Revising a book

This was the second of my two pieces for Rebecca Bradley's excellent blog, which I'm reposting here. The initial one was on first drafts, aka the terror of the blank page, this one is on what to do once you've filled those pages.

Once again, make sure you check out Rebecca's blog to read about other writers' revision process; it's a cornucopia of great advice.

Your first draft has been completed, what state is it generally in?

Kind of a mess! It’s usually missing important scenes, characters have changed names halfway through, the geography and timeline is often a bit mixed-up, I’ve given places names like ‘Toytown’, characters are named after actors who I think could play them… the first revision is about going back through and fixing all of the placeholder stuff that I only put in there until I could think of something better.

What is the first thing do before you start to revise?

The most important thing to do is nothing.

As in, take some time off and don’t even look at the manuscript for a few weeks. I need to be able to come back and look at it with fresh eyes. Usually it’s not as bad as I had feared, and the things that need to be fixed are more obvious.

When I’m ready to go back over the manuscript, I print out a hard copy and go through it with a pencil and a set of highlighters, with a notebook to record anything that requires more detail.

How do you assess the damage that needs working on?

I read through the whole book. Normally I’ll have a good idea of what scenes and elements will need the most work before I start, but it’s important to see how it reads as a book, even in rough form.

I also find this process often gives me better ideas for new scenes, or ways to tweak existing ones.

Do you allow anyone to read that very first draft before revisions or can you assess it objectively yourself?

Are you kidding? No one ever sees my first drafts but me. I hate showing anyone a work in progress until I’ve been through it at least three or four times. I even get paranoid when someone walks into the room while I’m writing, and change to another window on my screen.

I email each day’s work to myself as an extra backup, and I have a recurring nightmare about accidentally sending a work in progress to my editor or agent.

What do you initially focus on, when approaching the completed first draft of the manuscript?

Getting the structure right, making sure the plot holds together and makes sense, and that the pace works. I usually end up cutting scenes and adding new ones if I feel the story is sagging at a certain point, or if I notice a key character disappears for too many chapters.

Do you have any rituals, writing or real-world, when revising a manuscript?

I like to book myself into a hotel for a couple of days to immerse myself in the book. The more remote the better. I like to go to places out in the country where I can go for a walk to give myself a break and wool-gather.

Essentially, my concept of what it is to be a writer was formed by watching James Caan in Misery at an impressionable age.

In what format do you revise, paper or computer?

As above, I print out a hard copy to read through and make notes, but after that I go back to the computer, save a new version of the file, and do my edits on the screen. I set my documents up with headers for each chapter so that it’s easy to navigate around the document and to switch the order of chapters if necessary.

How messy is the revision process – can you go in and repair areas or does the whole manuscript get decimated?

I quite like the process of pulling it apart and putting it back together again. Generally there will be some parts that don’t need too much work. Other parts will need major surgery, others will be taken out altogether. I’m an adder, so my books usually put on ten thousand extra words between the first draft and final draft. While it’s a net gain in word count, I’m still cutting stuff that doesn’t work and killing darlings as well as adding new material.

Is revision an overhaul of the story or is it minor editing?

The first run is usually more of an overhaul, but after that it settles down into a series of smaller and smaller edits until (in theory) I get it right.

What’s the biggest change you’ve made to a story during this process?

One thing I tend to do a lot of work on after the first draft is the ending. In one case, I expanded the ending and changed my mind about who the villain was! That obviously entailed going back and laying a lot of the groundwork earlier in the book so it felt natural.

When first drafting, many writers keep track of progress by counting words in a day. How do you make sure you’re progressing as you’re revising?

Good question, and with editing there isn’t as easy a way of gauging your progress as keeping track of words per day when writing a draft. I usually have a deadline on edits, so I’ll know it has to be finished by a certain date and work back from there, working out how many pages I need to cover a day.

Of course, some pages need more editing than others, so it may take a few hours to edit the first hundred pages, and then days to edit the next twenty.

