Where I talk about editors, Scrivener and the INTERNETS.

In today’s post, I’m going to share what it’s like to have your novel edited. By a publisher. Or what it’s like to wax your inner thighs. No, just kidding. The editing is much more fun. And I never waxed my inner thighs, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Because I’m with a digital-oriented publisher, Momentum, it’s only fitting that my editing be delivered to me through the INTERNETS. Not only that, but you can say goodbye to making corrections by hand, on a mountain of paper. It’s all digital now, baby. Which means the joys and torments of Microsoft Word’s track changes. (To be fair, as much as I laugh at Microsoft, their word processor is pretty solid. And yes I’ve tried OpenOffice’s Writer, Adobe’s InCopy and Apple’s Pages — didn’t like ‘em. And I’ll get to the awesomeness that is Scrivener in a minute.)

Digital publishing is — whether you like it or not — the future. As much as paper books will always be around, its the children of this world who will dictate how we experience storytelling. And I can tell you one thing, they won’t be picking up a hardcover.

How to edit on an iPad

Rather than print out the manuscript and edit by hand, my structural editor took a more digital approach. He drops my manuscript into Dropbox as a PDF, then annotates on his iPad. Once he is finished with the structural edit, he converts it back to a Microsoft Word document with all annotations intact and emails it to me: the author jittering with nervous anticipation on the other end of the Interwebs.

Traditionally, editors will do precisely what I described above, only on paper. Or they might write them as haiku and deliver them in gluten-free fortune cookies via genetically enhanced messenger pigeons.

Having had no prior experience with an editor, I must say I was impressed with the thoroughness that goes into the editing process. Many authors underestimate the role of the editor, and some — eager to self-publish on Amazon — skip it entirely, or substitute it by giving it to friends to read instead. If your friends can give you honest, blunt feedback, great! But they aren’t editors and unfortunately can’t substitute for one.

As I discovered, editors don’t just read your manuscript once. They read it three times. In each pass, they  write more comments and adjust their initial comments. My 450 page Word document came back with 425 comments.

What does an editor do?

I thought it might be fun or annoying or annoyingly fun to have this blog post edited. Before your very eyes. Like real magic. See the red text, highlighted text and crossed out words? That’s one part of the editor’s job: the “line edit”.

So to do this properly I’m going to share with you my editorial report and some annotations my editor wrote in my manuscript. While this means you get to see all my mistakes and sloppy writing, it’s also a great way to see the insides of the book making process! [I’m giving you one exclamation mark for the whole piece. And that’s generous.] And this is why I think there aren’t many blog posts about this. Because writers are a bit reluctant to reveal their pre-perfect writing.

Oh noes, no one can see my book before it’s perfect! ­- author of Twilight

[To be accurate, the author actually said she was "too sad" to continue work on the book and said she was putting its completion "on hold indefinitely". But I like your quote better.]

What if they find out how much I suck? – Paranoid vampire

“The first draft of anything is shit” – Ernest Hemingway [fact check: quotation]

Almost every author will go out of their way to thank their editor in the acknowledgements of their book because they know just how much the editor has helped complete it. But does anyone else really know what goes on behind closed doors?

Unless you work in the publishing industry, you probably don’t know just how closely involved the editor is with each book. And you probably figure editors are well paid too. Unfortunately that’s not the case. If we I could change the industry with a magical wave of Harry Potter’s wand (and I can totally mention Harry Potter and not have everyone question my sexuality) the first thing we’d I’d change do is tripling triple the editor’s salary. They are after all the most crucial element in the recipe of book-making [yo, this is predicative. So no hyphen]. Unless you write about glittery vampires.

But what exactly does an editor do? Well, what they don’t do is change the author’s style of writing (unless it sucks) [use a different word. Too much sucking and vampires already] or babysit the author’s children or nurse their insecurities or send them Farmville invites on Facebook. Well, I hope not.

