065: Important Lessons I Learned While Editing
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Important lessons I’ve learned while editing
Hello, and welcome to an episode all about revision and why revision can be really friggin challenging. I want to do an episode to talk about the lessons that I learned from this most recent round of revision that I did on my book. Because there's a difference between knowing something intellectually like knowing it in my mind, and really embodying it. And that's something that I found to be very true. In this, this recent round of revision, I had to do a lot of coaching myself through this, I had a lot of meltdowns, I had procrastinated like crazy. It was just really challenging. And so I want to talk about that.
Number one to say like, this is literally what I do for a living is I coach people, and I help people write books, and I create content around writing and editing. And it's, it's still extremely challenging for me occasionally, that I will say that this this recent round, with all of this being really hard, most of the time, most of the case, that's it's not like that I really like the revision process, I like editing, I'm open to receiving feedback from people. But there were just all of these factors in this recent round that made it really difficult. And I learned a lot from it than I'm going to take with me. And I wanted to pass the lessons on to you and just talk about revision. And if it's challenging for you, maybe this will help you get through it. And maybe if you're a newer writer who is just thinking about writing a book, or you're still in the drafting process, where you're getting your first draft written, maybe this can provide some insight into what's next. And you can avoid the mistakes that I that I made. I'm all about that.
So okay, so just to set the stage here, I got, I signed with my agent in the fall. And one thing we had discussed was making a big plot change. And it required making that big change required me to rewrite about 15 to 20,000 words of the book. So before she went through and gave me detailed notes on the manuscript, she's like, why don't you just go ahead and make that change, and then submit the manuscript to me. So I did that end of October 2022, through end of November, it took me about a month to do that. And it was a lot of work. And it was kind of challenging, but it was, it was okay. It was just a lot of heavy lifting. It was a lot of rewriting and thinking about structuring things differently. And, yeah, so that that part took me about a month. And then a few weeks later, she got back to me with more detailed feedback, she did kind of a light line edit, where she went through and made some comments, suggested removing a few things, changing a few things. And then she summarized your feedback for me into like, seven or eight main points, like here are some kind of global things that I've noticed or things I'm thinking about. And like, you know, this is probably something is probably something you should look at.
So I got all of that feedback, like mid December, maybe second or third week of December, and she was heading off for the holidays. So, you know, I was like, perfect, great. I'll work on this. And because I had rewritten so much already, I thought like, oh, I won't have to do that much work on this. Like, I'll just, you know, I'll get it back to you in a few weeks. I'll get it back to you the first week of January. What I did is a couple of days after I got that feedback from her is I met my friend Lisa for coffee. Lisa is a writer as well. She lives in my city, I met her through this writing center. And we it was a coffee ketchup. But it was also like, hey, let's work on her book because she's in the process of revising her book as well. So what I did is I took all of the feedback that my agent and given me all of the things that I knew I wanted to address in this round. And I made some bullet points to myself, I kind of condensed all of her feedback, all of the things that we had talked about changing the things that I wanted to change into five broader points, which made it more manageable for me to just get my head around how I was going to do this.
It was like Okay, five things. Like just to give you an example what one of one of them is I was revealing a lot of information in the resume Lucius in the last few chapters of the book, I was just like hitting the reader with all kinds of things. And then this happened. And turns out, this was the truth. And there's here's this twist. And she'd been planning this all along. So it was like, okay, what can we slow down the reveal of information. And I knew that I wanted to, like, kind of weave that in a little bit more skillfully throughout the last 25% of the book, as opposed to just dumping it all at the end. And I had that in the back of my head as I was doing that first rewrite. But I was like, Well, let me just, you know, table that and get to it later. Because here's the thing. I've gotten a lot of feedback over the years that I've been writing from people in my writing group from my husband from a friend of mine who read an early draft of something from agents from a lot of agents when I was querying and my own agent for agents.
