The Copy Edit

Somewhere in this world there is a woman named Katie Green. I have never met her but I feel confident right now I could pick her from a crowd, although quite probably she is currently sitting alone in a very dark room. Her hair is likely to be dishevelled and her eyes wide and vacant, her features drawn and a glass of something strong on the table beside her, maybe gin, but more likely whiskey, neat, straight out of the bottle. Katie's hands might shake as she holds the glass and she might even be rhythmically rocking back and forwards in her chair. Maybe murmuring to herself, doubting her career choices, bemoaning the decision to carve a profession in the literary world and wondering how someone could get passed mixed up with past quite so often, is wonder so similar to wander? And is there really quite the need to so seldom punctuate and for so many sentences to have no verb at all!

Yes, that's right. Katie Green just copy edited my book.

I know it was hard work for Katie because I spent thirty two hours over two days this week, going through the raft of changes she has made to the manuscript of Chasing Innocence. There were a lot of changes, but then that is what the copy edit is all about. In the lead-up to publishing a book, someone that has an eye for grammar, the flow of a story and continuity, goes through the whole text and highlights all instances where these are incorrect. When they are done they send it to you (the author) and you then decide which of the changes to accept or reject.

As I have never been through the process I was unreasonably excited to get the script and wasn't quite sure what to expect. To highlight the changes Katie had used Word's change tracking, so all I had to do was start at the beginning and make a decision on whether to accept Katie's first change or reject it, then move onto the next. The book in its A4 double spaced incarnation has five hundred pages and ninety eight chapters. For 75% of the changes accepting is a no brainer, these are punctuation, tense or word choice changes. This also included the need for indents. I had written my whole book without them. I also have a tendency to sometimes place my adjectives at the end of a sentence or miss out a verb. I typically don't use commas as much as I should. Mostly for the same reason I didn't punctuate dialogue properly, because I was busy writing the dialogue. I went back later and added the punctuation, but no matter how hard I tried I would end up reading the text and not punctuating it properly. I even edited the book from back to front at one stage and this helped a little.

I had originally written the beginning of the book without having a very good idea for who would read it. So the narrative was not consistent, this is disconcerting for the reader. I had worked hard fixing this in the edit and even re-written some of the chapters from memory to flatten the narrative. Except the version in my mind was so ingrained the re-written chapters were incredibly similar to the original versions.

On top of this there were unconscious errors. I love the writing style of Lee Child and had at times emulated it without knowing, usually after I had read one of his books. I also had my own idiosyncrasies that I littered the text with. Which meant I would often string too many 'and' into a sentence or start a sentence with Which, which is a big no no apparently.  10% of the issues were caused by me being too wordy, or not being wordy enough. Sometimes towards the end of the book I simply had no more words left to describe anything originally. This resulted in some bumpy scenes. For 5% there were paragraphs or blocks of text that I had struggled over repeatedly, trying to make what I wanted to say work within the context of the story and the requirements of grammar. Usually it meant something had to give. Often in my world that was sentence structure, which made the reader do a double take. 10% of the changes I rejected, simply because the viewpoint of the human editor is sometimes going to conflict with the creative viewpoint of the human writer. It comes down to preference.

The sheer volume of changes were quite bewildering at first. I would turn each page to find another swathed in blue underscore. It was incredibly daunting. I had two days to go through the whole book. After sixteen hours on day one I had only covered thirty three of the ninety eight chapters. Katie green had requested two changes that really threw me - I needed to refer to two characters by different names. I did one but not the other, but getting a sense for each and whether it would work and how that would ripple through the book chewed through a lot of time.

The simple truth is, this was my first book. While I am busy learning a whole bunch of new lessons as I work through book two, the learning curve was incredibly steep for book one. I made a huge number of mistakes in the first third of the book and a decreasing number for the last two thirds. I had fixed many of them during editing but there were a lot of artefacts left over. It took so long to go through the first third of the copy edit because most of the changes were condensed into this area. I got through the final sixty five chapters during day two.

