Editing

So, you’ve finished your first novel and you want to get it published.  What next?  As it happens this is exactly where I am.  I will document my efforts to accomplish this very thing and hopefully we can both learn from it.

Let’s talk about editing.  This is the most tedious part of the writing process, but it is necessary.  I read and reread my book until I had found and corrected all of the errors.  Most of this is part of the writing process.  When you are writing a novel you don’t write it all in one sitting and boom, you’re done.  You writing until you hit a wall and then you go back and you read and reread what you have written until the next piece comes to you.  While you are reading, you are editing.  However, after I was finally done with the last chapter and I was satisfied that everything flowed and made sense, I still had to read my novel three times before I found all of the errors.

Once I thought the editing process was over, I was still worried so I went through it one more time using MS Word’s search function.  I was looking for all of those homonyms that are technically spelled correctly, but are used incorrectly:

there/their/they’re

you’re/your

its/it’s

whose/who’s

Once satisfied that all of those were correct I scanned the entire story looking at every place where Word suggested my grammar or spelling was wrong.  Just because Word says it’s wrong doesn’t mean it is.  Word hates contractions and long sentences and passive voice.  Sometimes you cannot get rid of those without ruining the feel or flow of your text.  So take it with a grain of salt.

If you can afford to, hire an editor to read your book.  No matter how good you are, or how hard to try, you cannot be expected to find everything.  Neil Gaiman loves to joke that when he gets the first copy of a new book he wrote he opens to a random page an invariably finds an error.  It happens.  If you cannot afford an editor, but you have friends that can read quickly and know how to edit, ask for their assistance.  If you are financially capable, give them some kind of gift for their services.  Something to expedite their reading.   

If you don’t have friends, or your friends cannot be motivated to read the manuscript you gave them two months ago, then you simply must move on.  Time waits for no one and, it is my belief, that if you don’t publish your work soon someone else will.  By this I do not mean that someone will steal your work.  I mean that ideas are in the ether.  They are in the zeitgeist.  Your idea may seem brilliant and original, and I’m sure it is, but it is also someone else’s brilliant and original idea.  Reference “The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia,” by Samuel Johnson and “Candide” by Voltaire.  Both were published in 1759.  Both are relatively famous and original pieces.  Both are basically the same friggin novel. 

Now, let’s be clear.  Candide and Rasselas were very different.  Rasselas was a mind numbingly boring novel about a nobleman searching for happiness by going on an adventure to exotic places and ultimately finding none and returning home.  Candide is an incredibly entertaining novel about a nobleman searching for happiness by gong on an adventure to exotic places and ultimately finding none and returning home.  The novels were very different, but there were huge similarities that led people at the time to think that one of them had ripped off the other.  They had not.

I have never been blatantly ripped off before.  However, I have found kernels of my ideas in other works.  Ideas I thought were too unique to me to be repeated anywhere else.  But there they were.  More embarrassingly, I have written something I thought really funny only to find later had been in someone else’s work for years.  Oops.

My point is, the ideas are out there.  If you don’t get your book published soon all of those ideas will show up somewhere else.  Perhaps a little bit here and a little bit there, but each time it happens it will hurt you.  Because you will know that you sat on your book and let the world pass you by.  DO NOT DO THAT.  Get it edited and then get it out to publishers.