Who else short story editors, just I mean, I've gotten a lot of feedback over the years. And I've gotten better at digesting it and being open to it and being receptive to it. But there's still that initial sting when you get an email or a letter or have a conversation of like, here, all of the things that you should probably fix with this. But what helps me feel better about it is getting a plan together like a plan of attack of how I want to approach it, what my entry point is going to be at an entry point for me in this case was okay, of these points that I'm making to myself, What feels easiest to tackle first, because some of the things were bigger, like that whole issue of planting things in the last 25% of the books, sprinkling them in letting the character do some digging to discover things that was going to take some some brainstorming and some tweaking, and it was going to take a little bit of rewriting to figure out how to do that. So that felt daunting, it felt like that was going to be a big thing for me to do. And I wanted something easy, I wanted something that was like, Okay, it's not gonna take me long. Let me just check this off the list, and then that'll feel good. It'll feel like I'm making progress. So that's why I did that. That's why I distilled everything down into these bullet points. And just I'll just make a disclaimer really quickly that these were all ideas and changes. Like these were all ideas that I had come up with and changes I had talked with Molly about that felt good that I agreed with there wasn't anything where she was like, Nope, you got to change this. And I was like, I don't really want to change that. I don't think so. Everything that we talked about all of my initial gut instincts about the book, were right, so So just want to say like, I was in total agreement with the feedback I had been given.
Okay, so my first thing that I learned, was in this early process. And it was about ego. And I feel sort of weird talking about this. I'm just gonna be honest with you. I feel a little weird talking about this because it can be. I remember hearing from writers when I was querying. And then when my book was out on submission, but wasn't selling the book that didn't sell that died on submission and never got published. I remember hearing published writers and successful authors talking about things like ego and impostor syndrome, and there was always like, a part of me back then that was like, but you have an agent, or you have a book deal. You have 10 books published, like, how can you be talking about this stuff? I don't know. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna put it out there and say that it feels a little bit weird to like, navigate this, and put it out there publicly. But I just want to be honest. And I want to say that there is a part of the writing process for me and like getting feedback where my ego gets a little bit bruised.
When I get feedback. I felt a lot of impostor syndrome signing with Molly, I felt very out of my depth, in a sense of like, I think I was so shocked that she signed me. And I don't this isn't false modesty. This isn't like, oh, it really rattled me. It really rattled my confidence. And I was so excited to sign with her. And I am so excited to be working with her. She's, I've had an incredible experience so far. And I'm so so excited for our for the book to be going on submission soon, but it still, it still shocked me. I just was like, I don't know if I can pull off the revisions, like, what does she regret signing me? What if this book doesn't sell, and then I'll have two books that didn't sell, you know, it's like, it just brought up all of these fears and all of this doubt. And my mistake, what I learned is that I didn't process those feelings.
In December when I was thinking through all of that feedback and experiencing all of that impostor syndrome. I didn't process it. And I give a lot of tips and I talk with my coaching clients a lot. The people who work with me one on one, I talk about this a lot. with them about impostor syndrome, and like working through it, and working through self doubt and fear. Part of doing that, but before you can work through it is you have to just acknowledge, like, I feel this way you have to name what the feeling is, and you have to name what the fear is. And I did not do that I minimized it, I pushed it down. I was like, just ignoring it. And like, You got to work through this. I talked about it a little bit with my friend that day when I was like, feeling all those feelings about it, but and I talked to my husband about it, too, when I was like having a meltdown about I don't know if I can do these edits. It's so much work. What if the book sucks afterwards? What if it's not any better? What if I make it worse, you know, but, but I really like, just tried to ignore all of that. And push past it, instead of acknowledging that I was having those fears.
And also just acknowledging that like, it stung a bit to get some suggestions. Even though I knew they were coming, even though I knew that the book needed some work before we sent it out on submission, like, I knew all those things. And I want the feedback, right, I want the beat of the book to be as good as it can possibly be, and so ready to send it out to editors. But still, it there was the part of the part of my ego that was like a little bit bruised. And you know, so, yeah, I think it's just so important to be honest about how you're feeling about feedback, revision, like, whatever it is, whatever you're feeling along the way in the writing process, because it can bring up a lot of shit, it can bring up a lot of feelings about like, doubting our skill, doubting our self worth all of this stuff, right?
