THE EDITING DIARIES (PART 1)
Bestselling author��Lavinia Collins��talks about the process of editing her second trilogy, published with��Not So Noble Books, out now!!��
Book I, Part I: Less is More ��
Monday morning, my email pings. It���s the publisher, telling me he���s looked at the first book of my new series. It���s editing time. He���s had a new editor look at it, he says. I begin to feel nervous. I know that there is a lot of cutting to do. I wrote my first series,��Guinevere, in a manic six weeks, and with half an eye on writing it to a commercially viable length. Encouraged by my erstwhile love and long-time muse, Kay, I sent it off to a publisher before I had time to over-think it, and there I was, just nine months after I had begun writing the thing, watching it go live on Amazon. No time to over-think.
Now, though, I was about to receive back a series I had had more than a year to read, re-read, re-edit and ruminate on. Somehow the draft of this one had ended up almost twice as long as��Guinevere. And I knew it needed to be cut. Still, I wasn���t looking forward to a file full of instructions to excise parts of my beloved book. Written in self-indulgence, perhaps, but nonetheless dear to my sweet old artistic soul. I girded my loins (and boy did those loins need to be girded) and I dived in.
I was surprised by what I found. I should probably explain my own editing process. It is the worst editing process in the world. I just��add. Add add add. And it���s because I love writing so much. It���s what I do to keep myself sane after a long day of work. So, if I like something I have written, I try to re-live the enjoyable process by��writing more. Error error error. This is why writers make such bad editors of their own work. It���s hard to do less of something you enjoy. It���s hard to make yourself cut something that you love.
So there I was expecting to read something that pummelled my self-esteem by demanding I cut beloved scenes from my magnificent octopus. (If you���re too young to get a Blackadder joke, surely you���re too young to be unsupervised on the internet?) That wasn���t what I found at all. My beloved book hadn���t been put into the hands of some crazed woodsman hacking down healthy growth left, right and centre. It had been put into the hands of a skilled tree surgeon (if you forgive the extended analogy), trimming out what was stopping the existing healthy plant from showing to its best. Paring away unnecessary additions to dialogue (MAN I need to chill on adverbs) ��� which I was sure I had only added in later self-edits ��� cutting unnecessary description which again was the product of my own puppyish over-exuberance and removing things that��I had added myself��which second-guessed what a reader would already know. It really opened my eyes to my own writing process, and my own self-editing process. I saw, clearly, what I had been doing wrong. A writer (like me) editing their own work is their own worst enemy, but a good editor can be your book���s best friend. I looked at the edits, and I saw how much they improved what I had written, how they made it clearer, how they made it the way it would have been��if I��hadn���t��mucked about with it so much myself. Only more so.
It h
as made me think about the great editors, like Ezra Pound and��Raymond Carver���s editor. They���re not famous for adding things.��Less is more��is something I firmly believe in, but a mantra I find it depressingly impossible to follow as a writer. It just goes to show what another pair of eyes can achieve ��� and how wonderful it feels to read your work through the eyes of someone who seems to really��get��it. Both what you���re trying to say, and how to make that shine through work that you might have muddled in your own excitement.
