Listening to the voices

In the two weeks between organising and waiting for the Chasing Innocence cover shoot, there has been the small matter of preparing the whole manuscript for the copy editor. This is a very major stage. When handing the script to the copy editor we are effectively saying: this book is finished.

And I will hand the manuscript over any day now. But as I was bundling it all together in readiness, the little voices started chirping away again. These are the inner voices, the voices that belong to the part of our mind that has stored every word and nuance, every character and action, every shock or twist that you ever read in a book or watched in a movie, that may have enthralled, horrified, saddened or just plain bored you. These are the subjective voices of the inner editor, that can see the failings of our writing even while the conscious element is getting worked up about how brilliant it all is.

And we are brilliant, maybe even glowing with pride over our half page description of rain on evergreen leaves, the invocation of dripping water and the melancholic mood of our character. While those little voices are busy chirping away trying to tell us that actually, why don’t we save the reader the ordeal of the half page and ourselves the increasing chance their attention will drift, and just mention it's raining and get the character to the big scary house.

It can take a while to trust or even listen to these voices, because, like the first feedback from the first beta readers, the problems must surely be caused by the readers inability to comprehend the art of our words? But if we really are serious, I mean really, really serious, we must give the book over to the reader. If they stumble on meaning or get confused by our masterful multi-tangled plots, really, what’s the point? It’s only then with our acceptance of this, will we realise those bits the readers struggled over, were always the bits we had nagging doubts about, but were too busy being brilliant to listen to - the inner editor voices. 

On this occasion they drew me to the epilogue of Chasing Innocence, as they had been for quite some time. I had tried to be innovative. I love the modern concept of providing three chapters from the sequel at the end of a book, so I decided to wrap that all into the epilogue. Except, then, it’s not an epilogue, it’s the beginning of the next book. You read it as a standalone and yes, it’s great. But the reader has just been through the emotion of the whole book. They need closure, not seven pages of event heavy teaser trailer for book two. They need a thank you and a chance to say goodbye to the characters for now, in under four pages. And so it was. The voices won again and only then, when I did have the epilogue under four pages, did I afford myself the luxury of weaving into it a hint for what might be coming.