New LabLit Novel/Shameless Self Promotion

[tmahony]

Thanks Beatrice and everyone for the kind words.

Mike, I tend to do a ton of revision, and the way I keep it fresh is to set the manuscript aside for weeks or months before doing another round of edits. That said, I do think you can overedit. There comes a point where you've just got to call it good. With my own writing, every time I read it, I end up changing something. The way I know it's done is when I start editing my edits.

[Octavia]

I know what you mean about editing the edits. For me, in non-fiction at least, when I'm writing something important and I get to the stage where I'm going back and forth and changing the same word to what it used to be, then to something else, then back again. It's almost like it's reached an equilibrium.

Did the editor(s) have any issues with characterisation - e.g. "can you make this person more likeable" or "I don't believe X would have said that at this stage"?

[tmahony]

I think you nailed it with "equilibrium", when you start going back and forth with the same edit. At that point, it's time to send it out and move onto something else.

In the first round of edits, which I recently completed, there were some changes in character, etc, but at that point it was mostly plot changes, kind of a macro level edit. I assume there will be some character fine-tuning in subsequent edits. I'm sure Jenny will have a better take on the overall process, as she's been through it already.

[Editor]

Well, in the UK at least, most publishers don't do much in the way of editing any more - budgets are being cut, and anyway they have thousands hitting their desks on a weekly basis, so they can afford to take ones that are already highly polished. Tom, if you're getting developmental editing then that's a real privilege, and you should feel great about it.

In my case, my former agent was an editor, so we got all of that over with before the tendering phase. (And it was incredibly intrusive, to a degree that I'd never allow now.) Experimental Heart got only a copy-edit at CSHL Press, but as I mentioned it was already over-edited at that stage.

The second one was accepted without a lot of editing from anyone except myself before I submitted it. Which means, I think, that I've learned a lot about self-editing during the process of the first one. I am really ruthless about test readers - I mean, I send it out to dozens and dozens including people I don't know (I ask friends to give them to friends and relatives who won't care about saying bad things because they don't know me - you can't really trust your nearest and dearest), make major revisions based on their comments and then repeat the whole process three or four times. I think my second has had about 60 readers of various versions to date, and yes, the changes were pretty extensive. As someone mentioned above, both times around I had a character I wanted people to like who was behaving in a way that was not entirely sympathetic, so I had to keep tweaking that character. And yes, plot changes filtering throughout the book - oy vey, is that a pain. In my case, with novel 2, I had started out as a series of flashbacks and had at some point decided it wasn't working and needed to put it into chronological order, and then I decided one of the characters needed to be introduced sooner...the upshot it that even as late as a week before submitting my final copy to CSHL Press, I was noticing residual continuity errors. I let it sit for a month then re-read it (and gave it to one last naive reader), so I hope that it's sorted!