Timestamps:
**Sara’s Journey into Publishing (00:00:40)**
Sara shares her accidental entry into publishing and the influence of her professors.

**What Editors Look for in Manuscripts (00:03:37)**
Sara discusses her preference for manuscripts and the importance of compelling writing.

**Creating Compelling First Pages (00:04:58)**
The challenges and advice for authors in creating engaging first pages.

**Balancing Worldbuilding and Character Development in Fantasy (00:06:54)**
Sara’s perspective on worldbuilding and character-driven fantasy stories.

**Freshness in Writing (00:12:14)**
Sara discusses the concept of freshness in writing and the balance between familiarity and authenticity.

**Revising and Streamlining Writing (00:15:32)**
Sara’s tips for effective revision and streamlining of storytelling elements.

**Interconnectedness in storytelling (00:24:19)**
Julie and Sara discuss the interconnectedness of different elements in a story and how changes affect the overall narrative.

**Flexibility in story revision (00:25:13)**
Sara emphasizes the importance of being flexible during story revision and trying out different approaches.

**The “says/does” outline (00:26:15)**
Sara explains the “says/does” outline as a helpful tool for authors to reflect on their writing and ensure effective communication of the story.

**Reading recommendations (00:30:41)**
Sara shares her current reading list and recommends a book she finds relatable.

**Creativity and self-doubt (00:34:25)**
Sara discusses the challenges of maintaining creativity and self-belief in a competitive publishing industry.

**Humor in storytelling (00:37:00)**
Sara discusses the refreshing humor in “Murder on a School Night” and the importance of originality in storytelling.

**Book Banning and Publishing (00:38:50)**
Discussion on book banning, including the pushback faced and examples of flagged content, and the importance of not letting it influence acquisitions.

**Reading and Writing with Love (00:43:25)**
The significance of reading as a writer, advice to read with joy and love, and the act of writing as an invitation to share one’s experience and heart.

**Where to Find Sara Online (00:44:39)**
Sara’s online presence, including her Twitter handle, website, and involvement with the Manuscript Academy.

Please note that this transcript is auto-generated. There may be errors, omissions, and other inaccuracies. 

Julie Kingsley (00:00:01) – Welcome to the Manuscript Academy podcast, brought to you by a writer and an agent who both believe that education is key. The beauty is the people you meet along the way and that community makes all the difference. Here at the Manuscript Academy, you can learn the skills, make the connections, and have access to experts all from home. I’m Julie Kingsley. And I’m Jessica Zimmer. Put down your pens, pause your workouts, and enjoy. Hi, everybody. We’re here with editor Sarah Schoenfeld. Sarah, we’re so happy you can join us. Thanks for making time.

Sara Schonfeld (00:00:39) – That’s such a pleasure.

Julie Kingsley (00:00:40) – My gosh, I don’t even know where we should start. Why don’t you bring us back to the beginning? How did you know that you wanted to work in publishing?

Sara Schonfeld (00:00:46) – Oh, I started my publishing career sort of by accident. And I think a lot of editors have a similar story where I didn’t even know it existed when I went to college, and I actually needed help from my professors to learn about the idea of publishing.

Sara Schonfeld (00:01:00) – I had taken a mix of courses. I briefly thought that I was going to be a doctor. I took chemistry, I took physics, I took all these courses thinking that this would help me get, you know, a good background in everything. And I come from a family of academics, and I ended up sort of tripping into creative writing classes as something for fun. And my professors recommended publishing as a career path. And I was lucky enough that they actually worked in the industry and recommended that I check it out because they thought that I could be a good fit based on how I was in classroom discussions and giving peer feedback, which I really enjoyed almost more than the writing assignments. So I ended up taking a few internships, and at the time I did not have, you know, necessarily the courses. I hadn’t taken any special editing classes, and I found myself just really enjoying the work that I was doing at these internships and at the school paper. So I slowly made my way from, you know, looking at every type of class I had taken, trying to take calculus like me taking calculus, and ended up, you know, kind of going into more English classes as I as I continued my college career and then eventually moved to the city, got a job at Barnes and Noble, and the rest is history.

Julie Kingsley (00:02:15) – I love that. I love that your professors encouraged you to, because I feel like so much of the time they’re like,, publishing. Don’t do that. Go into something solid like academia. And then I don’t know, not that there’s necessarily like a huge dividing line there, but I’m just I’m happy they encouraged you. Yeah. I’m curious. You know, like the physics classes when I’m drafting a book, I kind of think of it like physics, like when you have to slow down, when you have to, like, like, fling forward a certain ferocity. Do you ever kind of like, use some of those thoughts when you’re editing a book?

Sara Schonfeld (00:02:46) – I mean, I think one of the things I always tell people who are considering publishing as a career path, there’s no one education that you can get to be a good editor. And I definitely agree that any sort of background is going to serve you really well. Thinking back, you know, my physics classes were in high school and that was quite a while ago.

Sara Schonfeld (00:03:02) – And I kind of by the time I made it to college, knew that I was going to go somewhere a little bit different than physics based on how painful those classes were. But it was, you know, such, such an interesting experience to get this education where I was learning a little bit of everything. And I think if anything, it taught me to be really curious, which is one of the number one things for being an editor.

Julie Kingsley (00:03:23) – So I was just saying the benefits of liberal arts, just like the constant learning, constant curiosity., so what are you looking for in your inbox now? Like, what is the one project that you would absolutely love to see this year and what do you usually like?

Sara Schonfeld (00:03:37) – , I think it’s hard to describe a dream project. I, I always have a strange wish list up on my website where it’s, oh, I would kill for a middle grade version of National Treasure, or I really loved the television show The Traitors, and I would love that energy and ye.