What they do do do do do (sorry got carried away there) is explore the manuscript and analyze what is and isn’t working. And most importantly why. They tease out the weaknesses and help the writer make their work the best it can possibly be. And then it’s up to the author to decide whether they want to make those changes.

But gone are the days where an editor will work intimately with the writer on twenty, thirty or even forty drafts. These days, there is pressure to publish more books more quickly [awkward phrase]. If you want your manuscript to even be considered for publication, it should already be 99% perfect by the time it lands on the editor’s desk, or the slush pile/recycle bin, intern’s in-tray or Hogwarts. If it’s 98% ready, then it just might be considered too much work. And no, I’m not kidding. Publishers in this day and age don’t have time to mess around with extra work.

That’s your job.

What types of edits are there?

Phase one is the structural (or content) edit. This phase involves the editor working with the author on the structure of the manuscript: the plot, the characters, the setting, the pacing, the logic of the world in which the story is set. To ensure that all the shit makes sense.

Xavier, my agent, once said to me, ‘So many manuscripts land in my inbox where the plot hinges entirely on the stupidity of the characters. At all times this is what you should be working to eliminate.’ Unfortunately, many writers storm off in a huff, never to be heard from again. But a rare few (too rare unfortunately, in Xavier’s opinion) swallow their pride, acknowledge that their draft currently sucks [no more suckage. Really] and needs work.

I know this because I was one of them.

He was of course talking about plot holes. And phase one is where you make your plot holes your bitch. And iIt can take several rounds of going back and forth between the author and the editor before phase one is complete. Sometimes this can take place before a contract is even signed.

And in Sometimes Land there is an in-between phase known as the line edit. This is when the language, sentences, repetition and pacing are cleaned up line by line. (Here in Australia, this is often merged into phase two.)

Phase two is the copy-edit. Once everything is structurally sound and the story does not suck balls [you can have balls, just no more sucking. Do something else with them] or other ball-related objects, the manuscript is passed on to the copyeditor like a game of pass the parcel and the copyeditor will look at language, style, sentence structure, expression, spelling, grammar, punctuation and your underwear drawer. The copyedit is the nuts and bolts of the editing process, it is intensive and detailed and did I mention intensive?, aAnd it is what gives the manuscript a professional finish.

The editorial report

But what does an editorial report look like? Well I’m glad you asked (you didn’t) because here is mine:

Dear Nathan,

Well, the time has finally come for the editorial report. Again, my apologies for taking so long to get this done. This has been a pretty big couple of months, but I wanted to make sure that your work got the attention it deserves, and that has meant stealing time when I can.

And it certainly has felt like stealing time. Every time I get to dip in to reading The Chimera Vector, I’ve been utterly absorbed by the story. Your pacing and action scenes are taut, exciting and visual. The novel barrels along at breakneck speed and barely allows you to draw breath. However, you’ve also managed to create some quite touching human relationships – particularly with Sophia and Adamicz and between Jay and Damien. Real characters and a totally unreal story are a great combination – and you’ve nailed that balance for the most part with real panache and stellar prose.

However (there is always a however) there is a lot that can be done to make The Chimera Vector even better. Your strength in carving out spare prose to create action is sometimes to the detriment of scene and setting. Your commitment to plot sometimes leaves character arcs and motivations unclear. The problems with The Chimera Vector put me in mind of the iceberg theory of narrative, which states that – just like an iceberg – 20% of your story must poke out of the water, suggesting the other 80% of the story beneath. In your book, there is plenty of story above the waterline, but it doesn’t imply that there is enough going on below. This isn’t to say that there isn’t more going on beneath, but the story depth hasn’t been effectively communicated to the reader.

Keep in mind as you read through that this is not meant to be prescriptive. All suggestions really are just suggestions. Not all of them are going to resonate with you, but I hope that at the very least they help you identify the issues and come up with your own solutions to some of the issues with the manuscript.

Notice that last paragraph. “All suggestions really are just suggestions”. Some writers think the editor will change their work and force them to produce an entirely different story, which makes them reel in horror. Well, that might be true in Hollywood. E.g. LOL I Am Legend.