You have to acknowledge how you're feeling. Okay, so that's kind of the first lesson in the first mistake. And I'm gonna just jump back into this timeline here and tell you a little bit more about what I did after that when I should have acknowledged how I was feeling. Okay. So then, I made that outline, I was like, What's my entry point going to be? I did maybe, like 20 minutes of work on it. And then I put it aside. And I did not touch it until the end of December, like I let it sit for probably two weeks. Part of that is because of the holidays, I was traveling over the holidays, I went to Minnesota, to spend five days with my family. And I didn't work on the book at all during that. So and that was intentional. I wanted to recharge a bit and rest and like, be present with my family. So I knew I wasn't going to write and I wasn't really planning to write. Well, that's not true. I was like, Well, maybe if I feel inspired, I'll write a little bit in the morning, like maybe, but I ended up just doing a little bit at a bit of editing work for the business and for a client and didn't, didn't do anything with my book, which is fine. So those weeks when I wasn't thinking about it, the fear grew bigger. Because I wasn't doing anything about it, I wasn't taking action, I wasn't acknowledging it really or like processing it out loud or none of that. It was just like this thing in the back of my mind that got bigger and bigger and bigger.
By the time I finally pulled out the manuscript, like right around New Years, it became this massive giant thing that I had to do like edit with a capital E. And it started getting, I started getting more and more intimidated by how hard it was gonna be, I guess, but also, but mainly just like, was it going to be good was like going to do a good job on it. Now, I knew that I wanted to have the edits done by January 9. That was the that was the goal. That was the deadline I had in my mind, which is a Monday. So that deadline was looming, and I really hadn't done like any, like barely any work on it. So what finally got me to start was just like buckling down on New Year's Day, or maybe January 2, maybe January 1, I can't remember if it was Saturday or Sunday, August Saturday was the 31st so maybe it was Sunday the first it was just like okay, I like this is I have to start working on this I have to do this. And I wanted to give myself some time to read over what I had done and let it sit and make sure that I felt good about it before I sent it to her. And I was like well you're not gonna have much time to do that if you do all of these edits like Sunday night right before you send it to her. So that's that's what finally got me to start working on it is just desperation and realizing that I had to I couldn't be procrastinating any longer.
Here's where the lesson The other lesson that I I sort of relearned comes in reading in your genre is important. Being familiar with genre conventions is important. If you write young adult fantasy It is a great idea not to read every young adult fantasy book out there, or to try to get ideas from them. But just to be aware of trends in the market to be aware of, what are readers responding to? And also just like what are the conventions in fantasy and same with like something like romance I mean, I talk about romance a lot. But there are certain genre conventions like in romance that readers are going to expect, if they pick up a romance novel, they're going to expect probably, that the two characters get together by the end of the book. So being aware of that is important, you have to know that before you write the book before you publish the book, before you market the book, to make sure that you are following conventions and that readers aren't going to be totally shocked and turned off by something that just doesn't fit in the book if you're if you're calling it a certain genre. That's not to say that you have to follow everything to the letter and just kind of copy what other books in that genre are doing. That's, that's not it. It's more it's again, it's just about being aware. And this is something that was true for me with thrillers. So this book, it's called scoop. It's a thriller. It's a psychological thriller.
And I had read some thrillers before I started writing this like a few popular ones. Actually, I've probably listened to more on on audiobooks, actually, thrillers are a great genre for me to listen to in the car or through audiobook because there's a lot of momentum and suspense and it keeps me going. But suspense is really one of the conventions, if you want to call it that of a thriller, there has to be that level of heightened sort of suspense and anticipation in anticipation, it can sometimes be a who done it like sometimes there can be a mystery, but that's not really like the full focus of it. And there doesn't always have to be a murder that someone's trying to solve. It's more like mystery or crime, but for thrillers, there is that level of suspense, that's important. And there's also a big reveal, there are also twists. So if you are writing a thriller, and there are zero twists involved, then readers are probably going to be a little disappointed or like, what is this. So knowing that note being aware of what readers are going to be looking for, you know, something good to keep in mind.
