeborahHalverson.com, I have a tab called “Editorial Services.” (https://www.deborahhalverson.com/editor/)
You can learn all about working with me on that page.
I specialize in picture books and Young Adult/Middle Grade fiction and nonfiction, and New Adult fiction.
When an author contacts me, I hear their vision for their book and read the first ten pages if it’s a novel or the whole manuscript if it’s a picture book.
I get a feel for the level of editing and the content, and that’s when I get a strong sense of how I might be helpful to a project. If I don’t feel like I can be helpful for any reason, I’ll say so. I don’t want to waste anyone’s time or money. Hiring a freelance editor is an investment, and you need to find an editor who can click with your vision, who knows the market and audience expectations for it, and who can guide you forward.
Why might I pass on a project?
Maybe it’s a topic or genre I don’t read, and thus I don’t know the audience expectations for it. Faerie stories, for example. I could help you shape a faerie story, but I don’t know the “rules” for faeries or what’s fresh for that market. You might have the best faerie story ever written, but I’d pass because I’m not the best editor for it.
If you weren’t an editor or writer - what would you be?
During college, I contemplated a career in advertising, but my heart was truly set on being an editor. I was a life-long avid reader, and I wanted to work in publishing. Landing a job as an editorial assistant at Harcourt Children’s Books confirmed that inclination: After my first day on the job, I told my husband, “I’ve found my people.” Creating books for young readers is deeply satisfying.
If I gave you a megaphone and the whole world would listen - what one sentence would you shout?
Being kind and supportive costs you nothing, yet we all gain.
What are you working on right now? A new book? Editing? Relaxing?
I’ve always put my editing first. Now that my sons have started college, I want to make more time for my own writing. I have several books for kids in the works – it’s time to finish them.
Writers often become editors and/or agents, sometimes even publishers….what’s it like being on that side of things in the writing world? Is it as romantic as writers might think? Is it easy to balance writing and editing or agenting jobs?
When I was interviewing for Harcourt, the human resources person said, “It’s not as glamorous as you think.” I hadn’t assumed it would be glamorous. I simply wanted to work in bookmaking. I was more than willing to bust out the elbow grease and put in the hours.
Turns out, editors need a lot of hours to read submissions and edit the books they’ve already signed up… and there are never enough of those hours.
They read and edit in the office, at night, on weekends, during their commutes…. It can be quite stressful because people are always waiting for your feedback.
Editors are also doing lots of tasks writers don’t see:
Writing marketing and jacket copy for their books, meeting with book designers about covers and interiors, positioning the books for the sales reps so they can sell them into stores, filling out forms for various departments, and assessing Profit & Loss statements about trim size and paper thickness.
Picture book editors must find illustrators for the manuscripts, then work with the illustrators on sketches and book dummies.
I loved wearing many hats as an in-house editor—essentially, you’re the project manager—but it’s exhausting, and editorial burnout is real.
Definitely not glamorous.
I balanced being an in-house editor and a writer by writing in the morning before work. When I went freelance, I had to be Triplet Mom while my sons were awake and Editor while they slept, so fitting in my own writing was challenging. My sons have just started college and I seem to have more time—at least on paper—so I am rethinking the editor/writer balance.
(Check out Deborah's Blog for more...)
Where do you think story ideas come from? Our own experiences, dreams, some creative cloud somewhere? Where do yours?
Before I worked in publishing, on some level I thought that writers were born with a sort of “vault of ideas.” I knew I could write—when a teacher assigned something to me, I wrote extremely well—but I didn’t have my own ideas. Or rather, I didn’t think I had them. Eventually I realized that my brain was full of things I found interesting, and those things were bumping into each other and mish-mashing into something I wanted to write about.
What’s the silliest thing you’ve done lately?
I tend more toward playful than silly. Hmm… Oh! I once joined a group of writers in the San Diego chapter of the Society of Children’s Books Writers & Illustrators for a theme-party dress-up: We dressed as Woodstock from The Peanuts. Yellow tights, yellow feathered body suit and wings and hat, and bird feet. It was for SCBWI’s national summer conference, and everyone else dressed as hippies from the Woodstock era. When the music played and folks started dancing, we birds swooped through the crowd and ended up dancing onstage. That was far beyond of my comfort zone, but I had a blast and was thrilled to have participated.
How expensive is it to have a young adult or middle-grade novel professionally edited? And do you believe it’s worth it? Why or why not?
The cost of an edit can vary according to the experience of your editor. Most freelance editors—but not all—have worked inside publishing houses. When you are evaluating an editor, look at their experience. Who have they worked with? What kinds of books have they edited? Read interviews with them (like this one!). Get a feel for their editorial sensibilities as well as their work styles and personalities, and of course for the kinds of stories they work on.
As I said above,
you want your editor to know your book’s genre,
audience, and market.