Side-note, this can in rare cases make a better movie, such as The Bourne Identity, which was loosely based on Robert Ludlum’s book of the same name. And The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, which were completely unrelated to the books and yet are among the best action thriller spy movies of the last decade.)

Where was I? Oh right. The editor, whether contracted through a publisher or hired directly by you, is more likely to pull a Bourne on you (hopefully without the shaky-cam bullshit) than an I Am Legend. So fear not. How much the author decides to take on the editor’s advice is up to the author. Obviously, the more advice the author takes on, the better for the book. And if the author decides to ignore most of the advice then the book will suffer — although the publisher has due cause to terminate the contract before that happens. Hopefully though, it won’t come to that.

So moving along. My editorial report gets down and dirty, into specific issues. Here is one example:

PLOT

The plot of The Chimera Vector races along so quickly that I could, at times, literally feel my heart beating faster. That takes some damn fine writing skills, and I applaud you for it. However, there were a couple of plot points that felt a little bit undeveloped, as if perhaps they were added in and then forgotten. This may not be the case, especially given you are planning to write more books in the series – but I’ve detailed them here for you to review.

Sophia’s Synesthesia

I really like Sophia’s synesthesia, especially early on. However, as the story develops it becomes a bit distracting – taking away from the descriptions of the places and people she sees, and I couldn’t help wondering why it was added in – as it doesn’t seem to serve the plot.

One thing about the first phase of editing, the structural phase: the editor does not actually do the work for you. They are not the co-writer. But their report and their suggestions will help you to make the changes yourself. Why? Because you’re a big boy/girl/hermaphrodite [I believe gender non-specific is the PC term] now.

Anyway, here are some more annotations for your viewing pleasure.

(Sidenote: my blog editor got distracted by The Muppets on YouTube, so no more red text from here on out.)

Oh look, an unwelcome cliché:

And a point of view suggestion:

A suggestion to cut an entire scene:

Or write a new one:

Remove some cumbersome language:

Edit Like A Boss:

And in case you’re feeling inundated with the negative annotations, a nice sprinkling of praise to keep you going:

Scrivener

While all of this work would ordinarily be done in Microsoft Word, I actually did something completely different. I knew there were a few scenes that needed to be swapped around, shuffled, moved earlier or moved later on, and some scenes written completely from scratch. To do all of this in a word processor is a bit of a nightmare. Jumping back and forth, getting confused as to what I put where, losing track of the overall flow of the storyline, all the stuff that brings a writer to their knees, weeping tears of despair into their gin. But not so. Not when you have something like Scrivener at your disposal. Shuffling stuff around in Scrivener is so easy. SO EASY.

LIKE PLAYING MINESWEEPER IN GOD MODE.

I imported my entire manuscript as an RTF file into Scrivener, complete with comments. I did the in-line editing in Word first, because I wasn’t sure if Scrivener could handle that. And then I broke the manuscript up, chapter by chapter. This was a bit tedious, but once you know the shortcut to create a new break (command + K), you can break up 100 chapters in under 10 minutes. I named each chapter, mostly to make it easy on myself, and color-coded them according to the character’s point of view. LOOK SO PRETTY.

After I was done shuffling the existing scenes around, I thought I may as well take advantage of Scrivener and write the new scenes while I’m here. I’ve already used Scrivener to plot Book 2, but this is the first time I’ve actually written a new scene in it. I was a bit excited and maybe peed my pants a little. GOD IT WAS EXCITING.

And before I knew it, the structural editing was all done and the manuscript was whisked off to PHASE TWO for the copyeditor to work her magic. And if you’re curious as to what this magic might look like…

Think of your manuscript as a really good head of hair. The editor is your hair wax. Wow, that’s my worst analogy ever. OK, let’s try again: think of your manuscript as a computer program and the editor as the debugger. They will test and discover every flaw, bug and error in the manuscript they can find.

Because no one wants you to release Windows 98 again.

