On Editing
My experience and thoughts of the editing process
So I’m currently in that period where having done about three drafts of my latest manuscript, I’ve sent it off to my agent, John Jarrold. He’s now going to edit it and send it back to me. Now strictly speaking, I don’t know exactly what it’s like being edited by an agent, because this is my first time. But I have used a freelance editor (the excellent Amanda Rutter) for my self-published novels, and I’m thinking it will likely be similar. (I should point out that this is the structural edit I’m talking about. I then follow it up with a copy edit, with Ro Smith being excellent here.)
And I thought that people might appreciate a perspective on what the process is like, from the emotional and creative side to the nuts and bolts, because I’ve come to realise that for many people, it’s all a bit of a dark art. (I had a head start because in my day job, I work as a business analyst and a technical author).
I’ll start by diving right into the lowest level of the nuts and bolts and work backwards from there. The publishing industry uses Microsoft Word pretty much as a standard, so it doesn’t matter what you write your novel on (I use Scrivener) because you’ll end up editing in in Word. And Word does have two excellent features that people don’t use enough: tracked changes; and comments.
What will happen is that you’ll send your novel off, and it will come back looking something like this (because the editor will have turned tracked changes on before starting to make edits):
Where your editor is suggesting that you murder your darlings delete text, it will be marked as struck through. Where the editor is suggesting that you add new text (possibly to replace text they are suggesting you delete), it will be shown underlined. (And if you’re wondering what the significance of the colour is, there isn’t really one. If multiple people are editing a document with tracked changes enabled, each persons edits will be shown in a different colour.
The brilliance of tracked changes is that you can see what the changes are, and they’re provisional. This is your novel. Ultimately, nothing should be changed in it without you being aware of the change. (I went to a talk by a couple of self-published authors where one confessed to not having known what tracked changes was when she had her first novel edited, so she allowed the editor to simply direct edit the novel, and it was only after publication that she realised the editor had actually introduced loads of mistakes).
For each of the changes, whether they be additions or deletions, you have three options: the two that Word gives you, and the third that you make yourself:
The three options are:
Accept the change. If it’s a delete, the deleted text will be removed from your document (i.e. it will disappear). If it’s an add, the added text will be added to your document (i.e. it will now just be shown as regular text).
Reject the change. If it’s a delete, the deleted text will now just be shown as regular text. If it’s an add, the added text will disappear from your document.
Reject or accept the change, but either way end up typing some new text of your own (which will itself be shown as a tracked change until you accept it).
With Amanda, I generally ended up accepting most of her changes. But very often, I would end up typing something new, where I agreed with her that my original text was deficient in some way and needed to be better, but wasn’t fully happy with the suggested replacement. In other words, editing isn’t necessarily your editor saying, “This is wrong, you should say this instead,”, but often more them saying, “This isn’t working, perhaps something like this might work better instead?” where you’re free to replace your text with text of your own that fixes the problem they’ve identified.
(Even if their suggested edit shows that they’ve misunderstood what you’re trying to say, the fact that they’ve misunderstood is, in itself, evidence that your original wording was deficient).
I should say that with Amanda, the number of changes where I just thought, “Nope I’m going to stick with what I had” was pretty small. :)
If we go back to the original screenshot (feel free to scroll back up), you can see that as well as directly suggesting changes to the text, the editor can highlight portions of text and then attach a comment directly to it (which then appears in the right-hand margin). These are useful when they just want to make a general point or raise a general question.
That’s the marked up manuscript covered, but that’s merely part of the story. When Amanda has done edits for me, she gives me an overview a couple of pages long that gives her overall thoughts on the story, plus a second document that has sections for each chapter.
For instance, for the Sleeping Dragon, her overview made the point that I had five male protagonists and that perhaps I ought to try gender swapping one of them. (She suggested I make Darrick a woman, but I opted instead to change Dan Dan to Dani).
What this means was that when I go through the document, I’m working on three levels:
I’m looking to address general points the editor has made about the overall novel.
I’m looking to address general points the editor has made about the chapter I’m working on (for instance, they might have felt that a chapter was a bit boring, or that the general plot device / contrivance / motivation it was built around was a bit arbitrary or unbelievable).
I’m looking to accept, reject, or modify all of the tracked changes they’ve put in there.
And that now gets us onto the emotional side of editing. Now I admit, that when you get a two page summary that goes into quite a bit of detail about all the ways your novel sucks, with an accompanying document that adds to that further detail about all the ways each chapter specifically sucks, with those accompanied by a version of your manuscript that looks like it’s been attacked by a razor-sharp crayon… well that can initially be a little hard. Deep down, part of us wants people to say it’s awesome, it’s incredible, you don’t need to change a thing.
But give it a couple of minutes, and you’ll see how incredible this is. Editing is legalised cheating. If you got caught doing this for a degree dissertation, you’d be expelled from your university for plagiarism. But do as a novelist, and it’s great.
See you can’t know, what you don’t know. A reference that to you that seems universal, because you’ve known it as long as you can remember, might actually be obscure. (And you find out when your editor posts a comment about not getting a joke). I sometimes worry that I might overwrite scenes, putting in so much that I end up with text that’s overcomplicated, or even turgid. But an editor’s your safety net. You can push your creativity as hard as you can, safe in the knowledge that in those areas where you’ve pushed too hard, they’ll catch it in the edit.
I like being edited. I like having all the rough spots in my story pointed out to me, so I know where to polish. In my final draft prior to sending a manuscript to edit, I find myself becoming a bit demotivated. I mean, yeah, I want to get it as good as I can get it before sending it to be edited. I don’t want them to waste their time spotting issues and errors I could have spotted myself (and if I’m paying for a freelance edit, I don’t want to be wasting my money). But equally, I feel that maybe I’m reaching a point of diminishing returns, where I’m just spinning in circles. I want that edit, where now I have a structured list of things to work through. Bang, bang, bang. Done, done, done. Progress, progress, progress.
So anyway, that’s what I’m waiting for.
Hope this was informative.
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