Sara Schonfeld (00:03:51) – But I think at the end of the day, so much of the read comes down to the read itself and so many projects I could pitch. I could come up with an idea for IP, for intellectual property, for those who aren’t familiar and so much of it depends on the author. People bring so much to projects on their own and develop it so much that even me coming up with the perfect premise, quote unquote perfect. I don’t think that’s necessarily what I’m looking for. I’m looking to fall in love when I go into my inbox and have that first page or that first chapter that I just can’t get out of my head, and that I just can’t stop reading a lot of the books that I’ve acquired, I’ve sat down to read them and tell myself, well, you know, I have an hour for lunch. I have an hour after work, I can squeeze in an hour of reading. And then I look up and it’s 10 p.m. and I’ve missed everything I was supposed to do. So I think, you know, as much as I want to say there’s some perfect premise out there, so much of it is just what the author brings to the project.

Sara Schonfeld (00:04:45) – And that’s really what I fall in love with. And when I’m reading.

Julie Kingsley (00:04:48) – I love the idea of you falling into work. Tell us, what are some things writers can do to create first pages that make you really want to read on?

Sara Schonfeld (00:04:58) – That’s tricky. I think first pages are incredibly difficult. As someone who writes. In addition to edits, I constantly think about this. I think there are a lot of things that are trendy in first pages that authors have started to do, that they’ve learned work, and that these techniques are things they’ve seen in other books. And I think it’s a great place to start. But I think, honestly, the first page is something that you should come back to after you finished writing, because the more that you write, the more that you get to know your characters and what your story is actually about. A lot of what I do in editing is trying to almost tell authors what they’ve written, and I like to reflect back to them the idea of what I call the heart of the story.

Sara Schonfeld (00:05:37) – So I often ask authors, what do you hope readers take away from this? If there’s one feeling or one piece of information, or one just main takeaway, and this becomes what I call the heart of the story. And oftentimes when you’re writing page one, you don’t know that yet. So I often recommend going back to page one after you finished writing and seeing if you can bring your character to life. I think a lot of people read for character and sometimes for worldbuilding, and it’s really just about getting to know what the story is. And on page one, we want to be grabbed. We want to be compelled by interesting characters, tension stakes. So I think a lot of it is honestly just forecasting your entire novel, which is very hard.

Julie Kingsley (00:06:21) – You know how there’s the battle test and there are all these other tests, right? So like, we were having fun the other day coming up with new tests for your query and your first page. We were speaking with Ellen Gough, the agent, and she was saying that if you have a fantasy work, it should still hold up as a story on the first page and in your query if you take the fantasy elements out.

Julie Kingsley (00:06:42) – And I love this as the Gough test, as we are calling it now. that’s great. Could you talk more about worldbuilding versus story, especially since a lot of your books have some element of magic to them?

Sara Schonfeld (00:06:54) – So I think of myself as more of a grounded fantasy as opposed to a high fantasy editor. I haven’t worked on many projects that I’d consider high fantasy, so for me, worldbuilding is all about giving us stakes that are relatable. And I think especially for children’s books, it’s hard to place a children’s story in somewhere that’s completely different from our own world, because we’re looking for an easy entry point. I think especially younger readers. The younger you get down to middle grade, you want something that you can step into and you can relate to immediately. And I think sometimes when authors are writing fantasy, they’re thinking in big, overarching worldbuilding elements. But instead I think what works really well is finding what the day to day is like in the simple things that feel like they’re part of our world.

Sara Schonfeld (00:07:40) – The authors that I’ve worked with who’ve been incredibly successful at this, they’re creating fantasy that feels like our own life, and it has that same simplicity to it. Another rule that I like to apply to worldbuilding, I usually say use Occam’s razor, so that usually is distilled down to, you know, when you hear hoofbeats you think horses, not zebras, or the simplest explanation is often the right one. And I think in worldbuilding it can be tempting to create all these rules and think, oh well, you know, magic is going to work like this, but then spell casting will work like that. And when you use a wand, it’s like this. And I show up as the editor and I often ask, you know, can it be one rule? Can we have something like to come back to the note about physics? Can you have a law of physics of your world that unites everything and makes it simple? Because I think the less we have to think when we’re reading fantasy, the more that we can feel.

Sara Schonfeld (00:08:28) – And I often think, especially in children’s books, that’s what we’re there for. We’re there to experience the character. The world is icing on the cake. We’re there to experience a character’s journey.

Julie Kingsley (00:08:39) – It makes me so happy to hear you say that and to talk about an entry point, because so much of the time I look at fantasy for any age and it is all world first. And I get it. The world is cool. The world is different. You want to set yourself apart. What’s different? Your world cool. But like, I understand the logic, but it’s kind of hard on me as a reader to feel like I have to learn a whole new set of physics before I even get to meet the person at effects. Yeah, and.

Sara Schonfeld (00:09:07) – I think it’s also tempting as an author, because you’ve invented all of this, so of course you love it. And of course it’s interesting, but at times your reader can feel like they’re getting a lesson as opposed to getting a story. I often tell authors one way to make sure that you’re showing, rather than telling, is to consider.

Sara Schonfeld (00:09:22) – Are people reading the Wikipedia page of your book, or are they watching the movie of your book? And sometimes that can be helpful, especially when world building to remember you don’t want to dump all the information in one place, and you don’t need to teach your readers. You are telling a story, and there are elements of the story that are unfamiliar that you might have to pause briefly to explain, but you don’t want to feel like your entire book is just about the world. I definitely agree I am a character forward editor, and I care about the characters and relationships way more than anything else in the story.

Julie Kingsley (00:09:53) – What do you think the breakdown is between character based editors and world building based editors? Obviously like fantasy, sci fi and. We’ll have slightly different ratios, but like, what do you think it is overall?

Sara Schonfeld (00:10:04) – That’s a really good question. I think people get intrigued by different things in a story, and that’s true for editors as well as it’s true for readers. Everyone looks for something different and everyone has a different experience with a book.