November. The month where it’s socially acceptable to look like a paleolithic caveman. Which for me is pretty much every month. So with that in mind, I thought I’d raise the bar.

The handlebar.

Anyway, I should really get back to work. Plus, I need to get a head start on Decembeard.

So how did I accidentally get published? Well, this all started when I was a young burgeoning wanna-be film director. Or burgeoning something. I’d just finished a film and TV course and thought hey, maybe I could be a writer/director/delusional?

I had my eyes set on the Victorian College of the Arts, the Holy Grail of film courses in Australia. Entry was a little like dating the popular girl at school though. More difficult to get into than an undersized wetsuit and once you’re in it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. OK, that’s actually a really bad analogy. Let’s just say it’s more difficult than your usual film and television course.

With 16 spots and 1000 applicants, entry was a multi-tiered selection process. From Hell. First, you had to mail in your application. And then you had to submit the online Supplementary Application Form. Hang on, isn’t that two applications that say the same thing? Yes it is. PROBREM?

So once you’ve accomplished that, you think you’re in for an interview, right? Wrong.

To even be considered for an interview, assuming you didn’t screw up the previous two steps, you have to complete and submit the Selection Test. So poor hapless wanne-be film director me was tasked with creating a short narrative from nine images. But they had to be my own images, not stolen from iStockPhoto.com. Amazingly, I had made it this far and could finally count myself among the fifty or so jittery interviewees who did their best not to vomit mid-interview.

Meanwhile, on a whim, I’d applied for this professional writing course. It was supposed to be the best in the country, but if you were under 30 years old your chances of getting in were slim. Something about life experience and being a crap writer. I can’t remember, but I tried for the hell of it. I had a novel I’d been writing for a few years so I bumped a scene out of that, slapped it into a self-contained short story and shamelessly attached it to my application. I knew it was unlikely I’d be offered a place so I didn’t bother making the story any good.

As it turned out, I scored an interview. I’m guessing they forgot to read my story. Or they got my story mixed up with an extremely talented writer’s story. Either way, my attention was riveted to the film course, so I just ended up winging the writing interview. I had no experience to speak of, I hadn’t traveled anywhere, I really didn’t have much to say. My answers were just a few words a piece and it was probably incredibly boring for the interviewees.

I mean, what did I have to talk about? All I’d been doing since I moved out of home was playing toy soldier, sleeping on a grimy futon and eating my weight in Mi Goreng noodles.

My debut acting role in film school

Anyway, back to the film course. It was “recommended” that all applicants show a short film they made. And by recommended I mean you do it or you don’t waste their time. In hindsight, this was probably not the best opportunity for me to start getting experimental.

Because after I spent ten minutes hunched over the DVD player in the interview room, trying to stop it from rejecting my self-worth disc, I played them a scene that could only be described as Fawlty Towers meets The Wire. I like to think I was ahead of my time, but it was just really, really bad film-making. Like Transformers, but with a storyline. On the upside, I didn’t vomit during the interview.

It came as no surprise to me that I was not offered a place in the film course. But out of nowhere I got in to the writing course. I thought there must have been some kind of mistake. But who cares, right? I was in. And it soon became very clear to me that this was a serious course with serious writers and that I needed to move to Brunswick, ride a bike, drink lots of soy, perhaps become a vegan and start reading books that came from bookstores instead of airports. It also became pretty clear to me that writing novels was a lot more interesting than writing screenplays. As it turned out, I would not become a film director. Writing novels was too much fun.

OK, I lied about the film director bit. There was one exception…

A bunch of my fellow writing students submitted this ridiculous comedy screenplay to 3DFest (and to their surprise, they won). So I was cast as this film director with anger management problems that would put Ari Gold to shame. And somehow we were allowed to perform a scene live on Sunrise, Channel 7. Which was problematic because I kept messing up my lines and that particular scene featured singing AND I CAN’T SING. (If anyone has this on tape, please send me a copy because I really want to affirm how little shame I have.)

