For the past two days I’ve been going through copy edits for my next book, GETTING AWAY WITH IT. I’ve never quite done things this way before; when I’ve written for Little Black Dress and Mills & Boon, I would get proofs of the book (ie already typeset, looking like the book itself will look, with two pages printed on one side of A4) with the copy-edits already done, and I had to look at those and make whatever changes I wanted, along with working on any queries the copy editor had. With such a tight turnaround on these shorter novels, I suppose it was easier for everyone just to do the copy edits and proofs at the same time.
But this time I received a copy of the manuscript itself, with the copy editor’s notes right on it, so I could see every change and suggestion she’d made. What a treat! For one thing, it looked like another language. Copy editors have their own special set of marks that they make, so it was like being confronted with a marvellous secret code.
But the best thing was to see my prose being improved right before my eyes. Awkward phrases smoothed out, repetition eliminated, confusion righted. It was a lovely lesson in readability and for a perfectionist like me, it was wonderful.
For example, I have a tendency to write speech as I hear it in my head, mostly with lots and lots of run-on sentences and with far too many exclamation marks. In my normal prose, I try to steer away from exclamation marks and run-ons, but in dialogue, they’re everywhere. Those little squiggles and coded annotations taught me that I need to pay a bit more attention to how my dialogue reads on the page.
I sniggered a couple of times. I blogged here about my massive “just”-purge before submitting the manuscript, where I went through and cut as many “just”s as I possibly could. But there were at least two times when the copy editor put the “just” back in. Fair enough—or should I say just?
Of course along with this I had to reread the story, paying attention to every word, and that was fun too. I swore and cursed at this story while I was writing it, and it’s such a relief to read it and see that actually, I think it works now. And it feels even better because I know I had to sweat to make it work. It helps me with the faith that even though the rough draft of the book I’m writing might not be perfect or even close to it, eventually I’ll find solutions for the problems I’m facing.
There were two other very fun things I got to do with the manuscript this time round. When I revised the ms for my editor, I got to put in chapter headings, which was great. Interestingly, my editor chose most of those headings, lifting phrases straight from the chapters. I thought it was brilliant how you could sum up 10 or 15 pages with a single phrase from those pages. It became sort of like a treasure hunt for me—what phrase was the phrase? This time, the copy editor suggested some chapter headings for the chapters I hadn’t named, which are the ones in the heroine’s sister’s point of view. And she did the same thing, lifting phrases straight from the text. How editors learn to do this I do not know, but it’s a huge treat for me, and makes me see my own story in a different way.
The second thing I got to do was change my hero’s car, from this:
Aston Martin Vanquish
to this:
Aston Martin DBS V12
A small change, but very satisfying.
Thank you, as always for sharing. Got to the first car picture and was about to scream No Don’t Swap it. . . .then saw second one. Like Wow.
Rather gorgeous, ain’t it?
Ha! My hero in my just sold first novel drives one of these! In ‘Casino Ice’
Great taste, Sally! And congratulations on the sale of your first novel! That’s great news.
I, too, feared you were going to swap the Aston for something less worthy. But what’s better than a Brosnan Bond car? A Craig Bond car! (Even if I might get sniffy about that flip into the air in Casino Royale. With that centre of gravity? Havin’ a laugh. Vesper Lynd would so have been roadkill…)
LOL Kate, I wish I’d talked to you earlier about this, I would have stolen that roadkill line to put in the book!
You’ll have to write another one about stunt drivers, then.
OMG I want the car. I’d kill myself, that’s guaranteed but I’m almost sure it would be w,orth it
It’s so funny that some of your justs had to be put back in and I can’t wait to see what the chapter headings are.