Sara Schonfeld (00:10:15) – I do think if you can look at the trends that we’re seeing, things like romantically, it does come down to even in books where it’s high fantasy and there is that exquisite worldbuilding. We’re there for the relationships, and we’re really compelled by the stakes not only of the world and of the revolution or the war or whatever’s going on in the plot element, but also in that emotional b-plot with the romance and that kind of balance and tension between the two. I think we’re seeing people love that. And as editors were readers first.

Julie Kingsley (00:10:45) – Also, when you were talking about how there has to be a system for how all of this in the world works, there has to be a physics logic. I also think, and you almost said this, so I assume you agree. There also has to be like an emotional logic, like the magic works this way because it does the following things to the character that help us explore this element of who they are and how they feel.

Sara Schonfeld (00:11:10) – Yeah, I definitely think the most successful fantasy is using everything to support that part of the story that I always talk about.

Sara Schonfeld (00:11:18) – So when you have a chance for the person to be able to succeed in the final conflict because they have grown emotionally, and you can interweave the emotion with the a plot with that worldbuilding, I think that’s when it becomes incredibly successful, and I often think a lot of fantasy. The magic becomes a metaphor for something that we’re all dealing with, especially in children’s books, some element of coming of age or identity or coming to figure out who we are. And I think the more that you can make it feel something personal to you as the author, the more it will resonate with the reader. Because at the end of the day, we’re just all looking for connection. We’re looking to connect to characters, we’re looking to connect to story, and we’re looking to connect to authors.

Julie Kingsley (00:11:58) – Well, there’s that weird paradox to write where a lot of writers think the worldbuilding is what makes this unique. But I’ve also found that if you go really deep into emotional specificity, suddenly it feels universal and also really specific and fresh at the same time.

Julie Kingsley (00:12:14) – And could you talk about the concept of freshness? Everyone says fresh. What does fresh mean? Fresh take on a familiar concept.

Sara Schonfeld (00:12:21) – In publishing were caught in a very interesting paradox, where we want something new but we want something familiar. I always tell authors, don’t try to reinvent the wheel. And, you know, talking to you guys, we can look behind us and see all the books that we have that we love. We’re not trying to create something completely new. We want something that exists in the canon of literature, but feels specific to the author or feels specific to the moment. And I think when we ask for something fresh, what we mean is we want it to feel resonant and we want it to feel authentic. But at the same time, we don’t want authors to feel like they need to break rules and figure out what everyone has done and do something completely different. At the end of the day, publishing is a system that’s built on a foundation of all the previous books that have been published, ever.

Sara Schonfeld (00:13:09) – That’s part of the reason that we use comps, you know, competitive or comparable titles in order to build our entire publishing plan comp, stick with a book all the way through from querying up through cover design. And they’re always something that we’re going to be considering. So we want something that feels familiar in the sense that there is proven marketplace demand for it, but it also resonates with our idea of what is a story, what is a character, what is moving. And then we want something fresh that feels like part of your voice. At the end of the day, I work with a great number of debuts, and I love working with people who are new and who are discovering their voice and finding out what they want to say. So I think the trick here is finding what you love. So researching your own comps, discovering what you love out in the world that’s already published and then saying, well, what can I do? What can I bring to this? And that’s the part that’s fresh.

Julie Kingsley (00:14:01) – Yeah, there’s a certain energy to it. I was thinking, as you were speaking, that some people listening may be too young to know this reference, but if you have a Xerox machine and you make a copy and then you take that copy and make another copy, and then you take that copy, and now we’re several generations down, it starts to get a little fuzzy, and you can’t really see the goals and the exact parameters of how it was before. And it’s funny because things like structure that is familiar doesn’t really take away from freshness. We like structure that is familiar, especially in romance. It’s comforting. It makes us have a sense of where it would go on the shelf. So structure doesn’t take any take away any freshness points. You know, adding romance certainly doesn’t either. That usually seems to add freshness if it’s done in a new way. Yeah, I guess we could almost like run through all the different elements, like what makes it more fresh, it makes it less fresh.

Julie Kingsley (00:14:48) – But I think, yeah, voice of course, needs to feel new, energetic, enthusiastic, the way enthusiasm is contagious. I mean, I’m starting to.

Julie Kingsley (00:14:58) – Panic listening to this in depth. Conversation about freshness and perfect fantasy and, you know, just the right amount of details. And I know that our writers are listening. Right. And so, you know, we’re kind of talking about Hemingway’s iceberg, right? You need to know the entire world. You’re only going to let a certain amount come to the surface. So, Sarah, like for the writer out there that’s starting to feel overwhelmed by now, I need to be fresh now. I need to be like, what is your best revision tips to get their work in the best shape possible?

Sara Schonfeld (00:15:32) – I think what you said is completely correct in that we need what we need, and we don’t need what we don’t need. And oftentimes I find, at least for myself as a writer, I tend to be an over writer, and I think many people do.

Sara Schonfeld (00:15:44) – So my advice for working towards revision when you need to cut down, or when you’re working with a fantasy world and you’re not sure if you’re over explaining things, is to make yourself a list of what your goals of the story are, and make sure that each scene, each chapter, each each line of dialogue, everything is coming back to that one element, or maybe those five elements. I saw a post online that this was used by the creators of the show, The Good Place, and I don’t know if this is apocryphal, but I think it was wonderful advice. And they said each scene, each moment had to do one of a handful of things. It either had to progress, the romance had to progress, the world had to deal with philosophy, because that’s a big element of that show. And there might have been another one, but those were kind of the key elements of character, plot or their themes. And I think you can make a similar rubric for your own work, which is figure out, am I progressing character, am I progressing plot, or am I progressing some element of the story which is very important to me.