Oh, and there was also a parody dating show and a Brady Bunch number, both of which were unforgivingly live to air. Pretty sure I’m banned from TV for life now.

Anyway, two years later I finished the writing course and began stalking literary agents through the long grasses of the Internets. I was looking forward to going through their trash and breathing heavily upon their necks while they slept, but as it turned out there weren’t many agents in Australia. Something about getting jobs that actually paid well. But of the few agents I could track down, none were interested in popular fiction. Go figure. Either way, I found one agent who specifically welcomed popular fiction: Xavier Waterkeyn. He signed me up and mentored me through a few more drafts. Before I knew it, it was ready for submission. (The kind without the whips.)

Nathan and Xavier

First on our hit list of the Big 6 publishers was Hachette. The editor liked it enough to commission a reader’s report and kindly ask for some changes. So I made the changes and we resubmitted. But the editor had been replaced by someone new. Someone who was not so keen. Rejected!

We moved on to our next unsuspecting target, submitted and a few months later we were rejected. I was getting a bit worried. I didn’t mind the rejections so much, but our list only had six publishers on it. What happens when we get to the end of the list?

By this point, the epocalypse was in full swing and a bunch of authors were shifting towards self-publishing. A couple of bestselling authors were turning down publishers to self-publish themselves, the iBookstore and the iPad were hitting the US and in turn the rest of the world. Amazon had released their latest Kindle. Suddenly, anyone anywhere could make their ebook available to everyone.

So I weighed up the options:

Traditional publishing

• After signing your contract, you will usually wait 1-2 years for your book and ebook to be published.
• Your ebook will only be available in your country. Everyone else can suck it.
• Your ebook will cost $25. Note: since 2010, the prices have dropped to under $20. UPDATE: no, wait, some still cost $26.
• Your ebook will be locked with DRM to stop piracy piss off your customers.
• Your book will be available in all the major bookstores such as Borders, Angus & Robertson and Dymocks.

Self-publishing

• Not good enough to be published, so now you’re selling your book for 99c and your front cover may or may not include Comic Sans typography.
• You have to do it all yourself, which means less time to watch The Muppets on YouTube write.
• You take all the blame profit.

No offense Australia, but you’re only 1% of the English speaking population. If I want to sell popular fiction, I want to sell it globally.

(This also means I’ve switched my UK English dictionary with US English, but most Australians unwittingly do that anyway, so whatever. And bonus, pedophile is MUCH easier to spell now!)

By 2011, the publishing climate was changing so rapidly that I found myself in a situation where I didn’t even want a traditional publisher anymore. It seemed that the direction my agent and myself were heading in was incompatible with the current publishing model. (And by current, I mean 100 years old.)

Authors everywhere were clamoring for higher advances and higher royalties. But I didn’t really care about royalties or advances. I just wanted someone from Germany or America or Brazil to be able to read my book without being blockaded by: “This ebook is not available in your territory”.

Nonetheless, the next step in the self-publishing process was poaching Joel Naoum, a talented editor I was stalking following on Twitter.

Little did I know he was poaching me.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, Joel was transitioning into the role of publisher for Pan Macmillan Australia’s forthcoming digital imprint, Momentum, which was due to launch in February 2012. As Joel started telling us about Momentum (then entitled “secret project”), we realized he was taking the best bits of traditional publishing and the best bits of self-publishing and putting them together.

What came out the other end was a lean, mean digital-only imprint that would publish globally (Apple, Amazon, Google, Barnes & Noble, you name it) and make the print-on-demand book available globally (Amazon, for example). And would do so without DRM or ludicrous pricing. We wanted to make my book, The Chimera Vector, available to everyone, anywhere, at a reasonable cost and maximum convenience.

And Joel had offered us just that.

It’s pretty clear to us that what Joel has in store for Momentum is ground-breaking, exciting and very encouraging. If the publishing industry is going to survive, and evolve instead of perish, it will do so because of people like Joel Naoum.

And so today, I signed on the dotted line.