An edit can be significant investment depending on how long your manuscript is, so it’s not for everyone. A picture book edit can be an hour to an hour-and-a-half; a novel edit might be anywhere from five hours to ten or twelve. Your editor will give you an estimate.
I’m biased of course, but I believe that if it makes sense for your budget, editing can be worth the investment because you strengthen not only this project for submission but all your future writing.
Authors often tell me that they applied what they learned from me in one edit to all their manuscripts afterward.
One author told me, “I feel like I just got a personalized
graduate course in writing!”
If you’re self-publishing your book, a professional edit should be one of your essential expenditures. I have hired a freelance editor for every one of my manuscripts submitted to publishers.
I am particularly proud of Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies – it’s part of the well-established For Dummies series, but I had free rein to indulge my playful side and go as deep into the craft of writing as I wanted. I think it’s very helpful to writers, which is my essential goal with writers, and it’s comprehensive, so writers can use it to assess and revise their work until they’ve taken the manuscript as far as they can on their own.
My primary goal is always to help writers make their work stronger. DearEditor.com is a part of that effort. Think of it as Dear Abby for writers: Writers ask me a specific question about the craft or business of writing, and I answer succinctly. Quick question, quick answers. I’ve been doing it for 15 years, so there are a lot of Q-and-As!
You can navigate through them, or type topics into the search field to find answers to the questions you have. I have a lot of fun with DearEditor.com, and have even started making videos of some answers that I post on my social media. (https://linktr.ee/deborahhalverson)
The idea for DearEditor.com came to me one day as I was thinking about how writers would often sit down next to me at a conference and go, “I just have this one thing I wanted to ask an editor if I ever met one!” I realized I could field those questions online.
Do you edit your own work? How difficult is it to edit yourself even though you’re an editor?
I have hired editors for every one of my manuscripts. I need those editors to do for me what I do for other writers: be a fresh eye, and articulate what’s not working and then make suggestions for revision if they can, or at least put me on the path to work out my own solutions. I assess my own work just like I teach authors to do, but then I reach a point where I’m just too close to the project, and I need someone new to assess it.
Do you miss working for Harcourt? What was it like editing for them?
I miss the daily comradery of working in-house, and ushering a story (and its creative team) from manuscript to bound book. It’s magical to hold the final book in your hand after one or two years in the trenches with it. I do not miss the bureaucracy—working with Profit & Loss statements, negotiating contracts, that sort of thing.
As a freelancer,
now I do only my favorite part:
editing the text.
What is your favorite editing service you provide and why?
I love what I call “substantive editing.” That’s when a projects is past the developmental part but not yet ready for line editing. I assess Big Picture story elements like plot, characterization, voice, and pacing.
As part of that, I’ll often line edit a chapter or two to help the author nail down the narrative voice or improve sentence-level craft, then I’ll switch to a higher-level assessment that may end with me suggesting changes to characters, scenes, storylines, etc.
My goal is to set up writers to revise and then submit to agents or editors. The writers may choose to come back to me for a second review to see if they’ve resolved the issues and anything else remains, or they may press forward on their own. This is a fun mix of close editing and Big Picture editing.
What is the secret to becoming a bestselling author?
Oh, if only I could answer that.
What is your number one pet peeve when editing a manuscript?
Pet peeve: the omission of the serial comma.
However, I know that the serial comma is a matter of preference these days, so I let the author’s preference stand unless clarity is compromised.
Down the line, their publishers may have a house rule about it, but my role is not to enforce rules. My role as a freelance editor is to help writers make a manuscript as strong as it can be to land literary representation or a book deal. I can’t promise either will happen after working with me, but I do my best to help it happen.
Where will you be next at conferences or places where readers can meet you and buy your books?
I present to writing groups throughout the year, usually virtually. I announce those on my social media: https://linktr.ee/deborahhalverson. (I also post video tips about writing and videos about publishing.) I also post upcoming events on my author website (under “News”) and on DearEditor.com’s “News” page.
How can my readers help you as a writer and/or editor?
Your wonderful readers can help any writer with a very simple thing:
Spread the word when you like a book.
Leave reviews at online retailers and share it on your social media. It’s easy, free, and so helpful!
Wow, Deborah, you shared so much information with us writers and those of us in need of editing help. Thank you so very much! If you are writing a KidLit book, check out Deborah's website below. She's an editor in your corner! I know I'll be reaching out to her. I've got a few MGs and PBs in mind that could use some editing help. I bet you do, too! Don't waste precious time. Finish that MS and get it edited for your best work to go out into the world of publishing. Good luck to you all, and thanks, again, Deboarh.
If you'd like to connect with Deborah Halverson:
Deborah's Editing Services: Dear Editor
Author Website: Deborah Halverson
Instagram: @DearEditorDotCom
YouTube: @DeborahHalversonEdits
Reach out to me via email angazur @ gmail.com
As always
Write~on,
Angie
