13/08/2020 – Editing

It’s 4am, it’s a million degrees in the shade and I can’t sleep, so I’m editing. This may or may not be the reason I couldn’t think of a good title for this post. I initially went for something quirky and self-referential but after about twenty seconds I couldn’t stand to look at it any more so I changed it.

Where was I?

Editing. So, I got my book back from the editor and I’ve been having fun developing a plan for how to approach the edits and subsequently starting. I’m doing some quite technical stuff right now with a focus on ensuring the sense of place in the book is rock solid as it’s a bit of a weird setting. I’m also addressing some of my editor’s easier comments as I go, and it’s one of those that I wanted to talk about today. This morning. Tonight. Whatever you call 4am.

My editor left a note basically saying the ending of the book was good, but I introduced a bunch of stuff late on which made things convoluted and messy. I thought about this and asked her if she meant these two characters that pop up in the penultimate chapter, shuffle the main characters from point to point like tour guides and then immediately disappear. She said yes.

What I found interesting was that before my editor suggested cutting the ending down a bit, I’d thought the ending was a bit rushed. I mentioned this, and she said yes, it probably does feel rushed, because you’re trying to cram things in that don’t belong there.

This interested me, because if something feels stuffed or oversaturated my instinct is always to draw things out a bit and give those elements room to breathe.

Cutting the characters in question turned out to be the right call. I learned this after I went through and removed them from the text and found they never actually did anything. They talked to the characters a bit, provided some context and lore, acted as tour guides and then disappeared. This meant that when I removed them the story still worked exactly as well as it had done before. There were continuity problems – the characters teleported around a bit, but these problems were nothing that couldn’t be solved by writing ‘and then we went here’. Although I ended up writing something with a little more character.