Themeattics

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Up until roughly five minutes ago, I loathed editing. Nothing about it felt like creation – all destruction, all the time. The things I’d built had to be torn down, the ideas I had were to be put to the ax (axe? Why are both correct? English is ridiculous), and the whole thing was just miserable. Needless to say, when I dropped the last period on Residuum’s “first” draft, it was both cathartic and daunting. I knew what came next.

Or maybe I didn’t.

You see, all of my past writing experience followed a similar path. Spend a great deal of time creating a work, tweaking here and there on the fly, finish the draft, get to editing, and in the midst of the initial edit review, realize that there were such major flaws that the whole thing needed to be scrapped and rewritten. This all started with Catalyst, my first attempt at a novel. Being generous, it took me about nine years to write, including all of the scrapping, reworking, and changes that took place during the draft process. All that time, all that energy, and when I sent it off for the initial high-level review to people close to me, what I got back was a very detailed, gentle, elaborate rendition of “yeah, nah.” There was so much to fix, so many issues, that it was no longer going to be an edit, but an entirely new story.

I took a bit of a break after that, then sat down to start again. The second version certainly felt better as I wrote it, but early into the remake a new idea began to tug on my brain. An idea about people forming a new society locked away from a dead world, and what might happen if they discovered what they had been taught for generations proved untrue. I tried pushing it back, but it kept coming and morphing and challenging Catalyst for my attention, so I put the second version to the side for what I expected to be a brief detour and decided to write a chapter or two of the new idea, Residuum.

Four and a half years later, the first draft of Residuum was complete. Still much too long, but a hell of a lot better than nine, so I took that as something of a win. That time around, while it was out for its high-level review, I did my due diligence and looked around for what is expected of first-time authors in the genre. What I saw was marginally disheartening, but I went forward with things anyway in hopes that I could at least dent the mold. The review was far better than before, so being the overambitious idiot that I am I made a very fast cleanup pass and started querying agents.

Listen. If you’re a prospective author, I don’t recommend you do that. When you take the time to look up industry standards, don’t assume you’re better than them. It’s not a good look. If agents are expecting a certain range of words, don’t double that. And if you do, don’t really expect them to give you the time of day. I’ll let you in on a little secret – agents have to put up with people like me for a living. They get God knows how many submissions a week and have to be discerning of what they even decide to pick up. Personal taste and submission skill matter, of course, but bear in mind none of this is automated or streamlined. That person has to choose to invest their time reading what you’ve given them. From the onset, they have to believe it can sell, and they know the boxes that need to be checked in order for that to happen. If you’re wildly outside the standards and, like me, you’re not backed up by any kind of crazy social media following or have credentialed, published authors vouching for your work, you might as well be sending submissions into the sun. It’s all opportunity costs, their time versus the chance a submission could sell. Check as many boxes as you can.

Needless to say after that little diatribe, I got a handful of rejections, but most never even acknowledged me. It sucked, I won’t lie, but I understood. I was being ridiculous in my expectations and needed to get myself more in line. To do so, I needed to cut almost eighty-thousand words from the draft. For the uninitiated, I pretty much had to cut a book from my book.

I tried. I spent more time than I should have trying to figure out what could be removed and reorganized, how the new structure could change, what certain eliminations would mean for other plotlines. I wanted desperately to avoid doing what I knew needed to be done, but in the end, it all came back to that same answer. I tossed that manuscript into another folder and started over.

This time, however, I had a goal. A hundred and twenty-five thousand words, that’s the acceptable upper limit of Sci-Fi novels of first time authors, so I knew I had to stay under that. I took my average words per chapter and determined how many chapters that limit required, did a rough – and oh boy do I mean rough – outline of what those chapters would need to be, and got to work. That outline changed more than a few times since it wasn’t very rigid or detailed, something I’m fixing moving forward, but it served its purpose. Even with the five-month break I took, I finished this latest version in a year and a half. Finally, an acceptable timeframe.

I liked this draft. It had its flaws, of course, but the story finally felt cohesive and slim, where before I’d been prone to bloat (As I’m sure you’ve noticed in these articles). Still, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t dread sending it off for the high-level edit. I’d gone through and done a read to make a note document on what I thought needed changing, and what I got back more or less mirrored that document. A couple major points that needed to be fixed, then polish. I spent the last week or so thinking about and discussing those major points, and figured out what I can to do tie them both together, giving the necessary payoff for one part and leading it into more understanding of the second.

A proper edit. I’m not uprooting the tree and planting a new one, just topiary work. It’s a new feeling, and one I’m incredibly excited about. Residuum is starting to feel like a proper bit of work – something an agent would be willing to give the time of day. In the end, that’s all I can ask for.