editing

Say yes to your opportunities. You never know who is listening.

Loyal readers (all three of you) know that I finished the first draft of my novel last October. I waited a couple of weeks, then spent several days at the library reading my masterwork and ducking out for coffee. I finally handed the manuscript to two readers I trust:

William, who is a friend and a veteran book reviewer.

Deborah, who is a veteran wife.

While they chewed through the text, I inspected all the wreckage I’ve abandoned over the years. I turned a 900-word fragment into a 10,000-word story. I guess something clicked. I took a sledgehammer to a 2,000-word conglomeration of plot lines and now it’s one plot and 5,000 words. An old story caught my eye and I made it shorter. Writing a novel may have unhinged me, and several managers from my past might attest that I was not particularly hinged to start with.

My readers gave me invaluable feedback. My book reviewer friend wrote his as a book review—my first! And yet, I knew it would be a good idea to find a reader who wasn’t my friend and wasn’t my wife. Someone who wouldn’t hold back because they never had to see me again.

Readers, I found her.

A flyer appeared in our coffee shop from an editor looking for clients…a week or two after I wrote about a son recalling his mother’s advice: “Say yes to your opportunities. You never know who is listening.”

(Note: I loved my mother and my mother loved me, but this is not something she would’ve said. Opportunities carry risk and risk made her nervous. She was more likely to suggest I zip my jacket because it’s cold.)

After some back and forth on email, I learned that the person behind the flyer—to preserve her privacy, I’ll call her Maxwell Perkins—was a college student pursuing a career in publishing. I worked for a newspaper and I’ve observed many editors, and I know that how you communicate with your writers is half the battle. You can send Ms. Perkins up to the majors, because she has nothing left to learn at this level.

I hired her to read my book. Actually, I was going to put her off until I had returned to the first draft and revised it into the second, but Deborah informed me that I was—what’s the word? Oh yes. WRONG.

Three weeks later, my new editor sent me her 5,000-word critique and a Google doc with 177 comments on my manuscript.

I have plenty of work ahead of me, but this is revision and revision is the fun part. This is going to be a much better book. Thanks to Deborah, William, and Maxwell Perkins.

What do you do when you finish your novel ?

I’ve been so focused on writing my novel that it never occurred to me to wonder what life would be like when I was no longer writing.

True, I’m not finished. I wrote a first draft. I spent several days at the library, reading it and marking it up with different color markers and highlighters and attaching Post-It guideposts. It was exceedingly pleasant, in the fall weather, to walk the half hour downtown to the post office and then back again, with my book tucked into its own cardboard box, stopping for coffee and maybe a nosh somewhere along the route.

Then I took a week to revise based on my edits. This took longer than I thought it would. I’m a former copy editor. I’m accustomed to editing other people’s work and to following other people’s edits in my own. But there are many types of editing (check out this list) and I was never trained to edit for structure. Grammar, word choice, tone, dialog, rhythm—that I can look for. How it all fits together—for that I need help.

So I printed a fresh copy of the manuscript and handed it off to the head of my order. No, not my Chief Rabbit. My wife. Deborah has so far said, “It reads like a book.” She’s still immersed in it. Maybe she’s also consulting a marriage counselor. Haruki Murakami, in his memoir Novelist As a Vocation, mentions his wife exactly once, and not by name. He does say that she reads his early drafts. Then they argue and “harsh words are sometimes exchanged.”

In our house, we reserve harsh words for the occasional canine caper. I’m eager to hear what Deborah has to say. I’ve worked on my book almost every day for a year and I feel bereft without it. What am I supposed to write now? What do I do with all my notes, background material, and writing that led me down detours or into a cul-de-sac? Or do I pivot out of the book and into all of my abandoned stories and narrative misfires? Maybe I should write a memoir. Say something nice about my wife.

When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.

When I was working, Theodore Bernstein was my brother, my captain, my king. His books would seem antiquated now; this one, his last, was published in the 1970s. But for me he was a far more readable helper than Henry Fowler of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.