Do you prefer to write the first draft or do you prefer the revision process?

Whichever I’m not doing when someone asks me! I probably prefer revision – it’s easier to fix something that already exists than create something from nothing. I always say there are hundreds of ways to fix a first draft; there’s only one way to fix a blank page.

What do you drink while you’re working?

I really want to give a more rock n roll answer, like Jim Beam black label, but usually it’s coffee, switching to tea when I’ve had too much caffeine. Occasionally I’ll have a beer.

How long does this process take and what shape is the book now in?

It usually takes a few weeks to do it right, although when I’m against a deadline, I need to cram that work into less time. When I’m getting close to finishing I’ll work way into the night fixing the last few things.

You never really get to a point when you think it’s perfect, you just get to a point where you’ve done as much as you can and it’s time to stop.

The fine detail

In the last couple of weeks I've been going over the copy edits of the second Carter Blake book. As those of you who looked at the picture above will probably have worked out, the current title is The Samaritan. It may or may not retain this title.

The copy edit is one of the later milestones in a book's journey toward publication. In earlier drafts, both the ones I do all by myself and the ones I work through with my editor, it's mostly about the big picture: getting the structure right, making sure the characters behave reasonably consistently, giving key scenes more punch, stuff like that.

The copy edit is the opposite of that. This is the stage where a very diligent and detail-oriented person (i.e. the polar opposite of me) goes through the book line by line making sure the fine detail is right.

That means spotting the typos and grammar mistakes that no one else has noticed or cared enough about to point out. It means picking up on continuity mistakes (how come this character is bald on page 54 and has dark hair on page 226?). It means finding gaps in the research (Ford stopped making that model in 2003, so it ought to have a higher mileage). It also means picking up on sentences that repeat the same word too many times. These things happen more often than I would like to admit, and it's a little humbling having it pointed out to you via the marvel of Word's track changes feature, even though you know this is an absolutely standard experience for all writers.

So you take a deep breath and open the document, praying there aren't too many red lines and comment boxes. It's a little like getting an assignment back from a strict teacher. It's an incredibly useful but occasionally dispiriting experience.

I went along with about 99% of the changes made or suggested by the copy editor, and added a fair amount of new changes myself. The only real point of difference was whether to use 'website' or 'Web site'.

The worst thing about reading through your copy edit is when sloppy writing or really obvious mistakes are pointed out to you, and you wondered why the hell you didn't notice them until now. It forces you to read every sentence carefully and ask yourself if this is really the best way it could be written. One (mercifully short) paragraph in this book had me banging my head against the desk wondering what the hell I was on about when I was writing it. Thankfully, I have the opportunity to fix it before it gets any further. That's why this stage in the process exists.

The best explanation I can come up with is, when you're writing a first draft - when it's going well at least - you're not stopping to think about the small stuff. You're writing in the knowledge that this is but the first of many passes, and anything that doesn't quite work can be fixed later. That's the way it's gotta be, at least for me. If I got hung up on making every line perfect, I'd never finish anything. The problem is that some of those glitches you decided to come back to later (or didn't notice in the first place) inevitably slip through the cracks and make it into later drafts.

Even when I read a book over again for a new draft, I tend not to analyse every sentence individually, unless they're unavoidably clunky. That's because I'm trying to read it as, well, a reader. The number of amendments and perceptive questions asked by a good copy editor really makes you appreciate what a unique skillset they have - to keep the big picture of the novel in their head while simultaneously zeroing in on tiny imperfections that creep into the paragraphs and sentences and words and punctuation.

I know I couldn't do their job. Not just because it's painstaking and detail-oriented and it's impossible to go on autopilot. The other reason is because I wouldn't be able to prevent myself from changing things about the style: to write it the way I would have written it. A good copy editor leaves the style alone and makes sure the writer doesn't embarrass himself. It's a tough job, and one I'm grateful for.

But I'm still going with 'website'.

