The Publishing Process Part II

“Actually,” she laughed…

Sometime very soon, perhaps today or tomorrow even, I will finish what I hope to be the final major overhaul of the book I’ve been working on. I don’t love doing revisions. This part is less interesting to me. I love the part where I’m working on a first draft, and the story ideas are pouring in. I capture them, put them down, and don’t worry about redundancies, plot holes, or any other problems.

This book is different from my past books for all sorts of reasons. For starters, it’s fiction. So far all of my published works have been nonfiction*. While I have written lots of fiction over the past thirty years, I’ve never published any of it—save for a short story that ran in SEVENTEEN magazine in 1990. All of the novels, and I have forgotten how many of these I’ve written, just sit in manuscript form on the shelf. But this one I am determined to release out into the world, and so I shall.

The process has differed from all of my past books, published and unpublished, fiction and nonfiction, in that I have solicited more input than I usually do. I mostly loathe seeking early draft opinions. For one, I don’t like the idea of writing by committee. My work is mine, a solo effort, and I feel pretty possessive about it. Also, because of my PTSD, I am cautious in seeking opinions because I know myself very well and I know that despite decades of work in therapy, I still have my moments of extreme defensiveness. Even constructive criticism can throw me for a loop.

But some friends asked to see it. I decided to take the risk. I was delighted to discover that any input I disagreed with did not feel like a personal attack. I was able to take advice that seemed genuinely helpful. Ideas that didn’t resonate, I simply let go of. What a refreshing change from my younger writer self.

So far, my favorite suggestion was one that came from my friend Bob, an award-winning musician, the writer of one of my all-time favorite songs and, as it happens, someone who makes a one-paragraph cameo in the novel (there are lots of real life characters in this book.) Bob noted that I have a tendency to use the word laugh and variations of it on the regular. He said he felt like he didn’t need me to tell him when the characters were laughing, that the funny parts were funny enough without what I am now calling my laugh track.

When I got this message, I thought about how much I loathe TV show laugh tracks. I did a search of my manuscript for “laugh” and found I had used it 98 times. Ruthlessly, I rooted out as many laughs as I could. Now it appears 18 times. This exercise opened my eyes to other repetitions in the manuscript. I sure do love to use the word actually it turns out. So I cut out a bunch of actually’s too.

As I moved along trimming off all of this fat, I took a moment to pause and remind myself that one can over-edit. I did not need to cut out every single actually and every single reference to laughter. There are some places in which these words were fitting and trying to replace them would have been foolish.

And then there are examples of how in attempting to replace one word with another, I risk overusing the replacement word. The word extract and its variations is a great case in point. My protagonist, Bunny Fisher, is forever extracting things from a big Mary Poppins-like bag she lugs around everywhere. When I realized I had overused the word, in my replacement process I further realized I might be overusing the word pulled. So I tried to balance usage of both words, and relied on other synonyms, too, like fished.

No matter how vigilant and meticulous I am, I’m positive some over usage has slipped by me. While I’m most certainly not opposed to starting sentences with And, But, and Just, I also know these words are commonly overused by many writers and I put myself at the top of the list. I’m working to clean this up, too, but I probably could do a better job of it.

Tightening the manuscript in this way is only part of my revision process. This is also the draft in which I am paying the most attention to repetition of ideas as well as words. I’m also practicing killing my darlings, which I’ve written about before.

I’m not the best housekeeper, literally or figuratively, and all this tidying works my last nerve much of the time. But I persist because as with actual housework, even if I hate engaging in it, I cannot deny that I very much enjoy when my house is clean. I know I’m going to be really grateful that I’m taking the time to make this manuscript shine, to get it lean, to declutter unnecessary excess.

After I finish this final overhaul, I will print out one more copy to read through mostly for copy editing purposes. I feel a bit wasteful printing hundreds of pages for the third time. I also know that in toggling back and forth between my screen version and a paper version I’m able to catch things in one that I don’t catch in the other. And no, I cannot explain this logically.

What’s your editing process like? Do you save versions you can go back and reference? Or do you cut mercilessly from a single draft? Do you have particular words and phrases you overuse? Do you enjoy revisions? Let’s discuss.

*It’s probably been twenty years since I did an experiment in which I published a sloppy novel online only. This was in the early days of experimenting with online readership of book-length works. It’s been so long I can’t remember if I solicited donations but knowing me I very likely did. It used to be available on the Wayback Machine, but I can no longer find it. So perhaps not everything lives forever on the internet.

NOTES:

If you haven’t yet bumped up to a paid subscription, I urge you to do so. At this substack I share lots of the same information, lessons and encouragement that I offer in my paid, in-person workshops. If you’re finding value in my offerings, I’d appreciate you supporting my efforts. Your financial support helps me carve out time from my other work to keep this thing going. It’s $8 per month or $80 per year. If you go for the monthly membership you can turn it off and on as you find time to write/need a break from writing. It also helps me if you share this with other writers who might be interested in joining us.

I hope you all will share your writing in the comments where we can enjoy it.

Thanks so much for being here y’all.

Love,

Uncle Spike