Part of the problem with this book, why I had to do a little bit more heavy lifting in the editing process is that when I started writing it, I was trying to straddle this line of women's fiction and thriller. My first book was women's fiction. And I didn't commit fully to this being a thriller until much much later down the road in the in the process of writing it. And I was thinking to myself, like I remember having these thoughts as I was writing it like, Well, yeah, there's like this twist and like, there's a death but but really, it's not about that it's about this, this other thing and like, Well, maybe it's not a mystery, maybe it's really obvious to the reader, like, what happened and who's responsible. But the more that I got into it, the more that I the more revision that I did. And especially when I started getting feedback from agents in the querying process. Last year, when I was trying to find my new agent, it became really apparent to me that I needed to fully commit to this being a thriller. I couldn't call it a psychological thriller, if it was so obvious, what was happening and who was responsible?
Like, why would the reader keep reading, if there's a very clear motive, or very clear explanation, it's very clear who's responsible, like there has to be something that keeps the reader going in the story. So that became very apparent to me last year. And that was the honestly that was a big part of of the revision that I did in the fall. The first one, but that's just a big lesson that I really am taking with me as a writer, and it's really going to be helpful for the next book. And for every book, I read after that, but I started, I have like a rough outline, and I probably have about 10,000 words written of another book. And it's like, okay, I really need to figure out the twists. And I need to figure out what the ultimate plan is. And just a lot of these things that I didn't have figured out for this book for scoop. So reading a new genre is is important.
And I'll say, I'm going to be honest and say another thing that contributed to the imposter syndrome is I got stuck in a little bit of comparison last year, where I hadn't read anything. I think when I was finishing writing the book and revising it, I didn't read any thrillers just because I didn't want to absorb anything and copy anything unintentionally. But I sort of lifted that. And I was like, Well, let me just pick up a couple books that look good. That looked exciting that were published in the last few years. And like, one of them was like, so good, so good. And I just remember thinking, why, why am I even bothering like, I could never I could never do this. And I guess I'll tell you what it is. It's gone. Girl. I reread it last year. I made a tick tock about it. Because gone, you're gone. Girl was published, I think 10 years ago. Last year. Anyways, it was published in 2012. And I reread golden girl it was like this. It's so good. It's so good. I mean, the things that Gillian Flynn doesn't that book with unreliable narrators with Amy's voice, I mean, it's like, incredible. I could teach a masterclass on that book. And here I am writing my little piddly thriller, like, Oh, God, what am I doing? What am I doing? You know, I really got stuck in comparison
So, but I know and I talk about this all the time that Gillian Flynn did not sit down at her computer one day and just bang out, Gone Girl, and boom, press Publish. And that was it. Like even she went through multiple drafts, I'm sure, went through a lot of revision, got feedback, had other people read it. And the version that she started with is not the version that we read, I know that there's that there's a difference. Yeah, so that was, that was part of the ego thing and the imposter syndrome as well. So in the span of a week, I did all of the revision, there were some things that didn't take me as long as I thought they seemed, again, because I had been thinking about it and not taking any action, they got built up to be like massive things that would take me so long to accomplish. And then I got in there was like, actually, I just have to tweak this little bit here. Like it's not that big of a deal. So I was able to make some progress started crossing things off the list. And then the last point about the reveals, took me the longest and that was what I saved for last because there's a part of me that is a procrastinator I like I need to do an updated podcast on procrastination.
