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By “edit letter” I’m talking about the long letter (though it is typically paired with a phone conversation) you get from your editor after they’ve acquired your book and they’ve sat down for a month or so to dig in and do the developmental edits. An edit letter can also be from your agent—the first round of developmental edits, to be followed maybe by some smaller editing in order to get your book into shape to submit to editors. Getting an edit letter is hard. There’s an entire emotional process involved, but this post is about how my process typically looks when I get one.
To take the first necessary diversion: what exactly are developmental edits? These are edits that can’t be fixed at the line level. It’s not just jazzing up a few pages of dialogue to make them not suck, or fixing some factual errors. Developmental edits can’t be fixed in a week. (I’ve seen this happen to authors at the querying stage—they’ll get a revise and resubmit from an agent and respond almost immediately with cosmetic edits. That is not how you handle developmental edits. If you repeatedly address developmental edits with cosmetic changes, you can and should be dropped. It shows you’re not good at taking edits.) Developmental edits can be issues like “the pacing is too slow in your middle” or “this character acts inconsistent with how you’ve characterized them elsewhere” or “the clues to the mystery got confusing in Act 3.” It could be something about fixing the writing: amping up a character across all scenes that involve that character, or things that involve plot or structure. I think the plot/ structure stuff is the hardest to do. It takes longer to figure out and is more akin to recutting wooden jigsaw pieces. These types of edits can involve tearing apart the fabric that is your book and then sewing it back together. It can get messy.
This is the process I go through to address my edit letters.
One) Receiving the letter. This typically feels pretty negative. I’m in a state of denial. This is the day I first get the letter and maybe a day or two after. Is that thing really a problem? Whatabouts start to pop up. But what about my vision for the book? What about the awesome ending I wanted? Ah no—do you just not get this? Wait, do we have the same vision? Is no one ever going to buy this book? Am I a failure? Should I crawl into a hole? What kind of hole?
Two) Feeling overwhelmed. I feel like I’m drowning. I sort of have a vague sense of what I need to do, but not really a sense of how I’m going to actually do it. I start to think that I couldn’t possibly do it. That I’m a failure who will live in a van down by the river. It feels insurmountable. It seems like a task that I’m not capable of doing, like standing at the starting line of a marathon and realizing that I’m in way over my head.
Three) Percolating. I spend time not looking at the edit letter itself after the initial few times. But I am mulling over things in the back of my head. Not to get woo-woo, but I am a believer in the unconscious. Sometimes when you encounter a puzzle, you stare and stare at it, then you come back after not (consciously) doing any work on it and all the sudden you can see the solution. I do believe that this percolating time is meaningful and important. You can’t stare at a problem constantly and expect to solve it because your brain needs a break. You can go for a walk or watch TV or play a video game.
Four) Readying for battle. To me, developmental edits are like performing a complicated surgery. I have to have my implements ready. Instead of the scalpel and syringes and surgical staples, I have a bullet journal, index cards, colored pens, and Scrivener. I want to note, for the record, that you do not need “writing software” like Scrivener to be a “real” writer. Scrivener has a lot of bells and whistles that you absolutely will end up wasting your time on by procrastinating. The only reason I have Scrivener is because it has two simple features that inexplicably Microsoft Word does not have. One, there is a corkboard where you can essentially write electronic index cards, move them around, color code them, tag them with particular words. Two, you can write sections or chapters and easily drag and drop them to change where they are. (You can do that in Word but it’s too complicated). [For the record, I don’t draft in Scrivener because once I had a catastrophic loss. I like it mainly for plotting, then I move over to Word).] In this particular case, with Book 3, I’m going to do this manually on index cards. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but sometimes hand writing things and physically manipulating them through space helps me organizationally.
Five) Noting where the holes are. These aren’t necessarily plot holes. But this is taking the list of what is wrong with the book (eg, punch up this character, make this motivation more clear, does this section need to exist?) and going through the book to see where these questions slot in with the text. For this particular book, I’m going to read through (I have not read the book for about a month and a half, so I have somewhat clear eyes) the entire book and do a notecard for every chapter. On the notecards I’ll write key things that happen in that chapter in the original version (ie, current draft) but also what things need to be fixed in that chapter. I might also write something like “cut this chapter, salvage the stuff about the girlfriend for later.”
Six) Restructuring. I can’t move things around until I fully understand what the things are that I’m moving around (which is the above step). This is a point where I would take notecards of preexisting chapters, and maybe make a couple new notecards that just say “new Riley chapter that has X, Y, and Z” and nothing else, and move them around until it works. This will happen for this particular book because we are changing the opening, and I need to insert some new material to make things feel more tense. Restructuring might be something you need to do to address fitting together the clues in a mystery or fixing pacing being off. In my case, it wasn’t so much that the pacing was off, but that we needed to insert some tension by spreading it across different places rather than having too much of it concentrating at the same place and time. If you have a pacing issue, or a “the middle is mushy” issue, I strongly recommend doing some very basic analysis. You can see some of this that I did with A Step Past Darkness in the post below, but what I will be doing for untitled Book 3 is a chart of where the tension in the chapter is right now, and where I want it to be instead. After I graph that line out, I will go back and decide what needs to be inserted in order to get to that tension.
I think a mathematical approach like that might feel… dispassionate to some, but this is just how I make my sausage. Some people confront the idea of a mushy middle and their approach to fixing it is just sort of throwing some explosions in. IMHO, the structure of A Step Past Darkness is strong because I tested its architectural soundness before I wrote/ rewrote it.
Seven) Outline. Outline chapter by chapter. This is a brief summary for each chapter which will make it clear which new stuff has been added. The edits for ASPD were so complex that I actually just sent this extended outline to my editor and agent along with a timeline of events. I don’t think you need a timeline necessarily (I was dealing with dual timelines and also the 100 year history of a small town), but the detailed outline is good. To me, this is like taking the blueprints I’ve drawn up and going to the client that hired me to build a house and saying, “does this look good?” It is way, way better than just building the house and asking them later.
Eight) Writing new text. Once the outline is approved, I will go ahead and start writing. But even before I’m actually writing text, I’m working on it in some sense—I tend to “see” scenes in my head before I write them down. So while I’m waiting to hear back, I’m mulling over how I would actually write those scenes, getting the dialogue down, etc.
Nine) Light reading. This is making sure I hit the things that I want to hit. I do try to limit how many times I ask my agent or writing group to read my book, because you only have so many sets of fresh eyes.
And once it’s off into the ether… you can’t really do anything for your baby. It just has to sink or swim while you daydream about other books.
Photo by Mikaela Wiedenhoff on Unsplash