I’m a self-published author, but that doesn’t mean I do everything by myself. Sure, I design my covers, write my blurbs, and do all my marketing, but there’s many aspects of the process where I rely on others. Today, I found out how rewarding that can be.
I’m writing this after coming back from a meeting with my editor, Rebekah. We’ve been friends for years, and she’s an award-winning poet and great author in her own right. I contracted her to edit Across the Broken Stars, even though I felt like it didn’t need much work.
To explain why this was a big decisions, you have to understand that I didn’t have an editor for my debut fantasy novella, Fires of the Dead. The book turned out amazing, but it would’ve been less stressful with a good editor. Why the stress? Well, after printing my first paperback, I found a spelling mistake. Then I found another. And another, and another. I ended up putting dots above every word in the book to make sure I’d found them all. Then I had to reformat the book and print it again.
In hindsight, it wasn’t a massive delay. But it was a delay I could’ve avoided with more consideration to proofreading. That’s why I bought Rebekah in.
She, however, went above and beyond and did a comprehensive edit on Across the Broken Stars, improving everything from characterisation to the number of times I used the word ‘piss.’ (Fun aside: there were 40 uses of ‘piss’ in my pre-Rebekah draft. Glad we picked that up before it went to print!)
We just had a three-hour meeting, going through all the edits. Beyond the obvious usefulness and story-improving-benefits of this, what I really enjoyed was the freshness it brough to my writing. I’ve been working on Across the Broken Stars since the end of 2017. I love the story and I’m incredibly proud of it. But as you can expect, some parts of the story now bore me because I’ve read it ten or fifteen times. I don’t mind that. Growing bored with your own story is nothing to be afraid of. Readers will be experiencing it for the first time, so it will feel fresh to them. (‘Bored’ is probably too strong a word, anyway. I’m still very passionate about it and I really enjoy a lot of the things that past me wrote.)
But bringing this back to my editor: there’s nothing that boosts your passion quite like working with an editor who gets your story.
As I was going through Rebekah’s notes, it created this strange effect in my head. She’d modified some passages, which meant I wasn’t sure if I was reading something I wrote or something she’d written – at least until using I worked out how to use the ‘track changes’ feature.
This was excellent. It fooled me – even for just one moment – into imagining my story was written by someone else. And there is nothing more exciting that reading a story about something you obviously love (because you wrote it), yet imagining it came from someone else … and then when you remember that you wrote it, you feel amazing.
So in the future, I plan to make working with editors part of my process. Not only does it improve the book (some of her ideas are incredible, and I can’t believe I get to steal them!), but it’s just so damn fun.
Now I’ve just got to implement them …
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