Polishing the Gemstone
Copy-editing my latest novel. A vital, painstaking stage in the creative process
Because a good novel reads seamlessly – may even appear flawless – it’s easy to underestimate just how much cutting, moulding and polishing was required to get it into its finished shape.
The first draft of my latest novel, Wildwood Rising, in the way of first drafts, was a rough uneven lump. It emerged from the unconscious as a raw sludge of half-formed thoughts and vaguely glimpsed images, with here and there just a glimmer of something valuable within.
After letting this draft cool off, I took a long hard look at it, and my editor, Anthony Hinton, took a long hard look at it, and between us we decided which parts we might shape to purpose, and what must be discarded altogether.
Then I wrote a second draft, and a third. Each time, Anthony sent the manuscript back with a ream of invaluable notes, which I absorbed into my own thinking as I went back into a fourth draft and a fifth, and bit by bit we chipped away at this raw ore of narrative, slowly refining its core elements. (I realise I’m mixing my mining metaphors here but there’s no editor to stop me so what the hell!)
At this stage the work can be crude, whole chunks of story-stuff hewn away, fresh material dredged up and added. Characters change radically, or disappear completely.
Anthony is genius at this. He’ll ask things like: “Do we need to see all this action, or can some of it happen off-stage?” Or: “Who is the biggest influence in X’s life?” Or: “Where is the reader in this scene? Do we have too much narrative distance?”
His questions have the knack of making me see the story in a new way, enabling me to dig a little deeper and unearth new raw material, while filtering out more of the waste.
And so we go on this way, Anthony and I, digging and dredging, discarding and recombining, until finally we sit up and blink. We peer at the manuscript, walk around it, peer at it some more, and with some surprise realise we’re both satisfied. The story is complete.
Complete – but not finished. Because now it needs to be polished.
This is where the copy-editor comes in. Up until now, we’ve been dealing with the macro: story dynamics and plot structure and character arcs. The copy-edit zooms in on the microscopic, examining the manuscript sentence by sentence, line by line.
My publisher, David Fickling Books, employs a freelance copy-editor called Julia Bruce. Among publishers and booksellers, DFB are renowned for their attention to detail, and the care they put into every title they produce. As such, Julia is a true asset. She is very thorough.
A stickler for historical accuracy, she went through Wildwood Rising marking it with notes such as: “I don’t think there is any evidence of English medieval women wearing anything we might describe as mascara/eyeliner/eyeshadow etc. Kohl was used in the ancient world, Middle East and Africa, but not in medieval northern Europe.”
She also pointed out that the royal mint at Nottingham would not have begun operating in the year my story is set, and that medieval mirrors could not be smashed because they were made of polished metal, and that the word “galvanise” comes from a 19th Century scientific procedure and is therefore jarringly anachronistic. Dirks are 17th Century Scottish weapons, sealing wax came not in pots but on sticks, and sumpters are the wrong sort of horse to draw a medieval carriage.
Julia is even more punctilious regarding natural history. Her notes inform me: “Poison ivy is a North American plant, unrelated to ivy [Hedera spp].” Therefore, she suggests, poison ivy has no place in my Sherwood Forest. Equally flame-of-the-forest and fireflies and a host of other flora and fauna in my story are ecologically incoherent. The “flowstone walls” in Robin Hood’s cave would not exist as I’ve described them because the geology of the area would not allow it.
This sort of thing can be hard on the ego. It rallies defensive thoughts such as: “I’ve written a fantasy story, set in a myth-infused wildwood, not a natural history text book.”
But such an attitude is unhelpful. I remind myself that Julia is critiquing the story, not criticising me. Ultimately we want the same thing: for the novel to be the best it can possibly be.
But it’s not always easy. As well as factual accuracy, Julia turns a stern eye to the language. She points out where I’ve overused a phrase or construction. She highlights missing conjunctions and misuse of the present participle.
Here, my stock defensive response is: “I don’t care about grammar. I care about the rhythm and sound of the language. I care about the impact of the words on the reader.”
In fact, I find having my sentences critiqued even harder than my story as a whole. By this stage, I have made painstaking efforts to make the language as effective as possible. Now to have it prodded at and poked is difficult to take. To make matters worse, I no longer feel in complete control of the manuscript. Up until now, with broader story matters, Anthony has only ever made suggestions for me to act on or not.
Now, though, at the sentence level, Julia actually changes the text. She swaps out a dash for an ellipsis, or inserts a question mark, or occasionally even inverts the clauses in a sentence. She marks all this in track changes, and I’m free to accept or reject any alterations, but even so the process can feel like vandalism when a sentence I’ve crafted is taken to pieces.
Worst of all, this process rattles the cage of my inner perfectionist. If I’m not careful, I can sit for ten minutes thinking: “Now, is Julia right: would that sentence be clearer if it contained a comma?”
Here’s an example. In the original text I wrote: “It was a tiny, fluttering hope, as fragile as a newborn butterfly.”
Julia responded: “Butterflies aren’t really born, suggest newly emerged.”
Julia is right, of course, technically speaking. But how many readers will make the distinction, or care? And the proposed change, to “newly emerged butterfly”, gives the sentence the wrong rhythm, makes it clunky.
I considered lots of alternatives – “freshly formed,” “fresh fledged,” – as well as a different metaphor altogether – before finally settling on “new-formed butterfly.”
The resulting line still isn’t as good as the original – it lacks the fluidity that comes from the alliterating “b” – but I can’t afford to spend any more time on a single sentence – let it go!
And as much as this process might prickle the author’s ego, when I take a step back, I can see that it does the novel a great service.
For instance, I originally wrote: “In spite of himself, he found he was grinning. So many times, as a boy, he recalled reckless adventures like this.”
Julia changed this to: “In spite of himself, he found he was grinning. He recalled so many reckless adventures like this as a boy.”
At the time of writing, I knew there was something wrong with the original sentence, but it would never quite play nice, and in the end I simply pretended there was no problem. But the original line, of course, tells us that the character, when he was a boy, used to remember having reckless adventures. The reordered sentence tells us that, when he was a boy, he had reckless adventures, which is what I meant all along. Tweaks like this mean fewer places for the reader to trip over the narrative, giving them a smoother experience of the story as a whole.
I would pick poetic license over factual fidelity in a heartbeat, and lyrical language over grammatical accuracy even quicker. Therefore what a gift it is to have someone like Julia, with the opposite tendencies, focus her considerable powers on my manuscript. Her art is true gem-work, removing impurities one at a time, and polishing the whole artefact to an ever more lustrous sheen.
And if, at the end of 400 pages of notes, I was left with the impression she doesn’t like my story very much, I was reassured by her parting comments to my publisher: “I really did enjoy this. It made for a cracking read and is a fitting end to a fantastic trilogy. I hope Tim is very proud of it…it’s been a great privilege to work on.”
Thanks Julia!
And thanks to all of you for being here and joining me on this journey.
Happy reading!
Tim
If you enjoyed reading this, there’s a growing library of similar stuff on my Substack website, including this article about revising my first novel ahead of its rerelease:
And don’t forget to check out the start of the Blind Bowman trilogy, Shadow of the Wolf, which SFX Magazine called “wild, weird and wonderful,” and bestselling author Sally Green pronounced her “favourite book of the year.”
Another great article, Tim. I really enjoyed reading about the copy- editing and take my hat off to Julia and to you.