Sara Schonfeld (00:16:38) – This like part of the story that I always like to talk about, and I think that can be kind of the trick for worldbuilding is I’m introducing, for example, this new element about how people can disappear or reappear. Is that serving my plot? Does it come back later? Is it serving my character? Is this part of their emotional journey, or is it going to serve? For example, if this is a story about privilege, does this serve that theme somehow? So coming back to your rubric and your 3 or 4 things that you want to do, I think can really help you streamline and figure out, is this necessary or is this just something I like?

Julie Kingsley (00:17:13) – Oh, I love that.

Julie Kingsley (00:17:14) – Right. So that’s how you kill your darlings, right? That’s how you make the decision about what you’re going to kill in a scene. Can you tell us about your own writing?

Sara Schonfeld (00:17:20) – Sarah, I think I tweet a lot about my own writing, and I’ve had a lot of people tell me like, oh my goodness, I can’t believe you struggle with these same things.

Sara Schonfeld (00:17:28) – And I’m here to say I definitely struggle with all the same things that every other writer has struggled with. I am not special just because I’ve spent ten years of my life editing, and just because I have been studying and picking apart some of the greats, doesn’t mean that I don’t also have those same issues. So I have many manuscripts and drawers. I am on draft number nine of my own book that I’m working on and rewriting it completely, and I think I’m coming back to those same questions of what story am I actually trying to tell? And I think having that in my head, that idea of a rubric of how am I progressing this? Or how am I progressing, that will be very helpful. But at the end of the day, I can’t see what I can’t see. And I think it comes back to I have a bit of job security here, and that every time I’m struggling with my own writing, I realize, oh my goodness, I really need an editor. And even, even I need that.

Sara Schonfeld (00:18:18) – And I hope this makes people feel better and that even my first draft was a mess. It was a complete, complete and utter mess, and I couldn’t see it until I had someone else read it. And I think we all need that kind of support, and we all need another set of eyes because it is impossible. I was talking to actually my dad about this and he was asking me, you know, why didn’t you do this? And why didn’t you do that without having read it and just having heard the pitch? And I said to him, I said, you know, I’ve spent two years constructing this box. It’s really hard to think outside that box because I have been building it scrap piece by scrap piece, slowly and steadily over two years. And I just I can’t think outside of it. So I think at the end of the day, it comes down to everyone needs an editor.

Julie Kingsley (00:19:02) – I love that so much.

Julie Kingsley (00:19:03) – I do something now that I’ve never done before, but I’m not.

Julie Kingsley (00:19:08) – I’m more of a pantser than a plotter, but I will do a synopsis and I will give it to all my writing friends and ask them to beat it up before I even get started. Because it’s so easy to write yourself into something and you’re like, of course it’s going to be like this. And then it’s like one simple thing that can unravel everything. And, you know, it’s it’s no matter how much you’re, you’re writing and how much you’re editing, how much you’re talking, how much you’re reading. Like, sometimes it’s just that one perspective can change everything. And that’s why we’re such advocates of critique groups. Finding your writing people., do you have a critique group? You know, do you have people that you work with on a monthly basis or tell us about that?

Julie Kingsley (00:19:49) – Yeah. Is there a secret underground Harper editors who.

Julie Kingsley (00:19:52) – I know, I was wondering.

Julie Kingsley (00:19:53) – I wish.

Sara Schonfeld (00:19:54) – There are so many very talented authors that I know from Harper. Some of them you will know, some of them you may.

Sara Schonfeld (00:20:01) – Not know yet, but, you know, it becomes this kind of awkward scenario of we all know how much we’re valued as editors and begging each other to read our work does become a little bit of a fraught process, but I’m certainly in the process of doing it. I’m laughing because someone tweeted what feels like begging but isn’t, and I quote, tweeted them and I said asking someone to read your manuscript because at the end of the day, it does feel incredibly vulnerable and it is very scary. And as an editor, I know how many hours it takes. I know the amount of effort. And I also know as an author how much it hurts when you send someone your work and they say, oh, I just I couldn’t read it and I have had to deal with that and having to deal with rejection as an author when you’re also an editor is very scary. And I think everyone deals with this and everyone has their own way of coping. But I am certainly working on building a critique group.

Sara Schonfeld (00:20:49) – That is one of my goals for the year. And I’ve been reaching out and and kind of trying to connect with people more because it is scary to put yourself out there, but it’s scarier not to be.

Julie Kingsley (00:20:58) – Especially scary if it’s people in the industry, because you know that, like, that sharp eye is its own for that. Yeah., yeah. Well, it’s interesting because I remember the first couple of years that I was working in publishing, what I likened it to was topiaries like, I got so used to seeing, like, this plain hedge and cutting it into shape, you know, snip snip snip, get rid of everything., that I’d get home and I’d still be in snip mode, and I wasn’t in growth mode, and I kind of just lost the ability to, like, growth, something from scratch because I spent so many hours a day, like cutting things up. Do you have a way of protecting that generative side of your brain when you’re cutting things? And.

Julie Kingsley (00:21:38) – Well, not. That’s kind of a violent way of putting it. But when you are,, chipping away at what is not David in the manuscripts you’re editing, this.

Julie Kingsley (00:21:45) – Is one of my favorite questions of all time, by the way.

Sara Schonfeld (00:21:49) – Hopefully, hopefully, if I’m doing my job, I’m kind of uncovering things. So I sometimes will joke that I’m just psychoanalyzing a book or psychoanalyzing a character. And I say, hey, I think you’re writing a story about this. I think you’re writing a character about this. Is that actually your intention? And let’s find ways to bring that forward more. And I have uncovered I love when I do this. I have uncovered clues to how a book used to end, because I can still find the traces of it. I feel like a little detective and authors will say, oh yeah, that’s where I was going. But I pulled back or I changed the ending and I’ll be like, oh, well, let’s talk about that. Let’s see. Why did you think that wasn’t working? And how can we adjust what those clues are leading up to? But when it comes to my own writing, I think I actually have the opposite problem, which is I am surrounded every day by the success stories.