The next one

If you're new to the publishing industry, as I am, you might be surprised at how far in advance things start to happen. Example: although it's still more than two months until The Killing Season hits the shelves, I've spent most of my time recently on the sequel, which won't be out for another year. I've just submitted the second version of this one to my editor.

Book 2 is provisionally called The Samaritan, and it follows Blake as he travels to Los Angeles to track down a prolific serial killer who may just be a long-forgotten figure from Blake's past. I'm looking forward to the feedback on this version, and I think it's a much stronger book after I've incorporated the thoughts of my editor and my agent, as well as some things I've decided to do differently on the second pass.

Although this one is going to be the second Carter Blake novel, calling it a sequel, as I did a minute ago, isn't quite correct: it's the second book in a series, and I think that's an important distinction.

The way I've approached the daunting task of writing That Difficult Second Novel, is in part to try to avoid writing a sequel to The Killing Season. It has the same protagonist, there are some ongoing plot threads that are picked up, and obviously it's in the same genre, but I've tried to approach The Samaritan as though it's the first Carter Blake book - i.e. one that someone who hasn't read the first book in the series can pick up and enjoy as though it were a standalone thriller.

This goes back to my thought process when I came up with Blake. I've always liked thriller protagonists who are not limited to any one location, from Travis McGee to Jack Reacher. Blake's background and profession means he can go anywhere he likes, take on any job he chooses. He's not tied down by authority or personal commitments. That means that every time I start a new book, I get to use a new location and create a whole new villain and a new supporting cast. It opens up a whole lot of possibilities for where the series can go.

The movie sequels I really love - films like Aliens, The Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - are all examples of the creators deciding to do something distinctive from the original. None of them are simple retreads of the original, even though they feature the same key characters and similar themes. I've tried to do something similar here: Blake is pretty much the same as he was in The Killing Season, but he's in a new city, working with new allies, facing a new antagonist. If I've got the balance right, the people who liked The Killing Season should like The Samaritan just as much, without it being a carbon copy.

I had a lot of fun writing this new book. It was a totally different experience to that of writing my first novel. The biggest difference was knowing that I definitely had a publisher this time. That was a slightly strange experience, because while I felt more secure about a lot of things, at the same time I felt more pressure to get it right. Secondly, I had to turn it around in a much shorter timeframe. I had all the time in the world to finish my first novel; procrastinating and tweaking and researching to my heart's content, but the writing of the new one was much more like a job. An awesome dream job, I hasten to add, but writing to order as opposed to as a hobby was definitely a different experience.

If all goes to plan, we'll be including the first couple of chapters of the second book at the back of the first one to encourage my readers to come back for more.

I've been talking to people about lots of exciting developments and upcoming events, none of which I can talk about just yet, but I'm hoping to be announcing some things soon. In the meantime, if you check out the nifty new Events page, you'll see that I'm going to be at CrimeFest in Bristol in May. It will be my first time at one of the biggest crime events in the UK calendar, and I'm looking forward to a few days of hanging out with some cool people, authors and readers and industry people alike.

Okay. Time to start plotting the third one...

Grizzly murders and the perils of quoting The Boss

I've just finished going over the final page proofs of the book, which means (to my extreme nervousness) that it's now pretty much set in stone.

One of the few advantages of not having a publishing deal before now is that I was able to write The Killing Season entirely to my own timescale. That meant I could really take my time over it and make as many changes and tweaks as I liked en route to what I amusingly believed was a final version.

Lousy coffee purchased as table rental, pencil sharpened, ready to go...

I probably went through five or six drafts before it got to the point where I was happy to send it off to Thomas, my then agent. Since then it's been through another couple of rewrites with Thomas, and a further version with Jemima, my editor at Orion. It's been read by a copyeditor and a proofreader. A bunch of my friends have read it, as well as my new agent, Luigi. All of these people have fed back on it and helped to point out the little mistakes (as well as the not-so-little ones). All in all, you'd expect that it would be polished within an inch of its life by now, but reading the page proofs over this week, I still managed to find 37 new things I decided needed changing.

