When is it? Ah… I see. It’s the very last day of July. And the universe (via Faber) has brought me a present for the new month: my very own project editor. (Well, not brought in an I-now-own-this sort of way, but I have a project editor none the less.)
Everyone should have one. They’re wonderful. They organise things. Many, many things.
I have been especially lucky with my project editor, Lucie, who – [fast forwards a few weeks] – has arranged for the amazing Eleanor to copy-edit my book brilliantly and very, very quickly.
So, we’re… er… mid August? Yes, something like that. Somewhere in the second half of August and not only do I have a project editor and copy editor, I have a copy-edited manuscript.
Eleanor has cowed Microsoft Word into submission and made the formatting behave throughout the entire document. I am suitably impressed by this feat alone. But there’s more.
She’s also sorted out my hyphens. I didn’t realise how bad I was at hyphens. I swear it wasn’t quite this bad not so long ago. Perhaps it was. Or perhaps this is one of the things I ‘lost’ when I had the latest rib taken out. Every anaesthetic I lose a few very precise things from my memory (the time before it was Latin flower names and things to do with architecture). It’s not that I forget these things, they’re just gone: no memory trace whatsoever. Anyway, I don’t know quite whether to hope I ‘lost’ my hyphens or whether I was just rubbish at them all along. Perhaps I’ll compromise with myself and just say ‘it’s one of those things that’s hard to spot in your own work’. That seems like a happier way of putting it.
Eleanor has also found a horrid number of sentences with repeated words. I’m generally so good at spotting these when I edit for other people… how can I have missed quite so many in my own work? On the bright side, Eleanor has spotted them so I can now sort them out before quite so many people see.
Hm… typo… typo… Wow, how did I miss that one?
Interesting: a three page allergy to the definite article. (What was going on there? Perhaps I don’t want to know… moving along, moving along…)
Ah… I see how that might sound a little odd to other people. But I hear it like that. Maybe it’s some dyslexic-ness in terms of the weird way I perceive language rhythms, but that’s how that sentence sounds to me. Even if it is a little dyslexic-weird, maybe non-dyslexic people will find it interesting anyway. After all, that’s how I hear it: that’s part of my voice. And I am careful not to go overboard with my weird way of hearing things. The majority of sentences need to appeal to a wide array of readers: a writer should only keep the odd one that exactly represents the stranger bits of her inner voice. But this sentence is *me*. This represents exactly how I hear things. This one I get to keep.
An awkward sentence. Yes, it most definitely is. All change, please!
In or into… Should theoretically be in, but into is acceptable and I like how it conveys motion, whereas ‘in’ is static.
Tenses, tenses… Some tricky ones here. A recounted story that includes a note about a general personality characteristic of someone still alive. Should that be in the same tense as the rest of the story-within-the-book, or does it go in the tense of the main narrative because the character is still alive and still likes flowers? As for some of the others… the book deals a lot with the fact that the past and present aren’t always that separate… For me, that needs to bleed into the grammar. But making sure that the grammar serves the story and doesn’t confuse when there’s a slip in time, and so in tense, is not easy.
This bit of reported speech doesn’t repeat the original bit of dialogue… Nope. But it *is* intentionally different. The change in the reported version is quite telling. At least I hope it is.
With my Uncle Ben or with my uncle Ben? I’m a traditionalist. The former it is because the latter, for me, would require a comma before ‘Ben’ and I don’t like it like that.
What else? Oh… a flaw in the time line. A great big one. I *knew* something wasn’t quite right there. Fixed. With surprisingly few changes.
A nice little bit of logical inconsistency. Possibly it’s not good for the soul. Let’s see if we can’t make that make sense.
Oh, and a nice dash of ambiguity…
And a nice little lack of clarity… Where are we in this scene? Oh, yes. There we are…
Hm… is this bit of dialogue forced? I think it won’t be if I just push a little harder here, make it clear to the reader that there’s meant to be some awkwardness by making it even more awkward. Yes, I think that works. And I love the characterisation of the bit-character now that I’ve brought all that awkwardness into the light.
Oh dear. People are spilling things left, right and centre. Or rather I’ve spilled lots of spillings into a single page. I’d better start cleaning up.
And now the manuscript is looking so clean and tidy! Hyphens all neatly in place. Repetitions scrubbed away… But there’s one change I just can’t even consider. It’s to one of my favourite lines in the whole book. And I *do* see how other people might find the phrasing a bit odd, but I love it. It says exactly what I mean about something quite hard to describe. Sometimes it’s good to be able to say ‘I am the author. I outrank you!’ Actually, I don’t say anything at all beyond ‘Please could I keep it!’ because I don’t have to… (and because I don’t know if Eleanor is familiar with The Producers, so don’t want to risk offending her if she doesn’t recognise this as a quotation.)
Every author is bound to find there are one or two changes that they just don’t want to make. The key is to know when something that might not work for all readers is important enough to you to assert your rights over. Think about it as having a handful of ‘free passes’ – a handful of times you can just say ‘no’, even when you acknowledge the merit of your editor/publisher’s comment. Often the comment is right in the broader sense of what will work best for the largest number of readers… But it’s still your book. If there are a few little things you love, and you haven’t been difficult about taking editorial advice, then no one will have a problem with it.
So what was my much-loved lined?
As soon as she says it, we both realise how unexpected the words are: oddly tender, wistful, as if she is lonely for kindness.
What do you think? Do you like it or are you with Eleanor, who would have preferred ‘hungry for kindness’?
thebonedragon.wordpress.com 
As I am not a creative writer, this account is strange but intriguing. It took me a while, but I’ve decided “lonely for kindness” is more evocative; it says something different from “hungry for kindness”, which is easy to understand and sounds usual. It tells something more about the character – whom I am getting to know only from snippets. More please.
🙂 Most of the time writers don’t want to give their readers pause: they don’t want to draw them out of the world of the book to think things over. ‘Hungry for kindness’ slips through the mind and the reader if off, on to the next point… so it is the better option if you just want the reader to read over the top of the line. But I really wanted a pause here. So I wanted to use a phrase that is unusual but, because of that, says something extra… For me, it sums up a lot of things about the character. I expect it’s the type of thing where some people will like the pause for thought and others won’t. But, in deciding to keep the line as is, I focused on the fact that all my early reviewers, and my agent and publisher had liked it… So I figured it must speak to some people. If everyone had commented on it being awkward, I probably would have cut it and saved it for my version of the manuscript, author’s prerogative notwithstanding.