Making Yourself Miserable By Endlessly Editing
I’m feeling confident this morning. Relaxed. Settled. The reason for this is: I’ve found a piece of really terrible writing advice.
It’s by Michelle Barker, author of several books, the most successful of which has 272 ratings on Goodreads. I provide this only for context. In case anyone thinks I’m looking down on Michelle, my most successful Goodreads book has 24 ratings. I’m no literary colossus, I’m just a person.
There are a few ways I could approach talking about this terrible advice, but I’ve got things to do, so I’m going to get the key parts out of the way. Michelle’s advice is this: If you have completed a developmental edit on your book, followed by a line edit, it still won’t be ready for publication. You need to go back and edit it again, and then again and again and again and so on.
I’m a big fan of revising novels. One of my favourite things is taking something which is already pretty good and making it way better than you thought was possible. However, this principle has definite limits. We’ll get to those later, but I need to start with a few quickfire objections to Michelle’s advice.
First: It’s Extremely Classist
Getting a book professionally edited is expensive. A developmental edit for a 70,000 word novel can cost between £600 and £900. Not necessarily the sort of money everyone can afford to drop on a hobby, especially if they have to do it multiple times.
Second: It’s Ableist as Fork
People with certain kinds of disability (to take a random example: mine) struggle with repeating the same task beyond a certain point. Michelle says as part of her editing process:
“I read it so many times I can almost tell you where to find a particular word (certainly the context in which I’ve used it, if not the precise page).”
Michelle, honey, not everyone can do that. To me, for example, because of my disability, asking me to do that would be like asking me to rub sandpaper on my brain. Similarly, saying ‘just get beta readers to look at your manuscript’ shuts out the millions of people who struggle with social situations.
Third: It’s Not A Process Which Produces Particularly Good Results
This point might be controversial. It’s might also be completely wrong, but it bears considering nonetheless. Michelle talks about every traditionally published book as if it’s gone through this process of being edited a hundred times. If that was true, I’d expect traditionally published books to be quite a lot better than they currently are.
I need to give my standard disclaimer, because saying things like that can make me sound really bitter: I am not a misunderstood literary genius. If you’ve read my Lessons Learned series, you’ll know I think most of my books which have been published are actually kinda bad. I do not believe that I have been denied a literary agent or a traditional publishing deal because of some grand injustice – I haven’t landed an agent because my work needed improving, and because I didn’t get extremely lucky.
So, back to the point. If you read many books, you’ll probably have noticed that a lot of them aren’t particularly good. Many have tedious opening chapters, others have flat characters, still others have plots which completely fall apart x% of the way through. If editing books over and over and over again actually worked, these issues would all have been spotted and fixed.
Now, most traditionally published books probably contain a higher standard of general writing than most self-published books. Again, I’m not saying ‘editing is bad’. I’m saying, ‘editing until your eyes bleed doesn’t make your book perfect’. Because, as I’ve talked about before ‘perfection’ is impossible in any artistic medium.
For an example of this, we might look at the fourth Wayfarers novel ‘The Galaxy and the Ground Within’. I didn’t enjoy it because it was so godamn slow and the thematic exploration of bigotry was no deeper than a classic Aunty Donna sketch. Do those objections make the book bad? Maybe. Do they stop people enjoying the book? Hell no, that book has 16,000 ratings on Goodreads and an average rating of 4.4 stars.
Ultimately, the advice ‘edit until your fingers are worn down to stubs’ ignores a fundamental truth of life: People enjoy different kinds of art. Take the passive voice, something editors hate. If you handed a book to a reader, and they enjoyed it but occasionally the text slipped into using the passive voice, unless the reader had an English Literature PhD, or was an author, I guarantee you they wouldn’t even notice. I’m friends with a bunch of voracious readers – none of us care if the books we read are written to an S-ranked technical standard, we care about clicking with characters and enjoying interesting stories. You don’t need to edit 100 times in order to make your characters engaging.
Fourth: It’s The Best Way Possible To Make You Fall Out Of Love With Writing
This point is extremely personal, and it won’t be true for everyone, but it’s still extremely important. I have actually followed Michelle’s advice on the book I had out for submission last year. I edited, I revised, I had the manuscript assessed and then the process began again. I went through countless revisions – genuinely countless.
Did those revisions make the book better? Some of them, yes, others just ended up fiddling around the edges, but my point is doing that many edits on one book made me absolutely despise it. I really, really hate that book now. This is partly because of my disability, but I doubt it’s entirely that.
Certain people, like Michelle (I assume) can edit ad infinitum without growing fed up with their manuscript, and good for them. That’s not going to be the case for many people. Writing is a hobby – a hobby you can turn into a career if you get exceptionally lucky, but even popular authors like Claire North and Ben Aaronovitch need to have a second job in order to make ends meet. Because of this, it’s extremely important that you enjoy the process of writing.
I’ve talked about this before, so I won’t go on about it, but focussing too much on the industry side of writing is a really efficient way of making yourself miserable. Repetition destroys passion for art. You start with a really cute idea about a magical jellyfish whose kids are stolen by a mean shark and has to lead a jellyfish uprising to topple the shark hierarchy, and you write the first draft and you love it.
You get it developmentally edited and you love making the changes, because now you’re book is even better. And then you make more changes, and then more, and then more. And at some point beyond that, you’ll start to get extremely bored with that forking jellyfish and her damned kids. You have other ideas! Other books you actually want to write! Why is the fiction industry insisting you write 100 drafts about this stupid godamn jellyfish?
One reason is a lot of people, like editors, make a lot of money from insisting people get their books edited over and over again. I’m not saying this is a conspiracy or anything, it’s just capitalism doing what it does – wringing as much joy out of art as it can in the hope of making the most money possible.
A Caveat:
I need to say this for a third time because I guarantee you some people will have ignored it the first two times: editing books is a damn-near essential part of the process. Getting someone who really knows the literary form to poke at your book and identify your problems is wonderful.
Edits should also be really enjoyable – improving your skills and improving your work is amazing. I can write to a pretty good standard now, and I love the work I put in to get me to this point. I also know I’m not done! I still have many improvements to make, but I also know I won’t make those improvements by working on the same manuscript 100 times. I know that because I tried it.
Writing is a hobby. The chances of getting picked up by an agent are extremely small (less than 1%) Your chances of getting published when picked up by an agent aren’t 100%, and your chances of being actually successful when traditionally published aren’t great either. If you’re not enjoying writing, you’re putting your happiness in the hands of a process over which you have almost no control. If you’re making yourself miserable by editing your book 100 times, then don’t.
Take it from someone who has tried doing things this way: It’s shit. It made me hate my book, It’s no guarantee of success and it doesn’t even actually make the text better. Editing generally makes a text better, editing until steam comes out of your ears doesn’t, because your boredom – your lack of enjoyment in the process will come across.
Wrap-up
Up top, I said I was feeling relaxed because I read this advice about editing until your guts fall out. That may seem strange, but the reason is because, in abandoning advice like this, I’ve gone back to enjoying writing. My current #1 rule of writing is this: Do not let the fiction industry ruin your enjoyment of your art.
When I finish my current work in progress, I’ll get it edited, because editing makes things better. I’ll probably have it edited once or twice more after that. Then, in exactly the same way Michelle told me not to, I’ll probably submit it to a few agents and a few independent publishers. Then, when it doesn’t get picked up, I’ll self-publish it, happy in the knowledge that I’m still happy with my work. I’m still proud of it. I still loved the process.
I’d rather fail to get published and enjoy writing than get published, sell 500 copies and then fade into obscurity, all whilst hating what I’d written.