The editing begins… again.
If you have been following this blog, you know that I paid to have my first draft of this novel professionally edited. It was a lesson in tough love, for sure. In the end, it was hugely educational and I feel I’m a better writer for the experience. I was able to cut over 20,000 words from my original manuscript, and I completely restructured it with pacing as my main priority. And it worked! I signed my very first (hopefully of many) publishing contract, and my novel The Timekeepers’ War is set to come out this summer.
So, they loved my book. Editing should be a breeze, right? Someone will scour my manuscript for the last few lingering typos and we’re done. Right?
Wrong.
No matter how many times you go through and edit your own work a professional will still be able to tear it down and help you rebuild. I thought that I’d pared down the language as much as was possible and keep my own voice (and my characters’ voices) intact. But I was wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
My editor, Amy, has given me a detailed edit of the first three pages. She really dug into it. When I’m looking at my document in Word with the edits turned on, it seems like there is more red than black. It’s intimidating. When I first read her changes, with my own words still visible, I felt a pang of sadness. I felt like Ghost was losing her voice. Becoming someone else.
But you know what? When I turn the mark-up off and just read, I realize that’s just my fragile writer’s ego talking. This is still Ghost’s voice. It is a clearer, more concise voice than I had given her. When I can’t see my original wording, I don’t feel that anything is missing in this clean, crisp version of my writing. And I guess that’s what a good editor can do.
I’m very excited to have just gotten my first taste of what this editing process is going to look like. I will be posting the cleaned up version of my novel on the SNEAK PEEK page as soon as the changes are finalized. I will probably write a post with some side by side comparisons–my first draft, my second draft, and my final draft–just so you can see what the process looks like. It might be interesting to any readers out there who take for granted all the work that goes into a novel. And to any writers who are going through the editing process themselves.
It is staggering to think of how much my novel has changed since I first started putting pen to paper nearly ten years ago (Literally pen to paper; I wrote the first hundred pages in a notebook on my lunch breaks when I worked in retail). How much I have learned and grown as a writer. And it is equally staggering to think how far I have yet to go. It is a truly transformative process.
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