How to (teach your kids to) Read Like an Editor

The Intro

When I graduated from Ole Miss back in 2000 with my B.A. in English Literature, I was shocked to actually find a job working at a publishing house.  I spent the first few months packing books and counting inventory and making collections calls.  But eventually, I got my first crack at editing a story.  I still remember the thrill of scouring the pages of one picture book in the making (The Monster Ate My Peas) and finding one missing comma.  The presses were halted, I was patted on the back by superiors, and the world was saved from one more grammatical tragedy.

Truth is, though, as I was allowed to do more and more editing, I soon found that the training I’d gotten in high school and college was woefully insufficient for what I was asked to do.  As a college student, I was taught to analyze and deconstruct and identify the author’s suppressed longings in the text.  But no one ever asked me how I would fix it.  That was the big difference: where I only needed the skill of interpretation before, as an editor I had to be story doctor.  Or a coach, if you will, who can see the end game as well as what it will take for the author to get there.  Very different skill set indeed.

Some aspects of the editing job I can’t replicate here.  For instance, the great privilege of sitting at an acquisitions table, listening to the various departments talk about what they look for in a book.  But there are some things I can pass on.  And I’ve distilled a few concepts down to questions that may help your kids be better readers, as they did me.

The Questions

1)  What is it?  Books are part of genres (Westerns, sci-fi, romance, etc.)  Genres are part of larger literary periods (Romaticism, Modernism, etc.)  When a good reader seeks to understand a book, he or she seeks to put it in the context of other books.  Doing so will help you find not only how the book is similar to other books, but what makes it unique or special.  The more you read and learn about these categories of books, the more adept you’ll be at weighing a book.

2)  Who is it by?  A book exists within the stream of an author’s work.  For instance, if you had never seen The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd Jones and you weren’t aware of her previous work with Jago, you might not be able to appreciate why she wrote her new book, Thoughts to Make Your Heart Sing.  Or what she hopes it will accomplish.  We need to be able to judge a work by itself, but also within the context of an author’s entire work.  The more you know about an author, the better you’ll be able to understand what she intended the book to mean.

3) Who is it for?  When an editor and/or publisher chooses to publish a book, they do so because they believe it will have an audience.  Sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong, but editors think in terms of markets.  If you want to know why a book resonates so loudly in our culture, it’s in some part due to connecting with a market–the Christian homeschool market or the skinhead market or the public school and library market.  Some writers have very small niches, but others are good enough and have a wide enough appeal that they seem to transcend a lot of these lines.  C. S. Lewis for instance, or even Shakespeare.  But even Shakespeare didn’t become famous  in a vacuum.  Various groups of people in various cultural contexts found him outrageously good.  Even Shakespeare has a literary market.

4) Who wants what?  At some point, though, a story has to stand on its own.  It can’t just be important for who wrote it and who reads it and who published it.  The Biblical framework of Creation, fall, redemption and restoration is what I look for.  I usually start with the climax.  What is the moment of greatest drama–the showdown in OK Corral or the moment when Anne and Gilbert finally kiss?  Put your finger on that, and then ask, what did the protagonist want?  How is that either won or lost in the climax (comedy or tragedy)?  This is also where I look for the gospel.  What we really want is God, and everything else we want points to Him.  Don’t stop at merely summarizing the plot–look for how it points to Christ.  (For an example of how I did this, see my review of True Grit.)

5) What if?  To discover what a particular scene or character means to a story, try playing the “what if” game.  What if Anne had had black hair instead?  What if the whale in Moby Dick had been blue?  What if Sherlock Holmes had never met Watson?  Imagining these alternate paths for the story will help you see the significance of what is there.

The Download

I’ve taken the basic form we used in our Acquisitions meetings and tweaked it for Christian young readers.  Might be worth a try sometime in your English Lit classes.

DOWNLOAD HERE: Book Review Form

Let me know if you guys find this helpful or if you’d like to see it tweaked.  What questions have you found helpful in getting young readers to engage meaningfully with a text?