Editing Continued - The Wrap up

Since I started this project of editing my book 5 months ago, I've gone through three definite stages of learning with editing. I can look at my book as 4 separate parts. Part 1: mild editing and a large learning curve. Part 2: More vivid writing, but still needs a lot of work on the scenes and connectivity of the story line. Part 3: All knowledge to date incorporated to date, but somewhat disconnected from the remaining book because I have changed some of the story line. Part 4: Pristine, untouched, original draft.

            Just thinking about those stages makes my head hurt. In a way, my book was better before I started than it is in its current state. I will compare it to moving into a house, because that is something that happens in my life quite often. When you move in, there are these lovely empty clean rooms, just like the clean empty outline of my story, AKA the first draft. Then the movers come and shove boxes and furniture everywhere. There isn’t enough room for everything and you begin to despair at the mountain of work ahead of you. Then you start opening boxes and unpacking them and rearranging furniture. There is stuff everywhere. Books piled by the wall because you can’t get to the shelf where they are going to go. Piles of wrapping paper. Boxes flattened and tossed out (text that is no longer useful to your story). Dishes piled in the living room because the box was put in the wrong room and it was too heavy to move so you had to unpack it, but got distracted by the search for the Tivo wireless antennae, which had to be found right now because the cable guy was due any minute and the antennae was essential for installation. And suddenly its night time and you have to go to bed because you are dead tired, but the sheets for the bed haven’t been found yet, so you just keep unpacking boxes like an automaton. Finally after an exhaustive night’s sleep where you frantically unpacked boxes in your dreams because you were looking for the baby, which some stupid pot smoking mover packed away neatly under all the china, you wake to reality, which is not much better. Don’t you feel a little frantic just reading about this?

There is a point of despair in every move, and I feel like I will never get through. Nothing is going to fit. I am going to be tripping over boxes for ever and I will always feel jittery because I live in a maze of boxes and paper. That is how I feel about my editing process right now. It’s such a mess and at this point, my book is worse than it was in the first draft, in the same way the empty house was cleaner than the half unpacked state. At least the first draft was a coherent story without characters popping up unexpectedly and other characters attitudes randomly changing.

            But, I kept chipping away at the boxes of stuff and eventually the house comes together. So it will be with this manuscript. Right now it is in an ugly stage, but it can only get better. I will have to finish out this round of edits and then go back to the beginning and apply the knowledge I acquired later to those first chapters. In a way, my book is a living and changing thing that will grow as I learn more. I also won’t be the same person I was when I started this process, not only because the process itself will have changed me, but already 5 month have passed and trust me, life went on around my editing project. I have been angry, scared, sad, happy, and all of the other emotions that constitute life, but also can change a person. So, the me that began will never be the same me that finishes a project that requires this much time.

            So, that all said, what will I do differently next time? I will story map first. I think I am kind of doing it backwards now, but don’t really want to change midstream since I am afraid something will get forgotten or undone if I change the process now. Right now I am going to keep unpacking one box at a time even if they are in the wrong rooms.

If you are editing a project, good luck and keep at it!