During the course of the two days I went through the whole book checking each proposed change within the context of the sentence, paragraph, page, chapter and book. The two days went so quickly though, that I had conflicting emotions come the end. In one sense I felt like I was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome - Katie had often felt like a tormenting jailor. As I turned each page and came to a favourite section it would inevitably be scored through in blue, a plaintiff wailing 'Nooooo' uttered each time as I scrolled down to see what the proposed change was. At other times I felt an incredible sense of gratitude as time after time after time whole pages were freed from my tongue twisting attempts at wordiness and lack of grammar. The overriding emotion at the end though, was a mixture of elation and a horrible sense of unease.  A full book edit previously had taken me an average of four weeks, this one had flown by in two days. How many new errors would I have introduced? Certainly some. Katie and I are both human, it is inevitable. But would so many changes have completely messed up the whole book?

Before I sent it back I went through the completed edit looking only at grammar and spelling highlighted by Word. I found a total of five errors in the whole book, which were easily fixed. I knew if I held onto the book any longer after that, I might be tempted to start fiddling - I might get to thinking something might not work and try to fix it. Feeling slightly less uneasy I sent it straight back to Lorena at Daniel Goldsmith. I think this is why they give you such a short amount of time to do the copy edit, because if you didn't you would start to doubt the changes. The copy edit is one of the most intrusive parts of the book creation process, it's the first time someone other than you will make such wide ranging changes. You certainly don't want to be making many changes once it is done at all. And what a great decision it proved to be - to send it back straight away.

Four days after sending the book back I packaged the copy edited text onto my Kindle and sat down and started reading. I was heartbroken by the end of chapter three and disonsolete after five chapters. The text and dialogue read all wrong, the pace was out, the sentences read clunkily. I could have cried, what had happened to my book? I read another two chapters and it was the same disjointed and clunky read. It was at this point I was very glad the book had been sent back, because my first instinct was to sit down and fix it. Experience though had told me something else might be causing the problem.

The clunkiness that now existed in my book reminded me of something I experienced during the main part of the book edit process. While editing Chasing Innocence I had read a few books by my favourite authors and had thought they were rubbish - they had seemed unusually clunky. I would often say to people: 'it's like they were written by someone else'. The explanation for this is simple - in my mind they were written by someone else because my mind was still largely configured to reading my own writing. Other writers I know who write grammatically very well find they read other books and think characters are cliche or story points are dull, despite reading books established for their strong characters and story. The simple truth is we are seeing the failings of our own books in the well written books of others. Our minds are saying: 'this is how it should be done.'

It occurred to me that the clunkiness I was now experiencing in Chasing Innocence was simply because it was now properly edited and read well. The last thing I should be doing was 'fixing it.' I checked my despair and turned to my Oracle for all such matters: the good lady Prid. She read the same first five chapters in her considered impassive way, silently and painfully slowly, moving down the page while I clawed at the dining room table. She turned the final page of the five chapters and announced: 'It now reads brilliantly, like a proper book,' cheers for that Prid.

And she was right. The section I had spent the most time editing was the troublesome first third. This section's pace and rhythm was carved into my mind, so reading the words of my story in the copy edited version, that now had properly structured and punctuated sentences, with correct tense and the overly literary bits stripped out - was going to sound weird in my mind. Through the weekend I went through the whole book and my mind quickly re-aligned. On Sunday night when I turned the last page I had a list of ten errors from the whole book. TEN! That was amazing, and then only missing words mostly, that had been deleted mid-sentence that didn't mess with the sentence enough for Word grammar to pick it up. What I now had was a book that read flawlessly. For the first time I had read almost all of it and had been lost in the story, without frequently clunking to a stop at some weirdly structured sentence. Katie Green had fixed ALL this. It was incredible. I now had a consistent grammatical narrative. I can't tell you what a huge relief this is.

For me the copy edit, as with every stage of writing this book, was an incredible learning curve. It would have been easy to be precious about the copy edit, to believe the changes are detracting from the story's 'style'. I had travelled sufficiently along the editing path to know it was specifically my style in the first third that was killing it. That the changes needed in the second two thirds were making it better, not worse. Making the narrative work through the entire book is the accomplishment of the editor. Did I mention how relieved I was?

To stand out as an indie author I think the imperative must be to embrace quality. The driving force behind every page of Chasing Innocence has always been to match anything produced by commercial publishers. It's hard, it does cost, in time, effort and hard earned cash. I certainly don't eat out or drink so much these days. You've got to want it. Ultimately for me it's about the paying reader. Everything is about them turning the last page and wanting more. I'll let you know how that goes.