Hands of the Editor

So book two, Blast, is off to the editor. This should be a moment of celebration. I have toiled through the drafts, crafting the narrative and sculpting the characters. Surely this is the moment I can relax, sitting back and taking a well earned rest. I only wish that were true.

Having my manuscript in edit is an excruciating experience. It takes quite some time to review and mark up an entire novel, and that means the author is left in limbo while who-knows-what is being done to their beloved set of prose. You work long and hard, writing what you want and how you want it. Then comes the moment you try to put off for as long as possible. You have to let someone else read it. I mean that’s the whole point isn’t it? But when push comes to shove, doubt enters your soul and you waiver. Your finger hovers over the enter key that will send the document off to the editor and you pause. No rational reason halts your digit. The manuscript is ready. You redrafted it several times; you’ve checked for errors and read through it countless times. It’s ready for the next stage. And yet your finger still hovers over the enter key. Why? What more could you possibly do? And in that question lies the problem. You don’t know. What horrors lie hidden in your manuscript? In essence you can’t know. After all this effort you are quite literally blind to the faults and inconsistencies in the tome. And this is why you give it over to an editor in the first place. It’s catch twenty-two.

So here I sit, waiting for the return of my manuscript with one thing for certain to happen. A lot more work. You can be sure about that. When that email drops in my inbox there will be a lot more work to do, it’s a given. You’d be amazed at how much an editor will pick up. As I said before, I’ve scoured my work from beginning to end, trying to make it the best I possibly can. And yet when I get back the first edit of Blast it will be littered with corrections, changes, advice and deletions. And that’s only round one. This whole gut wrenching experience will have to be repeated again. The final Copy-Edit takes place later when I’ve implanted all the changes from the first round and that’s even more agonising. That one picks up all the syntax errors. The type of errors that make me feel like an idiot for not spotting them. When you get the Copy-Edit back, you spend several minutes doubting your own existence as a writer. The number of faults is always far more than you imagined.

But let me ratchet things down a little. Here’s a message to any budding authors reading this who are wondering if they should get their work edited. I might have scared you a little bit, quite possibly resonating several of your own feelings regarding sending your manuscript off to an editor. All I can say is this. Yes, sending your work off is uncomfortable but it is also very, very necessary. Don’t think for one moment that it doesn’t need to be edited, because it most certainly does. And afterwards your novel will be the better for it. Working with an editor is a collaborative effort. The editor might suggest things that you would have never thought of by yourself. Don’t underestimate the power of working with an editor. Writing can be a solitary exercise. But in this one aspect, you get to work with another like-minded person, whose only goal is to improve your work. And at the end of the process you’ll be amazed at how your manuscript has grown.

Mr. Editor, please be kind.