Notes from the editing trenches

Digging deep to help our books soar

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks with ‘editing brain’, working on the latest round of edits for When She Was Gone. This means I can’t think of anything else but my book: messages have gone unanswered, appointments have been forgotten, family and pets have been neglected, and let’s not even talk about the state of my house. I’m both obsessed with this process and have a deep dislike of it. I love watching my book evolve, but I don’t enjoy the all-encompassing, time-consuming, physically draining intensity of the work. However, I’ve found I can’t really do an edit in half-measures with dribs and drabs of time. Just as when I’m powering through the first draft, I have to be all in.

Most of the writing process is actually editing: painstakingly reworking and strengthening each word, line, chapter, character, theme and plot strand. In fact, it’s strange that we don’t announce ‘I’ve edited a book’ with the same celebrative intensity as ‘I’ve written a book’, because writing is the ‘I’m fresh, focused and determined’ part of this marathon process, whereas editing is the bit where, although the finish line is so much closer, your legs are wobbling, your head’s spinning, you can’t believe you volunteered for this torture, and you may want to throw up. I speak for myself of course – some of you may love it (you incredible, hardy author geniuses!) – but I suspect more than a few others know just what I’m talking about.

The word ‘editing’ is actually a bit of a misnomer. There are so many elements to editing that in the industry it’s broken down into a few distinct processes, and each of them is vital. And before we even get to this ‘official editing’, there’s all the editing an author does while drafting their book. If you’re traditionally published, your edit must lead to a polished draft that will entice and excite agents and publishers. If you’re self-published, the onus is on you to decide when your draft is polished enough to seek editorial help. Alternatively, it’s perfectly acceptable to run out of steam during the writing/editing process and turn to an editor to help you figure out what to do next.

With a traditional publisher, the formal editing process begins once your book is accepted for publication. Your editor will first do a structural edit, which is all the ‘big picture’ stuff around plot, character, theme, pacing, narrative arcs, and so on. This can involve substantial rewrites – and while, ideally, you can achieve all you want to in one round of edits, this stage might also need to be repeated depending on how challenging it is to address everything in one go. After structural edits, the next stage is line editing, where things such as sentence structure, language choices, consistency in detail and voice, emotional resonance and clarity are all addressed. If you’ve done well so far, the line edit can sometimes be combined into a copy-edit, which is the last edit your typescript receives before it gets turned into proof pages. In the copy-edit, we get down to the nitty-gritty of grammar and marking up for typesetting as well as continuing to catch things that were missed in the previous rounds of editing.

Once the book is typeset, you’ll also have one final editing pass at proofreading stage. In traditional publishing, both the author and a proofreader are sent these pages (as well as the in-house editorial team) and everyone looks for those final errors and checks all the typesetting features of the book (things like ‘orphans’* and ‘widows’**, and whether the letters in each word are spaced well or a line has too much white space between the words). At this stage you’ll want corrections to be at a minimum as a) it costs money to make extensive changes, and b) early readers will already be receiving Advance Reading Copies, which are made from the proof pages and sent out to generate excitement prior to publication.

Once any proofreading corrections have been taken in and double-checked, the book is finally ready to go to print and meet its readers! And if you think, at this point, such hard-working authors deserve a very long nap, alas they’re not finished yet – the sales, marketing and publicity process is about to kick in, and that’s a WHOLE other story!

If the editing process sounds laborious – that’s because it is! Publishers and authors have one aim: to provide readers with a top-notch story and the smoothest reading experience possible. If done well, a book should read so seamlessly that no one will have any idea of the amount of work that’s gone into it. Therefore, all authors lead a double life: there’s the very brief book-signing, public-speaking, events-attending activity you see on socials, and the eye-stinging, back-breaking, brain-burning hard yakka they do in private to turn their ideas into stories.

When She Was Gone has had a more convoluted editing process than most of the books I’ve written. Thanks to an extended publishing schedule, we’ve had time to do a few extra passes to help the story shine. This last round of editing was only meant to be brief, and yet I was still tinkering with sentence structure and strengthening minor aspects of the story. I ended up doing four reads of the book, and each one had a different purpose:

Read 1: Taking in the editorial comments, and making the easy fixes. A quick read, almost a skim.

Read 2: The central read of this edit. A very slow and careful look at each page, examining every sentence and problem point – rephrasing where I need to tighten, and highlighting everything I want to research or think about further in yellow.

Read 3: A skim read to focus more on clearing all the yellow highlights, and making sure I’ve answered every editorial comment.

Read 4: A full read of the book but at more pace: in the way I’d usually read a book. This clearly shows up the remaining places where sentences are tripping over themselves or something isn’t having the impact I want, allowing me to tidy up those final areas of concern. Before this, I also did one extra read of the last 60 pages to ensure the ending was delivering the blistering adrenalin rush and emotional impact I want for my readers.

Editing is a skill, and one that writers continually hone as they get used to the process. I was very fortunate that by the time I came to writing I’d already edited over 100 books in my time as a freelance editor, but you can see (from the extended process I outlined above) that I still need to work really hard and stay switched on when I’m editing. I also sometimes read sections aloud, which I recommend: it helps you spot things you might miss from unintentionally skim-reading, and you can hear whether the rhythm of your writing is working. In a recent email, Alessandre Torres (author and founder of Inkers.com) mentioned getting her computer to read her work to her, using either Microsoft Word’s ‘Read Aloud’ functionality (instructions here) or Scrivener’s ‘Start Speaking’ capability (in Edit>Speech). You can also download plug-ins for this purpose for Google Docs.

Whether you’re editing, writing, or studying, the more intense the work, the more we need to take care of ourselves. Publishing deadlines mean I can’t always spread out my work to a few hours of the day, but I plan to take some recovery time this week while putting myself on lighter duties where possible – although I’m immediately into hosting an eleven-year-old’s birthday Harry Potter party extravaganza so my house is getting turned into Hogwarts as I type. And I had a huge marketing meeting yesterday to kick off the campaign for When She Was Gone in the US, so I had all of three days to move from editing brain to marketing brain! The rollercoaster writing life never really stops – as you’ll know all too well if, like me, you’re addicted to storytelling. But with every book I find my groove a little more, edit my books a little faster, and learn a few more skills. Most importantly, I’m getting better at extending deadlines if I need to, chasing excellence rather than perfection, and remembering to enjoy the ride.

PS I don’t just edit books: each Substack takes about an hour to write and at least another 2-3 hours of editing before I’m happy!

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Last week’s post for paid subscribers was about the evolution of the female action heroine. If you’d like to read it, you can do so with a free trial:

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Have a great week!