Editing Never Ends: Confessions of an Obsessed First-Time Author
I first posted this in 2018 around the time I self-published Lucid, my first novel and first in the Sine series. I’ve made revisions to bring the post up to speed, but all of it is still relevant and I suspect will remain so for any obsessed, first-time author. I recently re-edited Lucid and will be republishing it through Mountain Ash Press in spring 2024. Why re-edit after six years? Ha! Read on, and I think you’ll understand.
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I read an article or something about editing sometime during my first or second draft. Maybe it was a chapter from Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway. It said be prepared to edit your book a number of times, probably a dozen or more. It said you have to rewrite and then rewrite again. I thought, sure, a lot of people probably have to do that but not me.
The first draft of Lucid took me six years and was over 330,000 words. That’s like a thousand pages. I told a friend how long it was (his wife, also my friend, was writing her first novel too, but she actually knew what she was doing), and he was shocked. I remember thinking, yeah it’s long, but whatever, plenty of books are long. I had a style: story by stream of consciousness. I wanted the reader to hear the main character’s every wandering thought, feel every fleeting emotion, see every detail of what he saw. I wanted full immersion.
When the first draft was two-thirds done, I’d spoken to another friend who was an agent and asked her whether she thought I could get a publisher to pay me to finish it. She politely brushed that question aside and noted that most first novels were usually about 80,000 words, a more digestible size for publishers. I got why she said it, but it didn't apply to me. It didn’t matter what others did. My novel was just longer. I had a style.
I performed a meticulous edit of the prologue and first couple of chapters and sent them to two very experienced editors, friends of my uncle. They said it was too wordy and that I needed to think very hard about certain other things. One of them sent me an actual typed letter, which I still have. This marked the first time I paid attention to feedback.
The second draft took a year and a half and was 200,000 words. Complete rewrite. If any words survived from the first draft, they were very few. I didn’t even reference the previous draft other than to remind myself what happened in the story (which actually hasn’t changed much from first draft to second print). I just started over. And I was very proud of it. I did another quick pass for content, a close proofread, and I was done. I put together a synopsis in prep for querying agents.
But one morning toward the beginning of the query process, I decided to start reading the manuscript again. Maybe it was just for fun. Or maybe I suspected. It’s hard to remember. What I do remember is the feeling in my gut as I read the first few pages, then a few more. My gut said, “This isn’t good enough, and you know it.”
That would not be the last time my gut said that (it said it again in 2023, five years after I published [head explosion emoji]). But the realization never came easy. I truly believed every time I started a new pass that it would be the last one, just a cleanup with maybe a few small developmental tweaks. But then I’d start reading, and I’d get that feeling, that fucking daunting feeling, and I knew I was headed back down into major revision. My dream was on hold again. I’d tell my wife, who had already endured years of me working on a book that likely had little-to-no chance of being traditionally published, and she’d say something like, “OK, it’s your passion, do what you have to do.” And I’d wonder whether she meant it (she did), and I’d feel bad about all the time we could have been spending together, but I knew I had no other choice. I had to express myself and tell this story.
To any aspiring authors who give a rat’s ass about my advice, my one piece is this: pay attention to that feeling, and seek feedback. If your gut tells you it’s not good enough, that’s because it isn’t. If people tell you it needs work, it probably does (though this one’s tricky; you can’t please everyone, and even with feedback from professional editors, you have to use your judgement about what to implement). If the idea of a big rewrite or two or four is too much for you, no problem, put the book out there for your friends and family and move on with your life. But know that I sucked in the beginning. I can prove it, I have all the drafts. I’m not saying I’m great now, but I’ve improved, and it's taken years and years of hard work. I got married and had two kids along the way. I've worked hard at my career throughout. I’ve had eight to twelve hours a week to work on my book, and I’m a friggin’ slow writer and editor. It’s been absolutely grueling, but I’ve loved nearly every second of it. I think that’s how you know if you should keep going: if you still love your story and you love the struggle of getting better as a writer.
The next draft was 105,000 words and took close to two years. For those doing the math at home, that’s another ~50% word count reduction. I was finally starting to understand that less is more. I’d read that and been told it so many times. But I had to feel it for myself: the beauty and satisfaction of saying something in as few words as possible, with dialogue or a gesture instead of exposition or internal monologue. Burroway’s timeless advice of “show, don’t tell” was finally sinking in. The reader’s mind doesn’t need its hand held. It makes connections itself and enjoys making those connections. Realizing this was a huge step for me. It’s what defined this draft. And now I was ready. I went through it once or twice, cleaned it up, and started querying agents. I also sent it to my family and a handful of friends. Here it was, finally, the book they’d been hearing about for so long.
The agents didn’t bite, and that was disappointing. The feedback from my beta readers was also not what I’d hoped for. It was polite and complimentary. They thought it was cool that I’d written a book, but no one seemed moved or wowed. And that was f’n sad.
