I’d started writing my first mystery and was searching for an editor. I researched online and finally submitted the story to two practiced editors plus one named Sonia with minimal editing experience who said she’d done time and knew “the ins and outs” of crime. That sounded promising, but I asked each editor to review my story and agreed to pay their hourly rates for the initial feedback.
My story was about a shapely young woman named Shannon, who has a sultry voice and is a waitress in a Midwestern diner. One night, Shannon is at work wearing a tight black miniskirt with a slinky crimson blouse and cheap dangling earrings. She constantly flings her long blonde hair over her shoulder and has long, cherry red nails. After a day in which she endured dozens of innuendos and come-ons, a muscled and tatted truck driver hits on her while she’s trying to clean the coffeepot.
Shannon is tired and cranky, forgot to serve toast or hashbrowns four times in the past hour, and has already been twice reprimanded by the fussy manager. When the truck driver grabs Shannon’s backside, she snaps, and before anyone can stop her, she stabs him in the arm with one of her stiletto heels. Later, we learn that the truck driver moonlights as a mob enforcer and was in the diner that night to strong arm one of the waitress’s best-tipping regulars. It also turns out that the FBI was trying to nab the truck driver for transporting illegal material over state lines, so ultimately, the waitress comes off as a hero.
The first editor I heard back from found a few grammar mistakes but neglected to ask why the reader needs to know how much Shannon’s earrings cost or why anyone would wear stiletto heels to wait tables at a diner.
Neither the first nor second potential editor said anything about the cliches and incongruities. How many sultry blondes and muscled truckdrivers really exist, and how many waitresses manage the upkeep of a manicure?
Only Sonia, the third editor pointed out that a normal waitress would wear rubber gloves rather than ruin her manicure while cleaning a coffee maker. Sonia had life experience that included, she admitted, a stint in rehab for meth addiction, a year in prison, and a few months in jail for attacking a police officer who was trying to cuff her. She didn’t hide her past but said that she didn’t like to dwell on it, and there was shockingly little info about her on Google.
We met at a random, mostly empty bar on Chicago’s west side. Sonia said it would be safer if I didn’t know where she lived. She warned me in her flat Chicago accent that we’d never meet twice in the same spot. Sonia looked like a sweetheart, with a heart-shaped faced and a winning smile, but she was shady. She deflected questions about her past and I already knew that she had a murky internet presence. She also insisted on cash payment and used burner phones, so her phone number kept changing.
But Sonia’s advice was spot on. She said that no matter how hard the waitress tried to stab the burly guy with the heel of her shoe, nothing would happen unless there was a stiletto knife hidden in the heel. Sonia suggested that Shannon either stomp on his foot with all her strength or pull out a 4.25 mm “Liliput” pistol and shoot the guy in the foot. Another option was to bash him in the head with the coffee pot because, Sonia patiently explained, unless the waitress was a trained killer, neither stabbing nor stomping would slow the guy down.
Sonia assured me that she knew more than most about how to inflict pain, but I was sold when she started raving about the little gun, which turned out to be the exact model she carried around in her purse. And she had other solid suggestions.
“If that waitress stabbed the truck driver,” she said, knowing whereof she spoke, “she’d be hauled to court, and suddenly she’d be fighting a dull, drawn-out legal battle that nobody wants to read about.”
I was blown away. An editor who doesn’t see beyond what’s on the page is not worth the money, but Sonia was a little scary. She liked the crime aspects of the story, but wanted me to round Shannon out, maybe have her bring slices of pie home to her grandmother or sing folksongs to her baby niece.
“Nobody should be only one thing,” she said the second time we met. “Give everyone some depth.” She told me that she fires clients who don’t make the corrections she suggests and added, “I’m used to people listening to me.”
She was a little intimidating, but Sonia taught me that nothing I write is sacred. At our third meeting, I gave her a new version of the story in which the high tipper who gets stabbed is a Federal agent.
“Making the story more interesting is good,” she wrote in red, “but adding clichéd characters and a convoluted plotline is not.” Then she told me a story about how stupid she’d been to transport drugs across state lines. She cautioned against letting my characters come off as idiots.
As disappointing as it was to see a thick red line crossing out an entire paragraph, Sonia taught me a lot about writing. “If your stories are boring and trite,” she said, “nobody is going to want to read them.”
Much as I admired Sonia, appreciated her edits, and enjoyed the stories about her trajectory, I ultimately ended up hiring a different editor. It wasn’t her fault, but Sonia screwed up because she’d never worked as a waitress and didn’t know that restaurant employees are required to tie their hair back in most states. Nobody wants hair in their hashbrowns.
GP Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series (Battered was re-released September 2025 in Paperback, Kindle and Nook). She’s a member of the Blackbird Writers, on the Sisters in Crime Chicagoland Board, and a member of SinC Colorado and SinC Wisconsin. She likes posting on Facebook, reads voraciously, and has interviewed over 260 authors for New Books in Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Her stories have been published in Pure Slush, Another Chicago Magazine, Grande Dame Literary, and other journals and anthologies. Over 250 of her essays on travel, music, culture, writing, and things that annoy her are available in various publications at Medium.Com.
No comments:
Post a Comment