Let me make a note of that mental note about that. But we so often talk about procrastination as if, if it's a bad thing, and it can make things unmanageable, it can be a big, it can be a big deal. And something that really affects us negatively in the workplace, with writing with just other things that you have to get done. But there's also a benefit to procrastination. And the upside of procrastination is that you get this boost of energy, this this creative bursts, like you have to get it done. So there's no room to be precious about your writing and to like, agonize over it and be like tortured, eat, like, you just have to get it done. You have to get it done. Right. I could have gone back and pushed back by January 9 deadline, but I didn't want to I just wanted to get through it. I knew that if I gave myself more time, it was going to take me that longer a bit of time. Like if I gave myself three months to do these edits, they would take me three months. If I gave myself two weeks, they would take two weeks. So that's why I wanted to just push through. And I finished Sunday night, and then read over everything, like one and a half times Monday morning before I emailed it out and I felt good. I felt good about about what I had done.
But here's the third lesson that comes into play. I realized, like fully realized I'd sort of been aware of this, but I don't think I had fully articulated it to myself, that I'm a verbal processor. I have to process things out loud, whether that's in therapy, my husband with a friend with my mom, like whatever. It's so helpful for me and it's surprising I think, why I didn't why I haven't fully acknowledged it to myself is that I'm a writer and I just assumed that processing via like the written word was how I was going to be helpful I don't know. But that's just not true. Processing my emotions processing my fears and also just processing plot out loud with someone can be so helpful. I relied on Sam my husband a lot. He's not a writer but he has a degree in English and he's been with me on this whole freakin journey and you know, he kind of has seen how the book has grown and changed. And I could just brainstorm out loud to him and say okay, like with the reveals thing, like we're learning too much in the rest solution like, this is what I'm thinking, what if Jamie discovers, in this scene that, blah, blah, blah, I don't want to give you any spoilers. Doing that was so, so helpful.
Maybe try this, if you're not quite sure what you're thinking or feeling about something, if it's hard to pinpoint it and put a name to it. Or if you want to talk through a character issue or a plot issue with someone in your life, do that. And if you don't have people who you can talk to about writing, what you can do is just get a voice No, like, do the voice app on your phone, and talk out loud, and then listen to it, listen to that voice message back and see if you can pick up on anything. Yeah, it's just, I think it's a big part of my process. And I need to be taking advantage of that. That's also something that's included in the six month program that I offer clients who work with me one on one, they get access to Voxer, which is this voice messaging app. And they check it once a day, and they can check in with me. And there's for most clients, there's this interesting thing that happens where they start messaging me, you know, we start working together, and then they're like, ah, Gosh, I really want to go back and delete this message and try again, or sorry, I'm rambling. This is like, I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say.
There's all this, there's all these feelings about talking something through. And I like that I like that I can get sort of unfiltered access to what they're thinking and feeling as opposed to email. If we did email check ins, it would be very easy for people to edit and revise and make sure that it all sounds good when they're like checking in with me officially via email. So having the voice message can help. And they can text on the app as well. So if they don't want to talk, if that's not helpful for them, they can always just text me. But yeah, there's something really helpful about about Voxer for that. So yeah, those are the lessons learned man from this really hard, hard, uphill battle, to revise my book, just the ego, the confronting that reading in your genre, and being a verbal processor. I think I shouldn't say that, we might do another light round of editing, based on these new changes that I made, you might have some feedback. So we might be doing another short round, but hopefully, you know, it's not going to be anything huge. It's not gonna be rewriting or making massive plot changes. It'll be just little tweaks. But yeah, I just have learned so much about my process and editing and writing a thriller. I mean, it's like, mind boggling how much I've, I've learned.
Hopefully, there's some takeaways in there for you, or things that you can try. When if if you get into a similar process, and if not, if revision is is a breeze for you, and none of this comes up like that is awesome. You could just keep it in your back pocket in case one day it does. I never thought that I would have this much trouble with editing with with doing a round of edits. Because again, I like it. I like editing. I really enjoy it. But yeah, this one man just it was a doozy. Big it was a doozy. So I'll keep you posted with the book and where it's at. And thank you for listening to this much longer episode. But again, I thought it was important to do a deep dive into this and just be honest about some of the things that I've been confronting.