In roughly three months I will package up my speculative fiction novel, “Scrap”, and insert it into the designated slot of the publishing industry machine, with the hope that it doesn’t spit it back out and ask for another, crisper book.
Five years ago the industry was a giant, black monolith to me. No sunlight in or out. I had no clue where to begin reading about it and less of an idea where to start. Now I feel I know a little bit more, but certain parts still sit behind a curtain. The process of actually editing a book, what it looks like before the red pens hit the page, how long certain books took to publish – all mysteries. When I’m knee deep in the draft and I’ve just spent an hour trying to figure out the best way to describe someone picking up a cup, I get so overwhelmed that I find myself pouring through books just to reminder myself that other writers have made mistakes and to just keep writing. But even then that doesn’t help with some books, the close to perfect ones. I’d like to sit down with both the first draft of my favorite novels and their final draft just to compare the two.
When I said this to my friend Nataliya she showed me this New Yorker article where they show both the edited and final versions of a Raymond Carver story.
Out of eleven pages, four entire pages of material got cut out of the final draft by the editor. I’m not familiar enough with Carver’s work to say a lot more but that’s a lot of writing. And right away you can see the work that the editor did on this piece. While some of the decisions that led to these cut pages are a little vague, a lot of them help keep the characters consistent and the story incredibly focused.
If I have the ability, I think it would be fun to post the unedited version of my book after I get it published. (That’s if my editors wouldn’t harpoon me for it.) Seeing the kind of work that an editor does to polish up a book is just so interesting to me as an incoming writer and reader. Good editing is harder to spot the better it is, so sometimes I read books that seem like they’ve cut from the side of a mountain instead of worked on, edited, written and rewritten by a few to many people. It’s much less intimidating when I can see a reminder that writing a book is work, not luck, and if I could remind some other overly worried writer about this I’d feel pretty good.
