Editing Your Manuscript; Or Amputating Limbs
Today I did something I haven’t done in a while. I sat down and read my book from first page to last. I clipped my inner-editor’s wings and let myself get lost in the story. Guess what happened? I LOVED IT. Now, that my sound egomaniacal to you, but let me put this into context. For the last four months, I have been stuck in the seventh ring of hell that I like to call editing.
Painful, gut-wrenching, and confidence breaking. That’s editing. And every time I make an edit, it feels like cutting a little piece of myself off. Fingers for sentences, and arms and legs for whole paragraphs and pages. Yet, I do it because it’s necessary. Then, I send my baby off to beta readers, hoping they will tend to it as carefully as I have.
The hardest discovery through this process is the one we all knew the moment we picked up our first Dr. Seuss book. It’s a subjective experience. No two people feel exactly the same way about their Green Eggs and Ham. Beta reading can be likened to this experience. One may tell you that your opening chapter is on fire. The next tells you to cut, cut, cut. You fix one thing only to create another problem, another limb that needs cut off. And you find yourself wondering, where does it end? What will be left of me when I’ve sliced and diced and carved away?
Gold. Pure gold.
That’s the dream, anyway.
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