The joy of editing

Some writers moan about editing. It’s painful - boring – impossible. It’s not creative. The joy of telling a story, inventing, imagining, creating is gone, and in its place you’re fussing around, checking and cutting.

But I love editing. The hard work is done. The story is there. Now I can trim and shape, experiment and refine without the big worries of where the narrative is going or what’s going to happen next.

I’ve just finished - hurray! – the first draft of Almost True. I loved writing the sequel to When I Was Joe but it was tough. I did a lot of rewriting right at the beginning, and then later on I found other work getting in the way. It’s taken a year to get the first draft done - double the time it took to write Joe.

However, partly because it’s been a longer process I’ve done a lot of editing as I go. There’s not so much to revise (until I hear from my agent and editor that is, they may disagree) Even so, it’s satisfying and fun to go back over sentences and chapters. Is that bit in the right place? Have I explained this clearly enough? Editing isn’t separate from writing, it just makes things clearer and sharper.

Almost True is a long book - 13,000 words longer than Joe. Will my editor think it's too long? Will he see cuts that I haven't spotted?

Candy Gourlay reported on a workshop held by Working Partners senior commissioning editor Sara O’Connor, whose message was summed up as: Slash, burn, chop, chop, chop. She gave excellent advice for writers of fantasties, and all writers - read it here.

If you’ve worked as a section editor on a newspaper you know that you can cut any piece of writing to fit, if you need to. What’s more, a good editor can usually make cuts that even the writer doesn’t notice. You also know that even the best writers can’t spot all the flaws in their work. Every piece of writing needs editing, first by the writer and then by an editor - someone to represent the eventual reader.

The perfect metaphor for editing is gardening. Do you want your garden choked with weeds, overgrown with towering shrubs ? Believe me, you do not. Some gardens just need a little pruning, others are crying out for a total makeover. Our garden was neglected for 12 years - 10 years when we lived abroad and rented it out to tenants, then another two while we failed to do anything about it.

Today was the day when the garden got its major rewrite. It doubled the available space. Beautiful plants got a chance to breathe. We re-discovered features that we'd completely forgotten about.

And now every time I sit in my garden I'm going to see it as editing in action.