Letting Go

You had a concept that you dreamed into a story. The subsequent life defining journey produced 120 carefully written chapters. Your finished book. Together these chapters create a narrative of drama, character and suspense. You have put the innocent into mighty peril and used slight of hand to implicate them, while making the guilty seem plausible and untouchable. Your story is a rollercoaster screaming towards its denouement, where, with a magician's flourish you conjure gasps of surprise and rapturous applause. Except there's no applause. Instead a bunch of people have bravely read your book and finished with barely a hair out of place. Each one has politely told you it was good, while also managing to look baffled. Then you find they're avoiding you and when you finally corner them, you hear them answer your explanation of key plot points with the same words over and over: 'Oh so that's what you meant!'

So now is the real challenge. You have to make your beautiful story play without a hitch in the reader's mind while entertaining them at every turn. Your very first step  - you delete 20-30 of the chapters. That's very painful, let me tell you. Although you don't actually delete whole chapters, not all the time. You're deleting exposition written by you to explain to you what the hell was going on. You delete all the character information added to dialogue so you better understood the characters. You delete all the padding that describes at length places or scenes you thought would be important but in the end your characters simply ran through and never revisited. You add in a few twists that were lacking, add drama where the story flags and you re-write, amend and re-write. Then you find someone that knows what they're talking about.

This will probably be a professional editor, they know what a good book should be. They have trained for this. They will tell you what needs to be changed, although this has a cost implication. Failing that you find the person or people whose opinion you trust most in all the world. You tell them to read it and be brutal. And when they are, or when you get your editor feedback - you have a little cry. And then it's very important you pay attention to every single word they say. When you have finally done almost all they say and made these final changes, you will find yourself in the most dangerous place of all - the search for literary perfection.

You will comb through every page of the book for errors or fumbling prose. For each fumble you add a comma, change the sentence structure and probably leave an error, and then come back a month later, rectify the error, add a full stop, change the sentence structure and leave a different error. When you turn the last page of the epilogue you turn to the very first page of the prologue and start all over again. You might well spend the rest of your life looking for that read through that never trips you up. That will never happen, because somehow your brain has remembered every single version of every sentence, and while a sentence might now read perfectly, something in your mind will register a missing word or different cadence, and you will probably try to edit and re-introduce a new error. You now need to let go.

And I almost did. My editor now described the book as slick and pacey, a modern thriller with wide appeal to men and women. Except I wasn't notorious enough for the established publishing industry. Rejection pushed me to become my own publisher. And of course the very first thing I did after setting up the company, was to sit down and do one final, cleaning, polishing edit. Unsurprisingly I fixed errors, added commas or full stops, changed sentence structures and despite paying very close attention, I probably added a few errors as well. But this really has to be the last time. It really does now have to go to the copy editors, that first stage of a new process that will take my story and turn it into a book. There is nothing more to do. The manuscript is going tonight. Absolutely definitely.