As I’ve said any number of times, my first drafts are awful, more like expanded outlines than an actual novel. Mostly, they’re a way to confirm the machinery of the plot before I buckle down to craft a sensible narrative out of contradictory notes, half-baked characterizations, and half-seen sub-plots. (No modesty here: they really are that bad.) In other words, there’s a lot of editing that goes into making a book out of it.
And because it’s REALLY tough to edit at your own work, I depend on the skill and good will of my publishers, who are willing to:
- Read the VERY rough first draft without instantly canceling my contract (editor)
- Read a (hopefully) improved second draft (editor, art department)
- Read a “final” draft (editor, marketing, publicity, copyeditor)
- Read the copyedited pages (the poor souls inflicted with the task of transcribing the mess for typesetting)
- Read the proof pages (in-house reads followed by more poor souls having to incorporate various peoples’ remarks, questions, typo notes, etc etc)
After which the book goes public, and various other people send in notes and objections and places where we all missed untrimmed plot snippets, repetitions, and eyes of the wrong color, some of which have to be jammed in at the very last instant before the presses start running.
Some writers of series novels have a “bible” reminding them of the things that they’ve said before. Mine is not that organized, but the publisher does have a Style Sheet that transfers from one book to the next, so that I only need to explain once that in the Russell books, it’s finger-nail and school-teacher but ash tray and bedsheet; that Mrs, Mr, and Dr have no full stop (period) after them; and that the possessive of Holmes is not Holmes’s but Holmes’.
Individual copyeditors also have styles. Sometimes I get a remarkably detailed plot-line, page after page of what exactly happens when. Other times it’s a sort of index with every proper name and its first appearance in the book.
But the key element of any story is the back-and-forth with my editor. And although now, houses tend to use e-edits—
—and I certainly know how to do them, I’m old-school enough to value the dialogue that comes with an actual on-the-dead-tree edit, whether with a copyeditor—
—or the editor herself. Because there’s nothing like seeing notes like this to let you know you’ve done the right thing: