If I close my eyes, can you see me?

I'll do something about it if several people mention it.

I hear that a lot from writers. Usually after they have received critical feedback on their finished manuscript. Usually they're talking about something someone said they don't agree with. Usually it's something they don't want to change.

Let's look first at how we get critical feedback for our writing. If you're very lucky you might get ten people to read your manuscript. If you're well connected maybe you'll get a few more. Let's say fifteen.

The first cut will be the five or six returned manuscripts that come back with a ten word or less eulogy. Most people are nice. Telling you something you put so much effort into doesn't work or that they didn't finish it, is beyond them. You're their friend. They will grasp hold of the bit that reminds them of a book they read and tell you: It was great. Really enjoyed it. You will struggle to get more from them. Maybe a few typos.

The second cut is the majority, the seven or eight who give you feedback on high level story points. This will be valuable. It will tell you generally what doesn't work in the flow of the story. Once more they are probably being nice. They are being polite about how badly the failures impacted the story. They will wrap what didn't work in a long list of good points that may undermine how bad the bad is.

The third cut is the anomaly. Usually just one, sometimes none. There are a bunch of reasons why they didn't get your story but they are very worth listening to. Probably they are genuinely being helpful. They probably read your book despite never reading your kind of book. Amongst the static there will be some key issues you should address. You will probably discount everything they say because they don't read your kind of books.

The fourth and final cut is the one, maybe two that dissect the good from the bad to the mediocre. This feedback is analytical. It will hurt the hardest because it is the most truthful. The most detailed. It may echo feedback from cut two and three. But half of the important feedback on your manuscript will come from just these one or two. If you're lucky they will come from different perspectives and they will have picked different things that didn't work. You will almost certainly ignore most of what they uniquely say too, because they don't agree.

You've had fifteen people read your manuscript and you know it's not perfect. A cross section agree on some of what doesn't work, you're preparing to address this. But half the critical issues have been told to you by one or two people, they are probably different issues. You're going to ignore these because nobody else has mentioned them?

It is not easy. I have said more than once, there comes a point when finishing the book has to stop being about you. It has to be about the characters, the writing and the relationship with the reader. If you give the reader reason to doubt or disbelieve or falter, think about this - you covet their attention. You now have it. Your readers are busy. They are investing their precious time in holding your book in their hand. There are a quite literally a million other books they can be reading. Many of these books are just two clicks of a button or a swipe of the screen away. You think there's something special about you, something extra special, that will hold their attention?

You need to take every piece of critical feedback and distil it, filter it through who your characters are, their goals and context to the world around them, to the people around them. You need to do this for every single piece of feedback. If you're honest to yourself, the story, the characters and the reader, you will know which ones to ignore and which will benefit your book. You should not need to be told more than once. Not if you're as good as you think you are.

Being Unfaithful (To Fictional Characters)

There is a little known saying, that goes like: 'Nothing sells a good book like a second good book, and nothing makes money like three good books.' A saying that Steig Larsson would probably whole heartedly agree with, if his heart had not so inconveniently failed him as his books went global.

Money, force of will and smart marketing will get a book attention in the short term, but for it to be successful it needs to be good. To make money it needs siblings. Modern reading minds love series characters. If they like one book, they will typically work their way through them all. It is therefore to series characters I aim. But I do not want to be tied to one series. I do have the outline for the second Sarah Sawacki book, sat on my hard drive. I am very excited about it too. As nobody really knows about Sarah at this moment in time, what better time to start another series.

So we busily make book two. I'd say write, but the ideal of playing a computer keyboard like some concert pianist and producing four effortless brilliant pages a day, is a long way from reality. So I make, I think of it more as paper-mache using words. The idea for my second series character occurred about two thirds of the way through writing the first. So we are talking 2009. This in contrast was about a man. He would be a man that women like and men understand. A very hard man with heart, a lost soul trying to understand why the most precious thing in his life has been ripped from him.

I wrote about 30,000 words of this, just under one third, after I had written Chasing Innocence. It then sat in the digital draw for two years while I edited and polished and eventually published Chasing Innocence. During the publishing stage I started working on TMWWRWs again (it's an acronym for the books title). This started as an edit and eventually became writing the book. It was slow work because publishing your own book takes a lot of time and energy. I was getting in about 4-6 hours a week. Now Chasing Innocence is out there and much of what I can do is out of my hands, I have about 4 hours a day to write. Hoorah.

Except something is different. It feels odd. I'm very excited about Marcus Hangiman and his journey, and during the hiatus came up with a whole bunch of very good ideas. I'm as excited as I was starting Sarah's journey, and a little more comfortable because I know a little more of what I should be doing. But somehow, having had Sarah Sawacki in my life for four years now, it feels like I am being unfaithful to her, by writing about somone else. It is a very weird feeling. Even when I was writing TMWWRWs the first time, Sarah and how I could progress her story was always in the back of my mind. But now it's all over for a while, it's a bit like selfishly going off with someone else knowing this character will be waiting when I'm done. It is a feeling similar to the one that makes you finish a book, which is the very strong allegiance you have to your characters. You want to finish the story for them. I suspect that is what will drive the completion of this book too. The need to tell this first part of Marcus' story, the excitement of publishing it and the thrill of saying hello to Sarah once more.

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.