Sara Schonfeld (00:22:33) – I am surrounded by the exception, not the rule. And every author I work with is incredibly talented and so skilled with everything they do that when I sit down I’m like, well, it’s words on a page. It has to be good because everyone that I work with is just incredible. So I have to remind myself that, no, this is a first draft. This is not a 20th draft like I’m seeing in my inbox. And I have to remember, I can be malleable and flexible with it. So I guess if people are struggling, feeling like their work is not of a certain level, they have to remember that every work that they’re seeing that’s published has gone through easily 20 rounds of edits and had maybe six people, maybe ten people reading it. And at the end of the day, you have to remember anyone’s words on a page. Anyone can write a story. The fact that you’re doing it, you’re already succeeding, and you just have to keep with it. Because I truly believe everyone has a story in them.

Sara Schonfeld (00:23:27) – And the difference between every single person on earth, being an author and everyone having a story is doing the work. So if you’re doing the work, you’re halfway there.

Julie Kingsley (00:23:36) – Yeah, you have to remove the extra parts that are hiding what the true story is. And I think that’s that’s a big part of where editors are so helpful, because if you’re just given a big chunk of marble, you can’t see that there’s something beautiful inside of it until you start taking away the parts that are not,, that are in the way of just letting that clear tone of your story come through. I think so many of the elements that go into a strong book, it’s almost like they’re interwoven, like you’ve got have you ever had a loom, you know, like for some reason kids get these a lot, right? Like there’s the loom on the wall. All the kids can weave in another thread. You pull on one thread, like worldbuilding, it’s going to tug on character to, you know, you pull on tension, it’s going to change everything else around it as well.

Julie Kingsley (00:24:19) – And I think it’s so interesting that interconnectedness of like how you change this one element and it will pull everything nearby with it. Can you think of an example of like change one element, it changes something else too? I realize that’s a really strange, abstract question.

Sara Schonfeld (00:24:36) – Well, I think this is one of the big things that authors struggle with during revision, because it can become incredibly daunting. As the editor, I’ll show up and I’ll say, hey, I’m not really understanding your character. Let’s get the character on the page. And they say, well, if I define my character like this, then this next scene won’t work. Or if I cut this line of dialogue I’m setting up for this. And I think at the end of the day, you have to at some point set aside a little bit of that feeling of. Frustration and feeling of fear and actually let yourself try it out. So I often recommend authors. Hey, you don’t need to rewrite the whole book. Try rewriting the scene and see how it feels, because I do think things are so interwoven in a story.

Sara Schonfeld (00:25:13) – If you’re doing it right and things will become big issues if you change them, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t change them. So I think the skill of a good author is being able to be flexible when it is important, and to hold your ground when it’s important as well.

Julie Kingsley (00:25:29) – When you were talking about the writers room of The Good Place having criteria for keeping things, it reminded me of a time that I asked an author who,, say most of the way toward commercial if we’re thinking of it as a spectrum. And I was like, okay, number your page vertically just on a piece of paper, and for each number being a page, tell me what that page accomplishes. And I think it’s so important for people to think about like things need to move forward. We’re not just there because it’s cool. I mean, absolutely, it’ll be cool at the same time to be in the world, but each page has to accomplish something. Can you think of any editorial exercises or edits or ways of thinking about things that you gave to some of the people you work with that might be helpful to our listeners?

Sara Schonfeld (00:26:14) – Yeah.

Sara Schonfeld (00:26:15) – So this actually comes from one of the first writing classes that I took in college, and I hated it, which is how you know it works. So writing exercises can be painful. It’s like when you’re working out and they say, you know, feel the burn or embrace the shake. This is this is what we’re doing here to make ourselves better. So I apologize to authors, please. No, it hurts me too, to do this to my own writing. But the outline that they suggested doing it was called a says does. And so you would sit down for every page or every scene or every chapter and you would say what the scene says and what it does. So the says is kind of like a summary. So you look at what information is being introduced. You tell us, oh, well, this is a beautiful scene. This tells us this character. And then what it does is how it progresses the story and how it’s functioning as a building block and trying to separate those two things.

Sara Schonfeld (00:27:01) – So, you know, you might say this introduces a character and then what does that do? Well, that’s progressing the relationship because they’re the love interest, for example. So I think A says does I often call it reverse outlining. So the idea that you’re not done with your outline when you’ve completed a story, an outline is not just a roadmap. It can also be a reflection. So as an author, I struggle with what did I actually put on the page? Certainly I know the story in my brain, but I have to put it onto the page if it’s going to get into anyone else’s brain. So working on this says does, or working on this outline after the fact can often be really helpful in figuring out what it is I actually did write and what actually is getting communicated, so I’m not relying on well, I know how this goes. I know what this scene is doing, but what is it actually doing? And while that can be very annoying after you’ve finished writing and the last thing you want to do is pick your story apart, I think it can be incredibly helpful and hopefully give you a bit of a bird’s eye view of your own story, which is the first step in seeing it objectively as a reader or as an editor.

Julie Kingsley (00:28:00) – Okay, okay, I’m sorry, I’m just having we’ve been getting a little meta with our podcast recently. Like yesterday, we were talking to someone who, like, there was a cup of tea that meant a lot to her. And we’re like, we’re sending tea to somebody. And so now I’m thinking, what if we chose a book that most people have read? Most people have access to the first chapter, and we go through page by page together in a form of, here’s what this says, here’s what it does, because I bet we will all see different things.

