The Book Deal Diaries #5
The structural edit - here I go!! (including exclusive excerpts from Breaking Waves)
Having been signed by Icon Books last November for my first book, an email dropped into my inbox a couple of days ago from my editor to say that the ‘structural edit’ for Breaking Waves is about to begin! So this is where my words, themes and thoughts are going to be reviewed, streamlined, changed, removed, added to… Where the entire manuscript will be checked for coherence, flow, sense?!?!
Cripes.
I have been really looking forward to this, and I have absolute faith in my editor, and the publishing house, but now it’s about to happen I’m kind of bracing myself. I feel, well, naked, and I have so many questions:
what if they remove something I love?
what if they add something I don’t love?
what if they ask me to ‘kill my darlings’*
what if it turns out they don’t understand me at all?
what if they make my book worse?
how do I relinquish control?
how do I hand over my baby and accept someone else’s parenting?
In that prescient way that the world seems to work, I came across a brilliant article this week by
titled ‘your editor is not your enemy’ thanks to the ever watchful and all knowing eye of the wonderfulBefore I actually read the article, I saw this superb comment from
in reference to it:“I find there are four stages to the editing process:
1) Anger: how could you possibly change my beautiful words?? You don't understand my piece AT ALL!
2) Depression: I guess everything I write is terrible and I'm at utter failure at everything!
3) Reluctant acceptance: fine, I'll do some of these edits, but I'm not going to change everything.
4) Elation: oh my god, this piece is SO much better now, and actually I've just realised another thing I can change to make it even better, this is the greatest day of my life.
I usually cycle through all four in under an hour, but sometimes it takes longer.”
Haha YES!!!! Quite brilliant. Even before my edit begins I am cringing at the anticipated feelings of ‘oh why is my writing so shit?’, ‘what was I thinking?’, ‘God this is awful!’, and then ‘THANK YOU!!!”. At least I will know I’m not alone…
In Heather’s article, she kindly and wisely dismisses the notion that:
“the job of an editor is to ruin a book and the job of a writer is to stop them.”
whilst reminding us as writers that:
“there is perhaps nothing more destructive to the end quality of your book than thinking you’ve written a flawless work of genius that doesn’t need to be touched.”
She also talks about what it really means to *”kill your darlings”.
I highly recommend you read the whole piece.
So as I get set to enter this process, I wanted to share with you - my inspirational and dedicated paid community - the opening and closing paragraphs of Breaking Waves as they currently stand. These are exclusive book excerpts. I look forward to revisiting these ‘post-edit’ in a couple of weeks, seeing if and how the paragraphs have changed, and how the whole process has made me feel!! I would also love to hear your views on the ‘before’ and ‘after’.
Watch this space and wish me luck….