This ranged from minor continuity mistakes (such as referring to a 'cold October noon' which falls at the beginning of November) to minor formatting glitches to one embarrassing spelling mistake - on page 152 I found myself writing about a 'grizzly' manner of death. Since there were definitely no bears involved, I was glad to have caught this one.

One of the final changes was to remove a number of song lyrics. Another advantage of blasting out a publisher-less novel is the fact that you operate in a bubble of blissful ignorance of things like copyright law, and specifically how it gets complicated around song lyrics. Naively, I'd assumed you could quite reasonably include a line or two from a pop song in your book and it would be covered under fair use.

Not so. Quotations from song lyrics don't work quite the same way as literary quotations. For a start, nothing from the modern era (actually since 1923 or so, which is pretty much everything, pop-music-wise) is in the public domain. There is no fair use limit, so any part of the song other than the title is copyright. And the rights may be held by more than one party (songwriter, dead songwriter's estate, publisher etc). There's an informative article on the whole thing here, summed up by the author's advice: Don't ever quote lines from pop songs.

Orion flagged this up to me at the contract stage, and kindly offered to chase down the rights-holders to see how much it would cost to use the five or six song quotes I'd blithely tossed into The Killing Season. None of them were cheap.

So part of the process this week has been to surgically remove these expensive little samples and instead try to allude to the songs without directly quoting. There was one Bruce Springsteen lyric, however, that I couldn't bear to lose. It's from the song 'Nebraska' - I quote it in the epigraph and I like how it sets the tone for the book, so I decided that one was worth keeping. It worked out something like £36 a word for a two-line quote. Given the low-fi nature of that particular album, I've probably covered the production costs all by myself.

So the typos are fixed and the song lyrics have mostly been excised and I've made a few other little nips and tucks and now that's it. The next time I see The Killing Season, it'll be in a bookshop, which is exciting and terrifying and unbelievable all at once.

Thankfully, I won't have much spare time to worry about it. I need to get my basic website looking a little less basic over Christmas, and there's also the small matter of the revisions to Carter Blake book 2: The Samaritan, which my editor has now sent me. I'm told it's already in pretty reasonable shape for a Difficult Second Novel, but this time I'm under no illusions about how many more changes there will be between now and publication day.

And no, I haven't used any Springsteen lyrics in this one.

Editing

The good news: after around four months of working every spare minute when I'm not actually asleep, I finally have a first draft of the second Carter Blake novel. The bad news: there's still a ton of work to do.

To be honest, it's not really bad news at all, as I actually enjoy the editing process. It's the time when the book goes from a rough, unfinished state to something that's more like the story I have in my head. Writers are luckier than most, because we get so many chances to go back over our work and tweak it before we have to show it to anyone. I don't envy musicians or athletes who have to produce their very best work in the moment, as opposed to when they happen to be in the zone.

My first draft tends to be all about getting the words down on paper without looking back too much. I work mainly on the computer, although quite often if I'm out and about I'll write a chapter longhand in a Black n' Red notebook I carry around, and then transcribe it at night. Once that's out of the way I can go back through the manuscript and decide what things work, what things don't work, which characters need to be developed more, which chapters need to be moved around and so on.



The actual first page (yes, I do have trouble reading my own handwriting)

 

I'm pretty sure most of the editing routine I've developed for myself comes from Stephen King's excellent On Writing. Any aspiring authors reading this should do themselves a favour and buy a copy right now, because it's the most useful and genuinely inspirational book I've read on the craft.

As soon as I've finished the first draft of a book, I like to put it aside for a couple of weeks to get some distance from the daily grind of the writing phase. Deadlines don't always allow the luxury of a break, but it's always helpful when I can fit one in. Once it's time to get started on the next phase, I print the book out on single sides of A4 so I can sit down away from the computer and read through it. For some reason, I tend to miss typos more often when reading from a screen. If it's printed out on the page, there's nothing to distract you. Once I have the hard copy manuscript, I sit down with a notebook, a pencil and some highlighters and get to work.

