A PROFESSIONAL EDITOR

I worked on my second novel, And Evil Shall Come, for more than ten years. It was to be a thriller about biological weapons. The protagonist was an enthusiastic young woman reporter, and I researched the storyline. Creative writing has become competitive with publishers discarding unsolicited manuscripts unread, so mine had to be good.

I revised the manuscript eighteen times with Strunk and White’s Elements of Style alongside the computer, but the story was still not right. It was interesting but leaden. I had never studied creative writing so I attended a few writing workshops. These were not helpful, and I spent my time trying to interest publisher’s agents in my work.

Among the many how-to books on writing, two of them by Sol Stein, Stein on Writing and How To Grow A Novel, were helpful. I read them cover-to-cover, highlighting important sentences, and I tried to incorporate the changes in my manuscript.

Finally, I decided to call Sol Stein and ask him for help. He told me he was too busy and suggested I call his sister Toby.

Toby Stein was a Barnard graduate and a professional editor and writer with a number of published books and novels. I called her and described my novel.

“Sounds interesting,” she said. We talked fees. “OK, send me the manuscript and a check.”

After a few weeks I received a package from Toby containing about fifteen pages. She had read and critiqued every chapter, paragraph, and line.

“You are a good writer with a remarkable talent for dialogue,” she wrote, “and we will build on that. You should consider minimizing the use of narrative summary to explain the story. This is a novel, not a textbook. Let the characters move the story on by their actions or by dialogue.”

Toby’s pages were filled with the craft of writing, and I still refer to them. She critiqued every line I had written, often suggesting elimination, substitution or modification. Occasionally she praised a sentence or paragraph and I glowed with pleasure. I learned a great deal from Toby as I rewrote my novel. I sent it to the publisher with feelings of satisfaction and pride.

I’d like to be able to say And Evil Shall Come became a blockbuster or a best seller, but this was not the case. Marketing books is more difficult than writing them and is itself an art or science.

I turned to Toby again as I wrote The Ebola Connection, and once again she provided excellent guidance.