Ink Tea Stone Leaf

I’m taking a short break from editing The Ghost of Canard University today in order to talk about how things are going with that book. Sometimes you’ve got to do that, or you go insane from staring at your own words for too long, wondering how you could have put them together so amateurishly.

Is “editing” the right verb for this? What I’m actually doing is evaluating the work of a professional editor whom I have contracted with, going line by line and adjusting the text in correspondence with their suggestions and corrections. Essentially, the editor has read the text I provided very closely (closer than anybody, perhaps even me), and identified instances of weak prose styling, redundant or contradictory information, and logical inconsistencies in characterization and point of view. There turned out to be somewhat more of these than I would have liked, but as I comb through each note, consider the implications, and make the necessary changes, I can feel the book coming together in a more satisfying way. And that’s what it’s all about, right?

The good news is, my editor returned the text to me with a lot of very complimentary comments on my dialog, characters, and structure. As if to encourage me as I go along, they even sprinkled some compliments in the notes to go along with all the little things I did just right the first time around. Occasionally a note comes along next to a sly little joke I wrote which says something like “this is indeed amusing,” which I think strikes the right balance between affirming that I do know what it means to be funny, and not deluding me into launching an ill-advised foray into stand-up comedy.

On the other hand, even as I approach this stage of the project with as open a mind as possible, determined to do everything necessary to turn this book into the best version itself and worthy of my ultimate goal of publication, it is an inherently frustrating process. I can recall agonizing over some of these paragraphs, trying to get them to fall into something like a coherent exposition of the narrative. To see one of them highlighted and be told to do it better is exhausting, even if it comes with a helpful suggestion on how to proceed.

I have mixed feelings about being told to cut certain passages. Sometimes I welcome it, because I never exactly wanted to write that part anyway and I only did because, in my inexperience, I thought I needed to. Other times, the passage may contain a sentence with a combination of words that I am particularly fond of, and I despair as I can find nowhere else in the text to transplant them. If I find myself in agreement that the passage as a whole ought to be cut, what can I do?

A friend of mine, who also read a draft of this book recently, gave me a piece of time-worn advice: “kill your darlings,” or don’t keep something that isn’t working just because you happen to like it. My editor essentially gave me the same advice, and then provided me with a long list identifying precisely which darlings I ought to smother in their sleep. I think resentment is the natural, even correct, emotion to feel under those circumstances. On the other hand, the story is the most darling thing of all, and the natural response to measures taken for its health and well-being ought to be gratitude.

But damn, it must be hard to be an editor, signing death warrants for all those darlings.

Being edited is a humbling experience. Sometimes when you’re writing a first or second draft, you find yourself breaking a little rule, or bending it just a little, because you like the way it looks and you think it reads better than the prescribed style, and you’re certain that not only will any editors or general readers agree, they’ll actually applaud you for thinking outside the box and making bold decisions. Then you find it singled out for execution with a polite yet firm reminder of the orthodox position regarding the use of adverbs in dialog tags (“don’t ever do it”), and you have to make a choice. Do you bow to authority? Or do you insist that for all the weight of tradition and stylistic integrity, this one particular adverb must live?

Most of the time, I simply defer, because I trust that my editor has understood through all of my idiosyncrasies and oversights what it is I am trying to do in telling this story. As I have said to anybody who will listen over the past year, it is the themes that matter: I am just an aspiring writer trying to provide these themes with a habitable home. I have my stubborn fixations and my predilections, but I am determined not to undermine my own foundation.

At times, the suggested changes require a more fundamental reworking of my approach than I foresaw myself making. The Ghost of Canard University begins with a mystery, and I took that approach to heart, withholding several pieces of significant information about certain characters until deep into the narrative. Unfortunately, I also withheld a good deal of contextual information that is ultimately necessary to understand, in the first few chapters, just what the hell is going on. After I read those notes, and as I experimented with recasting scenes with a few clarifying comments and even straightforward exposition, I had to admit that the book was getting better, and the mystery was not spoiled. It’s as if some people know what they’re doing.

One of the more interesting aspects of the process has been discovering the cracks and fissures in the story’s overall construction. To put it simply, there are two complete drafts of Canard University in existence. The second draft, the one which my editor has, was created by opening up the files of the each chapter of the first draft and directly revising them, rewriting or tweaking as much as I deemed necessary to bring the story into greater cohesion. But the first draft itself, especially its early chapters, was often being revised and rewritten in the same way as I incorporated concepts that did not definitively become part of the book until I was working on the later chapters. There are passages that survived from the very first go through the story, and which remained un-revised because I did not realize that they were inconsistent with, or flatly contradictory of, something definitively established later on. A lot of what I am doing now involves filling in those cracks, so that discrepancies between different conceptions of this novel (its ghosts, if you forgive that word) are no longer apparent in the final work.

I am still hopeful that, when I have finished adjusting all that needs adjusting, this novel will retain the same basic structure and shape that I originally envisioned for it. That’s the architecture, and this (all this composition and editing and ruminating and agonizing) is the engineering, necessary to ensure its stands under its own weight. One day, the engineering may be nearly invisible to the vast majority of people who interact with this work, but the architecture will hold up. It is extremely fortunate that I’ve found somebody who is patient and knowledgeable enough to help me get it done.

In other news, I have been giving some thought to a second book, though I refuse to begin writing it until this one is done. Whether to write a sequel or not has been a question I have not definitively answered even to myself: does this story stand on its own, or are its setting and characters in need of revisiting? As it is, I had an idea in the shower the other day for a narrative involving one of the principal characters of Canard University. I hope it won’t take me another twenty years to commit something to the page, but it seems like the natural place to start.