| Tammy Christensen |  |
Reviser’s Toolbox
Barry Lane
Discover Writing Press, 1999
What do Mary Kate and Ashly and Freddy Kruger have in common with Barry Lane? Each has tried to profit from an earlier success by creating one too many sequels.
I heard rumors that Barry Lane’s After the End: Teaching and Learning Creative Revision was a great book. The rumormongers were right. I was hooked after the first chapter. By the end of the book, I felt I had learned a lot about writing and revisions. Consequently, I decided to read another Barry Lane book, Reviser’s Toolbox. But the sequel did not match the quality of the original.
A few performances shine through the rubbish, and Chapter 7—“Forging Tools for Good Critics”—is worth the read. Here I found writing rubrics, conference forms, editing alphabets, and other helpful information. However, these scattered performances do not carry the book.
Also, like a movie star making an unsuccessful attempt to become a director, Barry Lane fails as his own editor. The layout of Reviser’s Toolbox is unprofessional. It lacks a common style except for the overused Microsoft Word clipart. Depending on the page I turned to, the text was too large or too small and the pages contained too much white space or not enough.
So to get the most entertainment for your time, ignore the sequel, Reviser’s Toolbox, and stick to the original, After the End.