It took me until this point to consider hiring an editor, and I know why. Fear of serious criticism, however constructive. Fear of having to do even more work. I’d listened to feedback over the years, read a couple of books on writing, took an adult writing course, read hundreds of novels, and worked my ass off to hone my craft. Surely that was enough. I didn’t need a third party jumping in.
But it was that feeling again. I fought it as I always did. I wanted so badly to be done. But it was even stronger than before. My standards had increased, because I had improved as a writer. It was more important than ever not to settle. So, I started looking for professional help. I ran a fairly robust search process, which you can read about in my post Cross Your Ts.
I expected to hire for copyediting and proofreading, what I considered to be cleanup work. But the editor I went with offered a developmental review, which I accepted, thank the gods. He taught me about point of view (POV). Yes, you read that right. I had been writing for about nine years and did not understand how to control POV. I’m sure it was covered in Burroway’s book or Stephen King’s On Writing, but I somehow managed to gloss over it. It’s laughable, but oh well.
The next draft was 92,500 words and took a year and a half. It was the most important one. Before this revision, I had bounced from character head to character head with reckless abandon, without so much as a section break. Now I had a well-structured story seen through the eyes of three characters. Going through the work of controlling POV was the most important learning experience I've had as a writer, and I am forever grateful to my editor. Readers can’t follow a story that has poor POV control. It’s table stakes for the mind. It contributes a great deal to flow. And it requires you to know your characters intimately. I knew mine before but not well enough. Now that the reader was experiencing the story through more focused lenses, I had to ensure that I knew as much as possible about where these characters came from, formative events in their lives, why they thought the way they did, why they reacted the way they did, what they were afraid of, what they loved. Yes, this is all stuff I should have known earlier. But I have no regrets. I made mistakes, and they made me better. Maybe others can learn from them.
For the first time after a major revision, I didn’t think or hope it was done. I knew it needed more work and that it would take a lot of time. I rehired my editor to perform a second developmental edit. The findings this time were less profound but still important. I did a whole lot of cutting in this draft. King’s words from On Writing echoed in my head: “Kill your darlings.” Small characters I loved, scenes I loved, sacrosanct sentences. If they didn’t add to the story, they were gone. It wasn’t easy. This draft took me a year. I was smiling as I approached the 80,000 word mark that my friend the agent had told me half a dozen years ago was a good number for a first novel. I was laughing as I busted through it.
Thirteen years. Five major drafts, which means four rewrites or major revisions, all at a snail’s pace. An average of two clean-up passes per draft. Believing at the end of every draft, except the last major revision, that I was done. It begs the question, how and when did I know when to stop?
Let’s be clear. It’s not done and never will be. I did stop, yes. And it wasn’t because I was tired and wanted to move on. It’s because the manuscript was finally good enough, for me at least. But if I started another pass today, I would make changes (2023 update: Hahahaha! I did, see below.). Just tiny edits probably (2023 update: Nope!), but I bet I could improve the story too (2023 update: Yep!). Writers and creators of anything, you’ve been warned.
All that said, something did change. When I went back to the start, I didn’t get that feeling in my gut. Not getting that feeling was one of the greatest feelings of my life. But it was sad too. I realized I’d never again edit my story with any intimacy. I was now in the cold clean-up phase. My baby had grown up. It was getting time to let it out into the world.
My editor performed two line and copyedit passes. I performed two myself and made hundreds of small edits. I wasn’t just being a psycho. These were important changes. Change a word, delete a word, tweak a sentence, increase the flow.
All that was left was the proofreading, and let me say a word about that. I spoke to a couple of self-published authors along the way who told me not to stress too hard about small mistakes, spelling errors and the like, because every book has them. That’s mostly true, but I don’t subscribe to that philosophy for a second. That’s a low bar. If you work your ass off to create a work of art, you take the time to eliminate mistakes. Mistakes are a snag for the reader’s mind. They mess with the experience. You may not get them all, but you better try. Part of this is maybe spending money on editors, including a proofreader, and part is performing fine tooth comb proofreads yourself.
I’ll finish with a quote from the main character that I like but that ended up on the cutting room floor (see here for more from this monologue):
How many times have I heard it: “nothing comes for free” or “what you put in is what you get out.” These are physical facts, I’m pretty sure. It’s how energy works. Forces are exerted, and particles and waves react depending on the perspective and properties of the forces, particles and waves. If no force is exerted, nothing happens. I’m pretty sure everything is particles and waves, so there is no way I can sit on my ass in this life. I literally won’t get anything out of it.
Jan 2024 update:
I’ve spent six years writing the sequel to Lucid (I’m nearly done). It’s called The Butterfly and the Squid. I remember sometime in the middle of that six years thinking, ok now I’m maybe actually a writer. I got better at analogy, personification, metaphor, simile, and telling the story through sense perception, as Burroway teaches. Spend time and effort on anything, especially something you love, and you get better. And so, I started reading Lucid again, and I got that feeling in my gut. And I changed a few thousand words, and I’m done now. Like really done. And it will always be imperfect.