Thoroughly Disenchanted

I’ve just handed the final proof-read of Thoroughly Disenchanted back to my editor at Harper Voyager. It’s been a fascinating journey to get to this point and I thought it worth sharing for those of you who are new to this as well.

There are three main stages to the editing process:

• The Structural Edit: any big picture changes to plot, characterisation, story arcs or as the title says, structure.
• The Copy Edit: a line by line review of the manuscript, sense checking and considering words and phrasing.
• The Proof Read: typos and final tweaks.

I imagine each of these stages changes depending on how much and what sort of work the novel needs, and maybe with different publishers or editors. Here’s how it played out for me.

THE STRUCTURAL EDIT

I’d heard horror stories about people getting their edit letter and freaking out about the changes they were being asked to make. So it was with some trepidation that I opened the attachment and… felt absolutely SEEN. My editor and publisher obviously completely got what I was trying to do, loved my characters and the story, and I could see the rationale behind every suggestion. 

Some data:

• My edit letter was 4 pages long (11 point font, single spaced)
• It had 7 items to address, 6 of which were small-ish and one medium/large
• I had about 6 weeks for my first response, then another 4 weeks going backwards and forwards with further tweaks

The most simple suggestion was to get rid of chapter titles, which were apparently “a bit too flippant compared to the tone set by the rest of the book”. I say this was the simplest suggestion, and yes it was absolutely the easiest to deal with, but actually it was the one I least wanted to action. I liked those chapter titles! But I sounded out a few trusted friends who mostly sided with the editor, and I wasn’t absolutely wedded to them so out they went.

Some other slightly more complex changes included going into more depth on one characterisation, altering the role and backstory of another character, providing more clarity on the magical system and how it all worked, and rewriting a couple of scenes.

The most complicated suggestion was to introduce a new character, one who was talked about but didn’t actually appear on the page originally. That meant significant rewrites of some parts and several new scenes. I can’t reveal the detail for spoiler purposes, but trust me, it was not a small change.

My editor, Shannon, was terrific. He framed the feedback in a very positive light and made sure I was aware they were just suggestions and I could do what I liked with them. He offered (and I took him up on) a brainstorming session mainly to work out how and where we should introduce the new character and what the implications of that would be.

I made myself a spreadsheet to track the suggestions, my initial thoughts on what I needed to do to address those, and the actual changes I made in the manuscript. I then bit each change off piece by piece, easiest to most complicated. It was actually much easier than I expected and not as daunting as I feared.           

THE COPY EDIT

I’d kind of presumed the editing rounds got smaller as they went on, so the structural edit would be the biggest, the copy edit would be more manageable and the proof-read I’d be able to knock over in a night.

Boy was I wrong!

I got a heads up when Shannon messaged to say the copy-editor had some structural suggestions. We had a phone call to talk through them and they all made sense, so that was cool. And then a few weeks later his email sending through the changes, came with a reminder to look after my mental health as I was going through it…

Some facts:

• The marked up manuscript was accompanied by a 5 page cover letter—so longer than my structural edit letter—with 17 sub-headings.
• There were OVER 700 COMMENTS in the document, and many more marked up changes.
• I had to get an initial response back within a week for us to send the ARCs to print (which I knew about in advance, and had agreed to) but then I had a further 3 weeks to review and make final changes.

This was quite a different process to the structural edits, and in some ways it was easier because the suggestions were marked up in the document. So I didn’t have to decide where and how to make the suggested change, just whether I wanted to or not.

The 700+ comments fell broadly into these categories:

• Explaining why she’d made a word or phrase change.
• Asking a simple question (Did you mean to use this word?)
• Asking a complicated question (This doesn’t make sense; what are you trying to achieve?)
• Suggestion for where something needed to be reworked, and why.

I agreed with by far the majority of the changes, and I was impressed with the attention to detail. Here’s one example, explaining a very simple marked up change:

“Suggest tweak to make language sound more natural and not too explanatory. Also to avoid repeating the ‘intellectual and emotional connection’ reference that’s already been brought up on page 4 and is coming up soon again on page 16.”

But even though I agreed with the changes, and honestly believe my book is significantly better because of them, the sheer scale of the task was overwhelming. Plus there’s something about looking at a sea of red mark-ups that hurts your soul.

It also involved a lot of work; we’d created some plot holes with the structural edit that needed fixing, and other parts required rewrites and new scenes. It wasn’t just clicking “accept all” on the changes.

So, I found this much more draining than the structural edit. A part of that is expectation—I’d thought it would be easier—but I do think it was also more work. 

THE PROOF READ

That part was fun to start with. Shannon sent me a printout of the formatted manuscript, so I read it in hardcopy rather than online, and marked up changes with a pen. I found a few changes but they were minor; words and phrases rather than anything structural. I had heaps of time, too, so I put it aside for a month and came back to it with slightly fresh eyes.

Shannon combined my markups with the changes from the proofreader and sent it back to me for one absolutely final review. 

Some facts:

• There were a further 490 comments! Apparently that’s quite light on, and that 800 would have been quite normal. But still…
• I had about three weeks to turn this around. 

These were all quite minor changes and yet, I found myself saying “no” to more of them than I had in previous rounds. I stopped myself a couple of times and stepped away from the computer, went for a walk and made a cup of tea, and came back to it with a fresh mind. If my instinct was to say no, I made myself read the original text and then the changed text out loud to see if it scanned better. If I still preferred my original wording, I tried to articulate why, just to make sure I wasn’t being pedantic.

Shannon reassured me every step of the way that it was my book, my words, and I didn’t have to make any changes I didn’t want. But maybe because I’m a debut author, I was nervous about rejecting something that might be legitimate feedback, that I was just not ready to hear. Hence if I rejected something, I had to have a really good reason why.

I ended up saying “no” to quite a lot of suggestions; particularly those that I thought changed my voice, or the cadence or rhythm of the text, and most of the dialogue amendments (I don’t care if it’s grammatically incorrect, that’s how she speaks!)

I accepted quite a few changes that I didn’t really agree with, but I felt they were so minor that it didn’t really matter. That was a deliberate decision to focus on the things that mattered most to me, and let the small stuff go. 

I thought the proof read would be super quick, but actually I took nearly my allotted three weeks to get the final response. This was mainly because I knew I had time, so I didn’t rush. But it’s also because I had to think about nearly every suggestion, and take lots of mental health breaks. 

* * *

So there you have it, the editing process with a trad publisher through the eyes of a first-time author.

It took 7 months from the time I got my structural edit letter in January, to finalising the proof read in August. I’ve been told this is longer than normal (it was certainly longer than I expected). I was always clear on what I had to do by when, and the time frames were reasonable and flexible if needed.

I’ve been enormously lucky to have such great support and commitment from Harper Voyager, and I’m very excited about where Thoroughly Disenchanted has landed.

Happy writing!

Note: KJ Charles has an excellent blog about how writers and editors deal with disagreement.