“Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.”

~Patricia Fuller

So, you think you’re almost done? One more edit should do it! You’ve made sure the blue eyes on page 46 aren’t brown on page 220 and that Uncle Grady’s southern accent doesn’t come and go. Done and done!

Think again. You might benefit from eight more rounds, beta readers, a professional proofreader, or a digital typo fixer (they make apps for that!) before pressing “send” on your query.

Ahh. Editing. That little thang. As dearly as you might want to be finished or meet your self-imposed deadlines, I caution you against rushing. “Writing is rewriting” isn’t just a saying on a nerdy bumper sticker. Once you’ve written what you know, and your stranger-than-fiction story lines sound plausible, it’s time to take out the scalpel. To edit the hell out of yourself without losing your book’s essence.

You’ll be okay. It’s enchanting, this practice of stringing the right words together in the “right” order. You just might learn to like it. For your sake, I hope so. I can usually tell which of my retreat clients will get book deals and who won’t—and it comes down to their attitude about editing. The “pros” are willing, even hot, to take the magnifying glass to their manuscript, yet again. The shortcutters skim over clunky bits while trying to convince me why they’re ready. (They’re the same people who say things like, “I’ve been writing for ten years,” “I don’t want to market myself,” “I’m going to hire someone else to do my social media,” “I hate book proposals,” “My psychic says . . .”)

I’ve had clients argue that not everyone has to edit. They cite those famous few exceptions like Mozart, who was rumored to never make a change to a single note, or mega-bestseller Lee Child, who admits in this chapter to rarely editing a sentence of his Jack Reacher thrillers. My sister falls into this category. Born on Mozart’s birthday, even, Carol sneezes out her wildly popular newsletter—thousands of them by now, sent to her hundreds of thousands of subscribers—in minutes with hardly any edits. The audacity. Okay, I say. If you can figure out how to take constant and unerring dictation from the gods, be my guest. But there’s only one Mozart or Lee Child or smug little sister named Carol Allen. Some people are phenoms. The rest of us must learn to edit or pay someone who can.

In this chapter, we’ll break down the different kinds of edits and editors and how to use them, from the initial writing phase all the way through to publication. And in case you’re feeling like you’re the only one the Universe is toying with, I’ll include a few outrageous chopping-block stories behind some of your favorite books.

“Every writer needs a freelance editor!” said the flyer at Brodsky Bookshop. Really? Everybody? I hadn’t considered hiring out. I had a New York agent who was sending my proposal to publishers. But that wasn’t working, yet. Maybe I could up my game! If a freelancer could catch things Dan and I hadn’t and make my manuscript stronger, wasn’t it worth an hourly investment? I called the number promising PhD-level support for $35 an hour.

Deborah Susswein, a former English major who wielded The Chicago Manual of Style as if it were Lady Liberty’s torch, became my spiritual advisor. It no longer mattered that my agent still wasn’t the most communicative or that I hadn’t booked additional marquee names. I was being proactive, drinking from the chalice of liquid language, and I was a delighted drunk. They say the best editing is hidden, and maybe so, but not to me. This woman’s skillful nips and tucks turned me into a full-blown convert of the Church of Craft. The difference a few tweaks make! I’d been lost—or, rather, my pages had been—but over glasses of iced tea at an outdoor café under the shade of cottonwoods, they were becoming found.

Deborah was training me to better identify grammatical errors, break up long sentences for shorter ones, and use the active voice over the passive. She taught me the importance of reading a completed draft of a chapter or manuscript in its entirety before executing line edits. I’d make a day of these visits to Santa Fe, stopping on the way home for empanadas and ten-dollar Navajo turquoise earrings on the sidewalk of the plaza square. During my trek back to Jesse and Tosh, I’d offer prayers of thanks, a sort of amends to my parents, myself, the teachers who’d tried and failed to hold my attention: each mile in gratitude to my mission and my muse.

Just like years before, my writing improved every day. Little did I know how much the skills I was learning through these sessions would inform my manuscript for the most important interview of my career so far. Or how blessed I was to have found a literary love match out of the gate in my freelance editor. Not only was Deborah a tree hugger who drew little smiley faces and trees in the margins of my pages where my interviewees talked about saving the environment, but she knew how to make me laugh. “Just one more celeb!” she’d say, echoing my agent and bending down in a pretend stance to avoid getting hit. But I felt her genuine faith in the book, which made me double down in my commitment to making my chapters stronger.

Carol Allen

When I wrote my first self-help relationship book [Love Is in the Stars], I had many early readers give me feedback—colleagues, teachers, mentors, therapists, clients, writing coaches—everyone I could think of to help assure the book was truly helpful and “ready.” And although I’d put it through endless rounds of edits, I wanted it to be perfect, so I hired a line editor.

“I just want you to make sure my i’s are all dotted and my t’s are all crossed,” I told her. “I’ve had this fully pre-screened and pre-qualified and don’t want any editorial feedback at all. Just stick with grammar and punctuation.” She agreed. Weeks later she turned it in with perfect line editing, but she couldn’t help herself . . . All over it were the very comments I’d feared, of those internal voices that had kept me from attempting to write a book in this genre before. Comments like, “We’ve all heard this before,” “John Gray already says this in his books,” and “Everyone knows this,” were scribbled all over the sides in her blue ink scrawl. And to think I was paying her! The very first stranger to read my work didn’t have a single kind thing to say.