Sara Schonfeld (00:28:31) – Yeah, I mean, it’s very possible that everyone will have a different takeaway, but hopefully a lot of the does will line up in terms of, oh, this is building character. Oh, this is building plot. And certainly when we did this in class, I think we did it sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph and then page by page. And it was it was like pulling teeth. And I think this is one of the reasons that I became a stronger writer, but it was suffering involved.

Sara Schonfeld (00:28:55) – And I think, you know, skilled authors will certainly be doing multiple things at once. And as you work on your craft, you will learn to have scenes lift several things. Which is part of where I’m struggling as an overwrite is I tend to be like, okay, this scene is all about character, and this scene is all about plot, and I need to figure out ways to do both at the same time. And I think that that’s definitely an area of growth. But I do think hopefully the says does functions in that it tells us what the building blocks of hours of a story can be.

Julie Kingsley (00:29:26) – Do you remember we did this opposite when we did the revision class, which we probably should do again. But remember, we had people had to put down their writing and then to say what it meant to them. So this is kind of the same thing in your head. You’d be like, okay, I think I’m communicating this to the reader, but then the reader had to give back to the author what exactly they get out of it and to see if it was correct.

Julie Kingsley (00:29:48) – So I think, like, you can do this forward. You can also do it backwards. This is a super interesting strategy.

Julie Kingsley (00:29:54) – What if we could make a comment section on the podcast page and people could discuss a first page? Sarah, you can think about. Us too, but maybe you could recommend a first page that everyone does this as does with on our site.

Julie Kingsley (00:30:07) – Yeah. You know, like, it’s like a book that many of us have read would be great. Yeah.

Sara Schonfeld (00:30:11) – I just want my copy of the West End Game out. But let me check out that first page and see how that is, because I think that’s a it’s a piece of art. It’s like one of the best books ever written.

Julie Kingsley (00:30:20) – That’s so good.

Julie Kingsley (00:30:21) – Yeah, I love that. Okay. So if you would like to participate in our says does exercise with your fellow writers, the more data we have, the more we can see what a subjective process this is. Head over to the podcast page. Manuscript Academy composite cast.

Julie Kingsley (00:30:35) – Hyphen Sarah no H hyphen Schoenfeld also in the show notes. Okay, back to the show.

Julie Kingsley (00:30:41) – Sarah, what are you reading right now? What what can you recommend to us?

Sara Schonfeld (00:30:44) – Oh, goodness. I have a stack of books on my on my shelf that I am part of the way into quite a number of them. I’m reading Cult Classic, which is a lovely adult book. I’m trying to get back into reading for adults, and the premise is that a girl who is dating in New York quite like me and having some bad luck of it, suddenly starts running into all her exes. But there might be something sinister behind the scenes about why that’s happening, and she gets pulled into something that’s happening, and I haven’t gotten into what that is yet. It’s beautifully written and such a fun experience to read a book that reminds me of myself. I think there are several authors out there who just so deftly are mirroring me back to me, and sometimes I hate it and sometimes I love it. So that is such a pleasure to get to dive into.

Sara Schonfeld (00:31:32) – I’m like looking to see what else I have.

Julie Kingsley (00:31:34) – Is there? What genre is it? Is it a thriller?

Sara Schonfeld (00:31:37) – You know, I don’t know how they classified it. I actually got the book at a book event, so I didn’t know much about it and spoke with the author, and I was like, I need to buy this immediately. I think I’m about 50 pages into it and really enjoying it.

Julie Kingsley (00:31:48) – Well, it’s it’s just another good example of like whatever the genre, even if it’s a scary one. We want to relate to the characters or real person, and it’s such a pleasure to see a real person on the page, even if they’re an extraordinary circumstances. So that’s cool. Now I want to read it.

Sara Schonfeld (00:32:03) – Yeah, I’ll have to report back. I’m not doing well at reading the spines all the way from here, but I have a long list of books. One of my jokes is that whenever someone asks me, have you read something? I respond, I’ve never read a book in my life because chances are I haven’t had time to get around to it.

Sara Schonfeld (00:32:18) – And so one of my goals for the year is just to read those books that I missed out on, that everyone else got to read because I was reading books that are amazing, but going to be published in a couple of years. So trying to catch up on that backlog. And, you know, I haven’t read Fourth Wing yet. I haven’t read what other big titles were out last year. I’m catching up. I’m slowly catching.

Julie Kingsley (00:32:38) – Up. I love that response, though, because people always think that we’ve read every single book. And of course there are 150,000 published a year.

Sara Schonfeld (00:32:45) – Yeah, I wish that would be if I had a superpower. No.

Julie Kingsley (00:32:48) – Okay, so if you had a superpower is actually one of our questions. Okay. Okay. So if you like, if you had a superpower, what would it be?

Sara Schonfeld (00:32:57) – Oh my goodness. That’s a really hard question because I think superpowers I definitely come from the with great power comes great responsibility. So if I had some magical power, I would feel like I had to dedicate my life to using that power for the greater good.

Sara Schonfeld (00:33:12) – .

Julie Kingsley (00:33:12) – I have to point out that as a fantasy editor, that this question is five times as hard. Ten times as hard.

Sara Schonfeld (00:33:19) – Yeah, I mean, I see so many really cool powers where I’m like, oh my goodness, you know, like the classic things like stopping time. I think a lot of editors can relate to wanting to do that. But then if you could do that, you’re still aging. And are you going to put your whole life into work? Are you going to pause your day every day so that you can work for longer, knowing that you know you’ll be aging ten times as fast? I don’t know, I don’t know if I would do that. Part of me is is a romantic, and I would love to be able to be some kind of magical matchmaker and find love for everyone. But then I know that based on how the genres work, I would not be able to find love for myself. So I don’t know. I don’t know what superpower I would actually want.

