Your book: when is it finished?

With most projects, it’s clear when they’re done. A bike shed is built once there are walls, a roof, and a place to store bikes. A lasagne is done once you have a gooey tray of tomatopastamince steaming in front of you.

And a book? It’s done exactly when?

Well, as with most of these emails, I don’t really know. The image that I mostly work with is that of an apple. You don’t really pick it from the tree. You don’t pull it. You twist it. And the twisting isn’t best understood as an efficient way to separate fruit from bough. The twisting is, in effect, a question. ‘Are you ready to come now, pretty red thing?’ If the apple falls into your hand, it’s ready. And if it stays on the tree, it’s telling you that it would like another day or two to turn its pips from creamy white to nut brown.

And there you go. That’s how it works with books.

If that fruit-based methodology doesn’t work for you, here are some others:

Can you find places to cut text?

If you can, you need to do more work. And I don’t mean, “Can you find chapters, pages and paragraphs to cut?”, although of course that’s important. I mean, “Can you find a 12 word sentence that could use 10 words to say the same thing?” I mean, “Is there a descriptive paragraph that uses three sentences, where two word actually work just as well?”

The main aim of cutting text isn’t to reduce the amount of things you communicate. It’s to leave the communication unchanged, but with fewer words. If that process still has further to run, you haven’t finished.

How easy is it to make insertions?

There’ll always be little insertions you want to make. It might be a plot point, where your Big Reveal later in the book needs some little clue offered early. Or it might just be that you need to deepen Aunt Jem’s character up front, because of the new role she plays in the warehouse shootout scene. Or whatever.

One of the things I notice as I’m editing is that, the nearer the book is to completion, the harder it becomes to make those insertions. When a book is looser, less edited, there are plenty of places where you can insert the blade of a screwdriver and force open the text. As the book moves towards being finished, it just gets harder to make those insertions. Yes, you could in theory put something about Aunt Jem on page 36, but when you look at page 36, it’s feels very smooth. There’s a sort of inevitable logic to the way the text plays out. You can’t add anything about Jem without interrupting the emotional flow of something that needs to happen. That’s good. Your apple is nearly ripe.

Do you find greater density in your text?

Bit more Zen, this one, but as a book gets closer to being fully ready, you may well start noticing echoes that you hadn’t quite intended, but feel really good. It might be that a sea metaphor naturally crops up in Chapters 4, 12, 18, and 31. You wrote those damn chapters months apart, but now that you’re editing into shape, it’s almost as though you planted those references to show a particular evolution of something. The more you notice things like that, the riper your book is becoming.

Can you spot the bits you hated?

Frank Herbert, author of Dune, once said:

I don’t worry about inspiration or anything like that…. later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, “Well, now it’s writing time and now I’ll write.”

That’s a good test. If you can still feel the sweat and the awkwardness, you might want to work a little longer.

Have you done The List?

Editing involves plot, it involves character, it involves settings, it involves prose, it involves everything.

It’s easy to think of editing as a process that starts at page 1 and ends at page 350, and, OK, that is partly how it works. But it should also be a process that simply works through items on a list. Aunt Jem’s character. The plot issue involving Gordon’s car. Your holiday house setting. Addressing those things will involve hopping around through the book, fixing Jem, fixing Gordon, fixing that holiday house. So you work in layers, not just by page numbers. And once you’ve worked your way through those layers, bingo. You’re done.

How does it feel?

I enjoy editing. It’s a pleasure, not a chore. But what you’re doing evolves. Early on, editing involves quite a lot of fresh writing. This chapter just doesn’t really work and you end up giving it a major rewrite. Later on, you are definitely editing – not writing, but manipulating plenty of text. And then you get a point where whole pages go by without you really touching them. Or maybe trying out a change here, reversing it, then maybe reversing again. And at that, you’re done. There’s a kind of sweet pain in realising it, though. Your book now is the best it’s ever been. It’s the first time you’ve looked at your text and not thought ouch.

That’s it from me. My own apple trees are coming into blossom, except the big monster tree which always blooms late and then produces huge green fruit well into October.

Til soon.

Harry