Are We There Yet?

I got my edits Friday. I'd been waiting anxiously: what if the editor should want major changes? What if he should want a different title?

Now I know. He wants major changes. He wants a different title.

The book has been critiqued many times. Each time I've reacted in a kind of Kübler-Ross sequence of stages:

1. Denial: There's nothing wrong with my manuscript. My manuscript is peachy keen. YOU, on the other hand, are a work in progress.

2. Anger: You wouldn't tell John Grisham his characters are under motivated, would you? Would you? Didn't think so.

3. Bargaining: How about if the aliens land in chapter 23 instead of chapter 16?

4. Depression: Why did I ever quit my job at Chuck E. Cheese? I was up for assistant manager. Now I can't write my way out of a wet paper bag.

5. Acceptance: Oh, all right, I'll cut the three scenes that show how the neighbor's cousin became terrified of thimbles. Are you HAPPY?

I keep hearing from and about fellow bloggers who've finished their first novel and are getting ready to query. I grit my teeth. Some have checked all the boxes: they've participated in writers groups, employed beta readers, distanced themselves from the project, edited, edited, edited. Still I grit my teeth. Because for most of them, the climb has just begun.

There's a difference between the critiques you get from industry professionals and those you get from beta readers. No matter how brilliant the latter are, feedback from agents and editors always seems shockingly concise and penetrating by comparison. It illuminates fatal flaws in your manuscript, flaws everyone else inexplicably missed. You find yourself on the operating table, your innards exposed from belly to brisket, pleading to the surgeon:

How about if the aliens land in chapter 23 . . . ?

Each time I'm told I need to make a major change, one that involves extensive deletions or the construction of new scenes, I feel as though I've been kicked in the yarbles. I give myself a few minutes, an hour, a day—whatever it takes—and almost always I come to agree with the criticism. As I write this, it's been a couple of days since I received the Big Edit, and although I've got difficult work ahead of me, I agree it needs to be done. The problem, like all problems, is an opportunity in disguise: the book is going to be better as a result of the effort. So I'm grateful, I think.

Am I there yet?

No, this is actually the second edit at this house; I had to make major cuts to the manuscript before the publisher would take it on. Life is just a long sequence of edits, interrupted by headlong bursts of raw drivel. Anyone who says "my book is finished" is either holding a copy or holding onto a dream.



I won't rest until the Mormon Tabernacle Choir records "The Scrotum Song."