Edits! [part two]
At the end of my last post, I mentioned a “breakdown of motivation”. This is that story.
So, like I said in part one of my “edits” series, I got my notes back from my publisher and felt pretty okay about it, all things considered. I was even reasonably calm about cutting an entire subplot and one of my favourite characters, because I could absolutely see how it would serve the book best.
And the first thing I did after the editorial Zoom call to discuss all these things? I went in and took out that storyline. Cut whole chapters. All 15k words, eliminated. (Okay, I saved them under a different file name in the vague hope I might give that character his own novel someday.)
That, it turned out, was the easy part.
I’m not proud of what happened next.
Largely because what happened next is that I entirely panicked and had to call my Mum.
Here’s an artistic rendering of the transcript of that call:
Me, a Harried Writer [HW]: Mum! Mum! I know you have your own life and hopes and dreams outside of your 33-year-old daughter’s wants and needs, but you must immediately stop what you’re doing to support me at once!
My Mother [M]: Jessica, stop being so dramatic. You do this all the time, and your crises are never that bad.
HW: But this time it’s different! This time I cannot possibly fathom a solution, and my novel will entirely fall apart because of it! Perhaps I’ll lose the publishing deal, perhaps I’ll lose everything!
M: Why are you like this?
HW: Alright, no need to get personal about it. Are you going to help me or not?
M: Go on, then. Talk me through it…
So I did talk her through it. She listened to the hole in my plot, and my concerns about it, and she presented a couple of ideas, which I fully ignored because it’s my book damnit, but actually, the most useful thing she did was just… listen. It turns out I wasn’t really having a crisis (she had told me that but I, again, ignored it), what I was having was a Need of a Sounding Board.
All in, I think we were on the phone for about half an hour, and at the end of the call I’d figured out exactly what to do about my thorny character motivation issue. Turns out, it was a super simple fix! But I wouldn’t have seen it, or at least, not as quickly, if I hadn’t had someone to call then and there who knew the story and could understand what my predicament was.
The other thing I identified (this time through a text conversation with a writer friend currently going through edits of her own) is that I was completely rushing myself, which was leading me to tie myself up in knots, unnecessarily.
I already agreed with my editor that I will attempt to get these edits done in about a 3-month window. That was my idea, by the way, and it’s probably flexible if I need it to be, but I love a deadline. The problem is, I’m also a teacher’s pet down into my bones, and therefore an unhelpful part of my brain was urging me to rush-rush-rush and solve all the problems all at once. Which was just setting myself up for failure.
So, after my mini-crisis (is it really a crisis if it resolves in less than an hour? Probably not…) I decided to print off my manuscript completely. Then, I’ve pulled it apart into manageable chunks, and I’ve started making handwritten notes on the pages, based on the notes from my editor and other ideas that come to me about filling in any gaps left by the now-deleted subplot. I’m doing that on a semi-daily basis, for a couple of hours at a time, but then when I have a whole “chunk” annotated, I use my weekends to put some of those ideas into practice.
This process led me, this most recent weekend, into have a genuinely brilliant editing/writing experience. Which I’ll cover in part three.