Writer Wednesday: The Editing Process

Writer Wednesday: The Editing Process If you look over at the sidebar on the right-hand side of the site, you’ll notice that the first draft of Taking the Gardener is now finished. It’s actually been finished for a while, which you might have thought was a reason for celebration.Not quite! Unfortunately, being ‘finished’ isn’t quite the same thing as being finished, if you know what I mean. Yes, I have a (rather large) collection of pages containing some 60,000 words, but they’re all first draft words. For anyone serious about writing a book, the first draft is only the beginning.Take a look at the sidebar again. My first draft might be finished, but the second draft is only 50% complete. What’s the difference, you ask? Good question! In the case of Taking the Gardener,  the main difference is things like spelling, phrasing and (occasionally) material cut or expanded upon in particular scenes. If you held the two side-by-side, you would be hard pressed to notice too many major differences.But that isn’t always the case. Writers can and do make drastic changes to their manuscripts during the second-draft phase. You can cut or add scenes, chapters, subplots or even entire characters. You can, if the need is great enough, scrap half the manuscript and essentially start from the beginning.It’s an intimidating idea, isn’t it? Well, it doesn’t have to be. For one thing, you can mitigate a lot of these changes through good planning. Ideally, you should have some sort of outline in place before you start writing to ensure that the book doesn’t grind to a halt halfway through. (Unless, of course, you’re one of those people who writes best without an outline. Yes, there are exceptions to every rule. Every single one.) Even if you do need to do some major retooling, that isn’t a bad thing. From the perspective of the reader, a book can seem like something that came into the world fully-formed and immutable. Not so – every book has gone through the process of writing and then rewriting (and rewriting and rewriting and…)No book is ever truly ‘finished’ until its author lets it loose on the world.