Julie Kingsley (00:34:00) – But I’ll put you out of your misery. You don’t have to choose one. But you know what’s interesting? I think that writers, and I’m curious, because you have an editing brain that deals with magic and superpowers and things like that, and then you have a writing brain. So we talked about how, like, we’re not some of us don’t get to read as much because we’re reading for other things. You have a creative fire, you know, but you’re also working really hard in the industry. What do you do to, like, blow flames on your own creative fire?

Sara Schonfeld (00:34:25) – Yeah. So I think for me, idea generation is not the tricky part. I think a lot of people who read a lot, you come up with ideas because you’re seeing what other people are doing so well. For me, what’s hard is feeling like the project has legs because I often joke, you know, I can hear the acquisitions board, I know I’m trained. I have trained myself to anticipate what they’re going to say.

Sara Schonfeld (00:34:47) – And as I’m writing, I can hear them in my head. It becomes very tricky because I get to a certain point where I wonder, why am I even doing this? Because there’s already so many incredible things out there, and every day I’m seeing work that is so amazing and so. Beautifully done, just rendered in a lush way that steals my breath. And I think, you know what am I? Who am I to try to hold a candle to that? And so I think at the end of the day, what it comes down to is I need to really remind myself that I am creating something out of nothing, and I am on a journey. This is the first draft. This is the ninth draft. This is something that’s special to me and as long as I believe in it, hopefully someday someone else will believe in it too. But I think it is hard. It is hard to remember like we are ants and publishing is huge and every one book is just trying to trying to be a book.

Sara Schonfeld (00:35:35) – So it is hard and I think it is a challenge, but I have to remember that I love my book and someone else will too.

Julie Kingsley (00:35:43) – I think something that a lot of creatives need to remember is that it isn’t necessarily about coming up with something that no one has ever done before, but about how you do it. It’s not necessarily what you do, but often how you do it.

Sara Schonfeld (00:35:57) – I hope this is a heartening thing to hear and not a disheartening thing to hear, but I definitely think at the end of the day, the idea is maybe 10%. You know, execution is so important and I hope people remember this. I know I feel this way. I did this the other day. A lot of people do this. You see these announcements on Twitter or in pub lunch and you say, oh my gosh, I got scooped. Someone else has already written my book and I think you have to remember, there are books out there that are incredibly similar, and it actually doesn’t really matter as long as you are intentionally ripping someone off.

Sara Schonfeld (00:36:29) – As long as you are writing your own story, that’s true to you. The idea isn’t the whole book, you know, it’s I think there’s that quote from Doctor Who. The souffle is not the souffle. The souffle is the recipe. And I think I want to write a similar quote, which is the book is not the book. And it kind of it stops making sense, those kind of nonsensical circular quotes. But I think at the end of the day, the concept is not the book. The book is the book.

Julie Kingsley (00:36:53) – Did you talk to us about murder on a school night?

Sara Schonfeld (00:36:55) – Oh, yeah, I have it over there and I could grab it. Yeah, go get it.. Show us.

Julie Kingsley (00:37:00) – Okay. Julie. And the listing, it says there’s someone killing other girls at high school with menstrual products.

Sara Schonfeld (00:37:05) – Murder on a school night. Actually, I’m currently in the depths of working on the second, the sequel to this. But this was such a pleasure. So this one came into my inbox and I read it incredibly fast and sent it over to my boss at the time, Katherine Teagan.

Sara Schonfeld (00:37:20) – I had sent this to her and I said, hey, I think, I think this is really funny and I think this is really special. And she wrote back within a couple days and said, this is incredible., so murder on a School Night is written by Kate Weston, who is a British comedian, and I think her specific take is something that is so needed. And yea, and having the humor in there, oftentimes we talk about romcoms and we talk about things that are put into this comedy bucket, but they often aren’t actually funny. And I think it’s so refreshing talking about what’s fresh. It’s so refreshing to actually see humor and see someone who’s willing to go outside the lines a little bit. And Kate’s really incredible at this. The premise for murder on a School Night is that these dead bodies are turning up, and they have been either staged or killed with menstrual products, and the police are baffled because they don’t even know what these things are. They can’t even say tampon without turning bright red.

Sara Schonfeld (00:38:15) – And these teen sleuths who, unfortunately, were on the scene when the bodies were discovered, poor Carrie just wanted to make out with the hot guy, but she stumbled on a dead body instead, which, you know, never a good time, but especially bad when you’re just trying to kiss someone. They end up sucked into the investigation of who has been killing people around town with menstrual products. Why? And at the end of the day, can they solve and catch this menstrual murderer? Because it’s really cramping their style. We made a lot of puns. There were a lot of puns in the book.

Julie Kingsley (00:38:50) – So what’s the pushback? Was there pushback from this? Because it’s just like all of Florida is not supposed to talk about periods or something like that in school. Like, did you like with all of these kind of book banning stuff, like, how does this go?

Sara Schonfeld (00:39:03) – You know, certainly I publish a lot of books that have fallen into categories for book banning, for categories that I didn’t even know existed.

Sara Schonfeld (00:39:10) – I published a lovely middle grade called The Song of Us, which included a queer romance, because the author wanted to be seen and wanted queer romance to be in tween. But it’s kind of a taboo subject these days in this country, unfortunately, especially for younger kids. And that was the whole point of the book, and that’s why the book was so important and why we wanted to publish it. It’s also a gorgeously written novel in verse. I highly recommend picking it up. I also worked with Allie Malenchenko on Disappearing House, which she wrote from her experience having cancer, and wrote about a protagonist who is handling what it means to be post diagnosis and having had this in their past. And that got flagged for something about, you know, a hard view on life or something, and dealing with death and talking about mortality, which was just shocking. I didn’t even know that was a book band that existed, and I think. Authors these days. It’s certainly is a hard time to publish. And we are.

