My Writing / Editing Process

- Writing

I’m in the middle of revising my second book, THE EMPEROR OF MARS, which is the sequel to SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB. Because this is my second time through the process of getting an editorial letter and having to work to it, I’m starting to get a pretty good idea of what my writing and editing process is like.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my first drafts have:

  • Too many words
  • Too many characters
  • Too many plot strands
  • Too much detail and worldbuilding
  • Too much description

Basically, I put in far too much of everything in my first drafts. And I’ve decided I’m okay with this.

Yeah, it makes the editing process difficult. Right now I’m having to unpick a whole bunch of interweaving plot and character strands, remove some of them, and reweave it all into a tighter book.

This is often not easy. I work pretty hard to make everything depend on everything else, and then I have to take huge chunks out, and it all has to still work.

But that’s how I work, apparently. I think in complicated stories. I write too much in a book. That’s just the way my mind works.

And I need an editor. Readers don’t think much about editors. (I don’t when I’m reading a book.) But I would be terrible at this without an editor.

I don’t actually need an editor to tell me *what* to do. I generally know what I need to do. But I need an editor to tell me that I *have* to do it.

I’ve just read a self-published book (I won’t tell you which one) which sounded interesting. And it was interesting. But it needed an editor. It needed to have someone who could tell the author that what they had written wasn’t good enough, that they could do better (and I genuinely believe they could do better), and they’d better get on with *doing better* before they hit “publish”.

My writing process is likely to stay the same for a while, I think, with me writing much too much and then having to cut great chunks of it, but that works for me, so that’s the way I’m going to keep doing it.

Wish me luck.

(By the way, THE EMPEROR OF MARS will be published on January 10th, 2017. Put the date in your diary. You’re going to want to book the week off. ;) )