Now that I’ve completed the first draft of my project, it’s time to give myself a break from it. I’ve actually been doing this for the past couple weeks. I’ve kept busy with other things, trying to catch up on duties I’ve let wait (tell me, do you know anyone who’s really ever “caught up”?). I’ve been reading more, I’ve even thought about my next project. All this in the hope of gaining some measure of a “fresh eye” when the revision stage begins for this WIP.
This next stage is going to start later today, actually, after my editor and I have a chat about how the book looks in an overall sense. This kind of revision is called “substantive” since it entails the larger picture. It has nothing to do with cleaning up the little stuff: grammar problems, scenes that need to be tightened, or repeated, pet words (don’t worry, I know of writers far more successful than I who still catch themselves doing this).
This checkpoint is for looking at the story with a bird’s eye view, how the plot is working, if the goals are clear and consistent, if any part of the story, theme or character portrayal needs to be expanded or removed.
Perhaps this is the edit that’s the most crucial, and potentially the most devastating. These are the areas that are normally the most challenging to fix. In one book I was asked to remove a point-of-view from one character who had a pretty consistent role. We wanted to keep her storyline, but not have any scenes from her pov. This was a major change and one I wasn’t sure how to handle at first. It was a little more complicated than just switching gears from her head to another character’s. It meant rewriting big chunks.
But as soon as I realized why they wanted me to make the change, I was fully on board. The book already had two main pov characters, and for the sake of clarity and ease of reading, it really needed to be limited to that. And it worked so well I soon wished I’d been the one who’d thought of it to begin with.
Something similar happened with my newest release, My Sister Dilly. I was asked to include a few scenes from Dilly’s point of view. As soon as I was asked I was excited about it, because by that time I knew this character so well I’d been dying to get into her head a little. But with the main story being told in First Person, I didn’t think it would be possible. Yet when I was given permission, the words just jumped onto the page. Once again I wish I could take the credit for this idea, but all I did was take direction and the words followed.
So for me this stage is exciting. What I love is that the editors I’ve worked with have always found a way to be true to the story as it is, yet enhance it so it’s stronger than ever. That, to me, is what makes an editor so effective. Working with what’s there, sharing the author’s vision for the work and not trying to take over, reinvent, insert another voice, or dampen the passion.
My job as the author is to listen, because we both want the same thing: to release the best book possible. Writing may seem like a lonely endeavor, but at some point it really is a team effort.
So the fact that I’ve written “The End” on this project doesn’t mean by any stretch of the imagination that I’ve actually reached the end. 🙂
Join Me!