Sara Schonfeld (00:40:03) – You know, I feel awful for whenever my authors are impacted by a book or by a ban or by a challenge, but I do think that’s not a reason to stop writing it. Certainly when I’m acquiring books, that is not something I’m thinking about. That is not something our team is going to let influence us at all. I want to joke and say like, I’ll just acquire them harder. But at the end of the day, you know, I’m going after books that I enjoy, that tug on my heartstrings, that make me feel something. So I certainly am not going to say, oh, well, this has tampons in it. We can’t publish it.

Julie Kingsley (00:40:34) – Well, I mean, I’m so glad that that’s the view. And, you know, we believe that especially in the classroom, books are places to have conversations in a safe place, and that it’s so important that kids have outlets where they can discuss real life. So we’re really pleased to hear that coming out of Harpercollins.

Julie Kingsley (00:40:52) – Yeah, I’m sure there are some authors who think that you’re going around like, oh, it’ll get banned, rejected.

Sara Schonfeld (00:40:56) – No. Oh my goodness. Now, I think, you know, at the end of the day, if I love the story, I’m going to fight for it regardless. And certainly some authors, you know, it’s up to you about how much you feel comfortable fighting for your book and know that your publisher is going to be behind you 100%. You know, in the face of these these challenges and these bands know, I understand it can also feel very scary as an author to think I’m going to go up against the entire state of XYZ and have to face that. So we’re definitely sympathetic and we’re so sorry that everyone’s dealing with that. But it is not going to change my acquisitions.

Julie Kingsley (00:41:31) – Can you imagine if people are like, well, won’t sell in Florida? Nope.

Sara Schonfeld (00:41:34) – I don’t know what we would publish at this point. I don’t know what’s left.

Julie Kingsley (00:41:37) – Yeah, seriously. So you are open for meetings. People can book with you. We’ll put the link in the show notes. What do you particularly like to talk about in consultation meetings like do you feel like there’s one area of editing a query, editing pages that you really just nerd out about?

Sara Schonfeld (00:41:54) – My favorite part of editing a query is usually when I get to tell people with the best parts of their book are.

Sara Schonfeld (00:41:59) – So I really enjoy when an author shows up and says, hey, I don’t know how to sell my book, and I say, well, I have a plan for you. So I love getting to tell authors. This is the thing that really grabbed me. This sentence, which you have at the bottom, should really be at the top, or this was really stellar in your pages, but I don’t see it yet in your query. So you can brag about that. And I think a lot of authors, again, as someone who writes, it’s really hard to see your own work. You can’t be your own mirror. And I love getting to show up and be that mirror and say to an author, your outfit is incredible, you look great. Go out in the world and show off.

Julie Kingsley (00:42:34) – Oh, I love the idea of that. An editor is a mirror.

Sara Schonfeld (00:42:37) – And also sometimes as the author, you can feel like the Emperor has no clothes, and it’s the awkward scenario of your mirror has to be very honest with you.

Sara Schonfeld (00:42:45) – So that’s a certain type of beta read. And I’m definitely in a position where I need that of someone who’s just going to tell me, like, hey, the Emperor’s got no clothes.

Julie Kingsley (00:42:53) – Versus those mirrors that are like bent a little at the middle. So you look like a funhouse character, I hate that, yeah.

Sara Schonfeld (00:42:59) – The dressing room errors that either make you look really great or really terrible. And no, you need you need a good mirror. And that’s and that’s what a good beta or CP or editor is going to be.

Julie Kingsley (00:43:08) – I love this. Oh well, thank you so much for talking with us about all of these things. I know we went into very abstract,, and yet also precise directions. So I appreciate you hanging with us while we did that.. Thank you.

Sara Schonfeld (00:43:20) – It was such a pleasure.

Julie Kingsley (00:43:22) – Is there any, like, what is your number one tip for writers?

Sara Schonfeld (00:43:25) – My number one tip for writers. That’s hard. I think a lot of people rightly would say read.

Sara Schonfeld (00:43:31) – I think reading is the number one part of being an author, because at the end of the day, the people who interact with your book are going to be readers. So becoming a reader yourself is the best way to hone your craft. Learn more, expand your horizons, discover more what’s out there. And I also recommend to authors to read with love and try not to read with competition. I think it’s really hard when you’re an author because you want to read that number one New York Times bestselling book and tear it to shreds because you want to tell yourself you can do it better. And there are things that you can do better, but you have to remember books that succeed succeed for a reason. And it is much better to read with joy and read with love than to read with criticism. So I think becoming a reader, finding the joy and reading and the joy in writing is what’s going to serve you best. Because at the end of the day, writing is an act of love. It’s an act of inviting someone into your experience in your life and your heart.

Sara Schonfeld (00:44:23) – And I think we need to find our way back to that. And during your writing process, finding your way back to the heart of the story is going to be the best thing to serve you.

Julie Kingsley (00:44:32) – And it’ll make it fresh too, because we’ll feel your love.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:44:35) – Yes.

Sara Schonfeld (00:44:36) – Love is always fresh.

Julie Kingsley (00:44:37) – Oh, sir, where can we find you online?

Sara Schonfeld (00:44:39) – I’m on Twitter at at Sarah Sara Scone. I also have a website, Sarah Schoenfeld Books. Com and I am also on Manuscript Academy.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:44:50) – Yay!

Julie Kingsley (00:44:51) – Thank you so much Sarah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:44:52) – Thank you.

Julie Kingsley (00:44:53) – We are so glad that you joined us. And as always, we appreciate your feedback. Just head on over to the iTunes store and let. Know what you think. And not only helps us make this podcast be the best it can be, but it also affects our ratings within the iTunes platform.

Julie Kingsley (00:45:08) – We’d love to hear from you if you’re feeling brave and want to submit your page for our First Pages podcast. You can send it to Academy at Manuscript Wishlist.

Julie Kingsley (00:45:17) – Com with First Pages podcast in the subject line. We’d also just love to hear from you.

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