You Want People To Love Your Book … Edit It—But Don't Destroy It

As I bury myself in the final edit of my first novel, I find that I haven’t really dealt with a pertinent question: what do I want from this book? 

You’re probably reading this thinking, “Duh … you want people to love your book,” and you’d be partially right. I didn’t write this book as an exercise in self-gratification, but you could. My point here is that if you’re a person of broad interests and tastes, you could write the same book in an infinite amount of ways. Don’t believe me? Work with an editor you respect and view his or her input as an extension of yours. Are their edits an improvement to yours? Personally, I find it important to focus on when my editor’s changes aren’t better than what I had written, when they may—in fact—be detrimental. If you’re being honest with yourself, you have to admit that this doesn’t happen a lot as a good editor is looking to bring out the best in what you have written. But occasionally, an editor takes the voice out of our work. Discovery lies within that edit. When you know what you’ve written has to remain unchanged, this is the clearest, cleanest evidence of your voice as a writer. That’s when you know it’s right. 

Study these morsels, they’re evidence of what makes you, you. Relish them. Print these sentences/paragraphs/whatever out on paper, cut them up into little pieces, throw these pieces of paper into your bath tub, and get in and roll around naked in them. That’s what you and you alone bring to the table. Nothing is more important than who you are—except the story you’re trying to tell. Hah! Fucked with your head on that one, didn’t I?

This is what smacked me upside my head in writing my novel. When did what I was writing serve the novel and when did it serve my ego? Was I writing this to prove to myself that I could write it, or was I trying to write the best book I could possibly write. After the first edit, I decided I wanted the best book I could write, and that wasn’t the first draft of this book. 

I began with admitting that my editor knew some things that I didn’t, and I could either learn from his experience, or blissfully ignore the “why” behind his damn rules. I think this may be one of the more important decisions a writer will make; it truly helps to define whether this is your career or a just hobby. I knew the answer to that one: this was my career. To be honest, it had to be, (but that’s another blog entirely). I opened my eyes. I studied the details of “why” my editor made the decisions he made. I studied why he did what he did. I needed to understand his rules, his framework, his perspective on structure, including, his literary background. When I understood that, it made my book better. 

I took his edits to heart, so much so that I was editing far more than what he had suggested. My first draft was 330 pages. I edited it down to 220 pages. The naked truth, I had written 110 pages that added nothing to my story. 

So I took my 220 page story and began a complete rewrite. Now I had the essence of the story, its purpose. My characters changed. The feel became clarified. Everything added to the story, and the filler was gone—well, almost gone.

So I’m back to style. Am I’m going to write a funny book, a serious book, an exciting book, a clever book, an intelligent book, a thrilling book, an emotional book, a sympathetic book, a realistic book, a commercially viable book, or a book that makes you think after you’ve closed the book. I went with: yes. All of the above. The question was how to do that legitimately.

What do I mean? In the first versions of the book, it had made people: laugh, cry, be sick to their stomach’s, and think. I was not willing to lose any of those elements. But to maintain a realistic perspective, you could not have too much of any of these elements. So a year 6 months after I had started, and another partial rewrite, I began a serious rewrite using the tools garnered from my editor, along with a healthy dose of personal experience and artistic clarity.

The new version of the book was over 520 pages. That’s 300 additional pages. Then came the BIG question. Again. Were all of these pages adding to the story? Were they necessary.

Surprisingly, the answer to that question for the most part was … yes. I felt weird about that, but it was true.

In retrospect, I still had some things that I wanted to say, and you know what—those were the things that absolutely had to go. There was one chapter in particular that my wife and editor both could not see being included. I wanted to develop an additional character for some very politically correct reasons. Now doesn’t that sound like the absolute wrong reason for including something in your book? I wasn’t telling the character’s stories, I was making a point. Perfectly valid if that’s what your book is about; totally invalid for THE LAST INTERROGATION.

In the end, I lost more than 20 pages. OK, I didn’t lose them, I trashed them. I had to, they weren’t part of this book.

I lost most of the smart-assed passages—people talk like that sometimes, but not all of the time. I wanted realism. My editor would have had me disposed of more humor, but even when the world has a one-way ticket to hell as it does in this novel, I think people do and say funny shit to relieve the tension.

There’s a shitload of swearing, too, but again, a big chunk of the world may be ending, hardly a time to mince words. In times of infinite stress, the lowest common denominators of vulgarity and violence will always get their two cents worth in. Don’t believe me? Take a hammer and smash your thumb, (don’t really do this, by the way). Did you swear? Did you think about swearing, anyway? If you say no, you are lying. Now think of a billion people being hit over their heads—with sledge hammers. They are going to die, for reals. Now, tell me that the people that know this is going to happen don’t swear through that pain. You know I’m right now, don’t you?

So the bottom line of my “Process” here, is: when I realized what the book I wanted to write was, it became an infinitely better book. The details became about the characters, not the author or the author’s opinions.

In many ways, I’m as proud of the editing as I am the writing, and I’m very proud to have had the opportunity to learn from, and participate in, the editing process.