For the first time, eyes other than mine are looking over the words I have been poring over for well over a year. I guess it should be a scary time, but it is not. Could this be due to the story already having been released in audio format – and the very positive response I have received from many listeners?

Making a better book

When I gave it a little more thought, I realised something very important about this proofing process: whatever comments I receive, they can only result in a better novel.

There is no room for egos and sensitivities at this stage. If the work fails to provide its first, amateur readers with a positive experience, it stands virtually no chance of passing the infinitely more discerning eyes of a professional publisher’s reader.

Real edits

The first reader to return edits was one I trusted would not tip-toe around my sensibilities, and tell me exactly what she thought. She did not fail me. Thankfully, she enjoyed the reading, wanting to continue with the rest to learn how the story unfolds. 

Minor typos, misspellings, and glitches aside, I found most of her more significant comments matched quite closely to those areas I have either struggled with or have had a gut feeling myself that something was not  quite right. Now someone else had spotted them, there was no denying the need for a little repair.

This is not tedious (yet)

I’m enjoying this editing process. Again, I think it comes down to an underlying realisation that the book is being improved, polished, and made more complete. 

I have spotted some issues myself while going through someone else’s comments. Focusing merely on how to fix issues they have highlighted, have detached me a little from the emotion of the words, and enabled me to spot – and fix – a couple of quite significant continuity errors, plus a chronological discrepancy.

I suspect, once the editing gets down to nothing more than individual word tweaking, I will get sick of the sight of the book. But I think I’ll retain my optimism, because at that stage, it is very close to being complete.

I regularly read about the danger of too frequent use of passive language in writing. We use passive language extensively in everyday speech as it dampens the danger of sounding aggressive. In dramatic prose, this style is fatal.

During those moments of full flow, instinctive writing, I tend to get overly passive, even in the heat of the action. That is just fine, as the writing is in the editing. Returning to the text months later, I discovered a copious splattering of passive verbs; time to dust off the scythe and and scrub the text into

Some examples

Spotting active and passive verbs is relatively straightforward. Here is an couple of examples:

• Brian was offering his hand in greeting. [passive]
• Brian offered his hand in greeting. [active]

The key to spotting the passive verb is, in most cases, the use of “was”. This led me to a straightforward method of activating my passive texts.

Kill the was

I searched for every instance of “was” throughout my text, each time reworking the sentence to remove it. Sometimes a simple matter of removing the “was” and changing its associated verb, other times a more colourful word replaced it.

Is it really that simple? Yes. Though some sentences will be tougher than others to adjust, I managed to remove the majority of “wases” which resulted in a far snappier and active form of writing.

Here are some genuine examples from my texts (I really don’t need to tell you which are passive, do I?):

• The opportunity to move was approaching
• The opportunity to move approached

• The sound was echoing as though behind it there was a vast, empty cavern
• The sound echoed as though behind it stretched a vast, empty cavern

• Jack was beaming from ear to ear
• Jack beamed from ear to ear

It seems obvious, doesn’t it? But when wrapped up in the editing process, trying to remember all the advice on what one should and should not do, simple, straightforward techniques such as this cut through the waffle and achieve marked improvements.

I’m 110,000 words complete in the second draft and a flaw has occurred to me within the pacing and structure of the story. The cause is simple and unsurprising: in my week-on-week working to create segmented 20 minute (about 3,500 words) audio book episodes, I have instinctively structured the story around those small segments.

This has created a rather odd story flow when all the pirces are joined into a single, continuous whole.

I knew some work would need doing

There was no doubt from the start that there would be a further re-work before I would feel comfortable tagging this book as finished, but the amount of restructuring as a result of serialization has surprised me; yet is not at all daunting.

My whole attitude to the writing process has evolved over the past year. At the start, I wanted to finish as quickly as possible, racing through sections to keep pace not only with the weekly audio episode schedule, but also my self-imposed notion of hos long I could continue to work on this. The thought of running more than a year on this single project did not sit comfortably.

Now, so far into the book with such a huge effort investment into it, the idea of a large amount of effort still to exert offers no concerns at all. Now, my attitude is if it needs doing, it must be done.

Deciding when it’s finished

A creative work is never truly finished, in my opinion. One must get it to an acceptable point of release, then let it out into the big wide world and move onto the next project.

The changes to Persistent Spirit will dramatically improve the pacing of the middle story. Right now it really does feel as if it has been created in small chunks. The story starts to accelerate, then there’s a cliffhanger point, then it builds once more to another cliffhanger. The rhythm of the text, to me, seems very contrived and is reflected by the flow of events through which the characters travel.

If it takes another year to get it to the right place ready for publication, then so be it (I don’t feel it will take that long, I should add). These novels are never going to be Pulitzer or Booker nominations, but they have to be “right”, at least in my mind.