Welcome back to The Iron Jaw, a monthly column on the writing life. This month we’re talking about the editing and revision process. If you’re an author, you know that feeling you get when you type these final two words into your manuscript—The End. A sort of tingling joy runs through you, a sense of euphoria that the mountain of doubts and fear have been conquered. You want to dance around the room and shout out your victory at having wrested the plot into a coherent tale from the tangled web of thoughts that bounced around your head. And then comes a compulsive need to have someone read it—to share it with a best friend, spouse, or parent, and it’s with great excitement you wait for the accolades to roll in. It’s amazing, they say. Your mother thinks you’re remarkable. Friends who have never written a fictional sentence in their life (besides their dating profiles) think you’re a wizard. I am author hear me roar

If you’re new to writing—you might actually believe these early readers which can lead to an ego-jarring let down when you send it out to agents. Don’t get me wrong, their sincerity is not in question—it’s their ability to be impartial and have a critical eye. In her Happiness Lab lecture series, Yale professor Lori Santos claims “knowing is not half the battle”, meaning we may know something to be true but still not accept it. To illustrate her point, she shares a familiar image of two parallel lines identical in length, but one has angles pointing inward at the tips, the other pointing outward. Our puny human brain will swear the outward pointing line is longer—and it doesn’t matter if we measure it and prove they are the same, our brain sees what it sees. So accepting that you’re not impartial, but then assuming you can make yourself impartial, is most likely false. If writers could just write and write and write, we would be the happiest people on earth. But the cold hard truth is that first draft you’ve worked so hard on is probably terrible in every sense. Sure it has potential, but like a diamond in the rough, unless the author undertakes the very hard next steps to polish and refine it, they will find themselves in a state of confusion when it is rejected out of hand over and over again.

So what should you do when you finish a manuscript?

Forget it exists.

Huh?

What I mean is, when you complete a draft of your story, close the file and walk away from it. You’ve just spent months, if not years, forging characters, plot lines, sub-plots, conflict, tension and twists out of the dark recesses of your mind. It’s exhausting and draining. Take long walks. Binge-watch all the shows you’ve missed. If you occasionally think of something you forgot to do, make a note of it in passing then get back to relaxing. The last thing you want to do is try to shift gears too fast. Imagine you’re driving seventy-five mph down the freeway and decide to throw the car into reverse. Watch your transmission drop onto the freeway! It’s the same for your brain. Creating the story is one speed, but when you shift into the editing stage, watch out—stuffs about to get real!

After you’ve let your manuscript sit idle—two weeks even up to a month—you’re ready to start the next step—the hardest part of all in my opinion. Now every word, every comma, every nuance must be taken out and examined in the harsh light of a critical eye and this can be both exhausting and demoralizing when you begin to understand how much work is still to be done.

When you dust off your file,  have a clean notepad at hand and a strong cup of coffee. It’s time to read what you wrote. It will feel strange reading your words fresh, almost as if another person had written them. You can make small changes as you read through it, but my advice is to mostly take notes as you go and let the story flow and just see how it feels. By the time you get to the end, you’ll begin to have a sense of the structural problems, timeline errors, slow moving parts and plot holes that raise a red flag. Now you’re ready to roll your sleeves up and really begin to grind.

I frequently read and reread a manuscript thirty, fifty, even eighty times before I’m happy with the flow. Each time I go through it I eliminate problem areas, smooth gaps, add tension, and sprinkle in more details. Its tedious and time-consuming but you will only really see what’s wrong if you take the story completely apart and then put it back together piece by piece. You may have your own method of doing this but it mostly involves critically examining the work with the goal of elevating the story to its highest form.

When you’ve worked through it until your eyes bleed and you literally cannot imagine reading it again, start on the nit-picky items. Learn your bad habits—all authors have them. Mine is starting sentences with phrases like “began to” “tried to” or “started to” For example, I might write, “He began to run,” because as I’m writing the story it’s happening in real time in my mind. But it’s much more active to just say, “He ran.” Be sure to find your bad habits and take note of them, they will reoccur often in future novels.

Another powerful way to weed out weak writing is to listen to your book read out loud to you. No, you don’t need to pay someone to do a voice-over or beg your spouse to run through the lines. There are many great text-to-voice programs available today that are inexpensive and synthesize the human voice very cleanly. You can even pick the accent and sex of the voice. Some stories sound better with a gravelly male voice while others might be more suited to a smooth female pitch with a British accent. You can choose the speed the words are read and pause anytime to make corrections as you follow along with your laptop. The benefit of hearing your words is that your ear can pick up things that your eye can’t. Repetitive phrases and descriptions will jump out at you. Dialogue that doesn’t make sense will jar the ear. Plus it forces you to listen to every word—sometimes when we’re reading we skip over parts, especially if we’re familiar with that part of the story. You will be amazed at how many things you never noticed sticking out like a sore thumb. Another benefit is the ability to listen to your story in the car while you’re driving, turning idle time into productive writing time.

Writers often hear the words “show don’t tell” but it really should be followed up with, “and whatever you do, don’t show AND tell.” If you’re not clear what show don’t tell means, it’s like this: you can write “John was nervous”—that’s telling the reader what John is feeling. It can feel flat and uninteresting as compared to this: “John’s fingers tapped on the desk. Sweat pooled down his back and his collar felt too tight to breathe.” That’s showing the reader that John is nervous without ever saying it. The reader gets to imagine it based on the signals given. What’s worse than telling? When the author considers the reader too dumb to pick up on the clues and so feeds the answer like this: “John was nervous. His fingers tapped on the desk.” It gets annoying to the reader to be told and then shown what is happening. Search out sensory words like feel and felt, hear and heard, see and saw, and try to change as many as you can into more active and dynamic verse.

At this stage, your manuscript is getting tighter and tighter. It’s time to do some repetitive word search and eliminate clichés. There are lots of programs that search out repetitive phrases and they are incredibly helpful at varying the descriptions. It’s always amazing to me that even after reading my manuscript so many times I don’t always see glaring repetitions. A reviewer of my book The Red Sun once pointed out that in spite of five different editors going through the manuscript and countless proofreads, I used “like a lamb led to slaughter” not once but twice in the space of a few pages! Obviously, it was a mistake, but I should have caught it and worse, it was with an overused cliché! With all that said, in the midst of trying to make your manuscript grammatically perfect, with active voice, and properly placed commas, remember to retain your unique voice and writing style. In the end, there are no rules we must follow. We can convey sahcasm with a properly misspelled word. We can make up words if you grok what I’m saying. What matters is the story on the page is the absolute best it can be before we send it out into the world.

I’ve Done All These Steps But My Book Is Still Being Rejected

You’ve put the time in and done the work but no one, besides your mom, is excited about your story. It’s easy to think the world just doesn’t appreciate your talent, but the truth might be:

  1. It’s as good as you say it is but your query isn’t getting you a first look. Queries continue to be the key to opening a door to an agent’s interest, and there are no firm guidelines to follow to know whether your query is connecting
  2. It’s as good as you say it is but they don’t think they can sell it—if an agent doesn’t think they can sell a book because its been done too many times or dominated by one author, they won’t take it on no matter how good it is.
  3. It’s not as good as you say it is. That one’s hard to accept but it could be time to hire a professional editor who can give you a comprehensive overview of what’s wrong with the story if you’re willing to invest in their expertise.

Remember even the best authors make mistakes every day and it’s only for the grace of their fabulous editors that they aren’t published for the whole world to see!