I don't think I'll ever stop printing the first draft out, no matter how good e-readers get.

I'm doing two things as I read through the first draft. Most importantly, I'm finding out how well it reads. Reading a book in one or two sittings is a completely different experience from writing it in small daily chunks of a thousand words or so. The read-through will give me a good idea of what works and what doesn't and what the big things I'll need to change are. As I'm reading, I'll use my notebook to record ideas for new scenes or edits to existing ones.

That's the big picture. The second thing I'm doing is looking for the smaller pieces of work that need done at the level of paragraphs and sentences and words: things like typos and awkward sentences and the places where I need to carry out some research before revisiting. I mark any mistakes with the pencil so I can fix them later, and add any extra detail that needs to be there in the margin.

I like to use real locations, buildings, street names etc in my books wherever possible, so quite often in a first draft I'll have something like:

"Blake stepped out onto xxx street and headed east. The sun was
beginning to set behind him, casting elongated shadows ahead."

This is where the highlighters come in. I use them to flag up any piece of information I need to check for consistency. For example, I tend to use one colour for information about location or geographical description, one for descriptions of characters, one for equipment (weapons, cars, whatever), and one for any mention of time or dates. In the example above, I'd want to check which street Blake was stepping onto, and if it makes sense for the sun to be setting at that point in the story.

It saves a lot of time later on if I can scan through the manuscript looking for any mentions of the time as it ensures I can keep everything as consistent as possible. It also stops a character from having blue eyes in one scene and green in another, or being 'on-camera' in one place when they need to be committing a murder somewhere else. This kind of thing is invisible to the reader if you get it right, but it's always noticeable if you screw it up. The second draft is where I start forcing myself to pay attention to the fine detail.

By the time I'm finished, the manuscript usually looks like a cross between a term paper with a lot of mistakes and some kind of day-glo Jackson Pollock painting. In the chapter on editing in On Writing, King recommends putting a symbol at the top-right of any page where you've made an edit, so you can find the pages that need attention easily. The first draft of this book is 365 pages, and if I'd bothered to do that, I'd have an edit symbol on roughly 364 of them (I'm pretty confident the cover page is okay).

Once that's done, I'm usually brimming with ideas of how to improve the book, and eager to get back in front of that Word file where I can start tidying things up and transforming it into something I'd be happy for people to read. For me, this is when the book really starts to come together.

And that's why I actually quite like editing.

Covering the bases

I've been hard at work on the next Blake book, but in between doing that and dealing with the mundane everyday life stuff, I've been getting regular updates on The Killing Season's journey through the various stages of production. I'm enjoying these updates - they're like little reminders every couple of weeks that this is really happening and there's going to be a real, chunky hardback book at the end of the process.

I just finished going through the unapproved copyedit and, of course, couldn't resist tweaking a few things here and there. This despite the book already having been through three major drafts, a polish, another draft following my agent's suggestions, and another draft after that once the book had been picked up by Orion and they'd made their suggestions. The one constant is that the book keeps getting better (I think) each time.

I've read this novel more times than I've read anything else I've ever done, and I'm pretty sure I could recite it by heart by now. That's why it's always good having a fresh pair of professional eyes reading something over. Somehow even on the sixth or seventh run through (or whichever this is) you can still find things to fix or improve or fiddle with. I'm starting to think that no book is ever truly finished until they print the damn thing. Of course, that's probably the very moment I'll notice some glaring typo on page 214...

The other cool thing about a real, physically published book, is the cover. I've just had a sneak preview from my editor and it was everything I hoped and more. I was cautiously optimistic, because Orion have some very nice looking products on the shelves at the moment, but suffice to say they've exceeded my expectations.

The best thing about it is it's immediately identifiable as an action thriller, and yet it isn't a picture of a guy with his back to us walking into a barren landscape holding a gun. I think it's really going to stand out on the shelves.

They're still tweaking (I guess covers are like novels in that respect), so I don't think I'm allowed to share it just yet. When they're happy with the final version, I'll post it here.