I was enormously grateful to be forty, and experienced, and well-loved and encouraged for decades by wonderful people before she came along, so her words didn’t slow me down. And they didn’t stop me from sharing that book with the world—a book that became the foundation of an entire business and career in which I’ve helped thousands of women with their relationships. But they could have, and I shudder to think of the many writers stopped by the criticism and feedback of people they think are on their side.

Seth Godin

Different people need different kinds of editors. We need to distinguish between line editing, copy editing, and project editing. A copy editor is somebody who makes sure you don’t use semicolons the wrong way. I have one of those. We’ve never met, and I don’t use her for my blog, but for the books I’ve written recently, it’s been a pleasure. You send a Word file to someone, and it comes back with the little things fixed.

A line editor is much harder to find. A line editor is somebody who can think the way you want to think and say, “Let’s rearrange these six sentences.” If you can find somebody like that, who you trust, you should work with them forever.

A project editor is priceless. They might deserve more of the project than you get. The project editor is the person who says to Jerry Lewis, “Don’t make that movie about the clown.” That one sentence is worth, what, $10 million? I’m always on the search for that. I’ve been lucky to have a couple of partners and semi-partners through the years that have been insightful enough and wise enough, and kind enough to speak up about the projects, but in general, you will be disappointed. It’s really hard to do that for someone else, so you’d better get good at doing it for yourself.

There he was! Woody Harrelson, hoisted two hundred feet up in the air on cables, hanging off the Golden Gate Bridge. Jesse’d hooked our TV up to our new solar panels and I couldn’t look away from the unfolding drama. Traffic was at a complete halt for hours in both directions; swarms of police cars and media trucks looked as plentiful as ants. Like an eco-criminal mastermind from a superhero blockbuster, Woody was putting his life and career on the line to save a sixty-thousand-acre redwood grove from a scheduled clear cut. I was riveted.

I no longer cared if he didn’t want to do the interview. He was doing it, damn it. I called his assistant, told her it was time, and she agreed, laughing about how patient I’d been. Woody met me for lunch at his favorite raw-food restaurant in Santa Monica for the first of several interviews, and over hummus wraps and green tea, we chatted like we’d been best buds all along.

“Be careful not to forget your environmental ideals when you become successful, Linda,” Woody warned me, eyes unblinking.

“Thank you. I hear you. You have my word,” I said, returning his stare.

“It makes me crazy sometimes, being so concerned with environmental issues,” he said. “I really ingest the world’s problems. A lot!”

“Ditto,” I concurred, hoping he didn’t recall my use of toxic tanners. As Woody talked about going to see the Headwaters redwood forest in Northern California, where sixty thousand acres of forest, mostly “magical” redwoods, some as old as two thousand years old, were marked with blue paint, signifying which ones were to be cut down, I lost my appetite. My mind was already organizing his chapter. People had no idea. I’d need to be courageous; my future publisher too.

“The area I was in no longer exists today,” he said, nostrils flaring. “It was completely destroyed. Over half of the sixty thousand acres is stump fields now, heavily logged. A lot of ancient trees go down, and even the smaller trees are often killed because when the big trees are taken down, their huge mass kills the trees in their path.” I cried in the car ride back to Carol’s house, loving and hating humanity.

Lee Child

I do very little, almost no rewriting. I have a kind of nervous habit, which is that these books have got to be pacey. They’ve got to be fast. You get the feeling when you’re writing them that you’re burning through stuff at such a pace that the book is going to be way too short. There are usually two paragraphs in there that are just rubbish, just rambling. But I leave them in, for the time being. I leave them because I’m thinking, I can’t make this book even shorter. But then, when I get to the end, it’s perfectly long enough, everything is fine. So, I go back, and I take out those two baggy paragraphs. That’s the only rewriting I do.

It’s a peculiar thing for me. I promise you I’m a completely normal, sane person. But when I’m writing, I feel like the action’s really happening. It is taking place. You can’t go back and change that. It’s like life itself. In real life, if something happens that we don’t necessarily love, it happened. We can’t change that afterward. That’s how I feel about the story.

I live for the story. If I knew what was going to happen, then I’m done. I’d want the next story. If I knew what was going to happen, I would be bored sitting there for six months typing it out, and I think that would show through. I’ve also learned to love rabbit holes. If you write in an uncontrolled manner, then you just randomly come up with great stuff. I feel that if it was outlined, I would have to ignore those, and that would feel like wearing a straitjacket.

Next, Arnold Palmer’s cancer was in remission! Hallelujah. Our interview was back on. In the weeks up to my trip to Florida, everyone had the same refrain: “He’s the nicest. One of the greatest people in sports. You’ll looooove him!” Arnie earned his reputation as a sweetheart from a billion charitable acts, ready smiles, jokes, and photos taken with the public. As the “John Wayne of sports” since the fifties when he’d taken golf from the realm of the rich and brought it to the masses, his army of fans, who still called themselves “Arnie’s Army,” were so loyal they’d kick his wayward balls back onto the greens. Such a rock star to his rowdy galleries, Arnold was the only player to require state troopers to keep the peace on a course. And as the first sportsman to endorse products (totaling over a hundred), he’d grown to popularity at a time when television was new and needed heroes. No bigs. He’d only given something like twenty thousand interviews.

But what if the 20,001st one wasn’t the charm? Was it a sign that my plane landed amidst hurricane warnings, the rain coming down in sheets as I white-knuckled my gutless rental car through the slick roads? I’ve come so far; just please get me there in one piece! I was hot and starting to sweat—was it because of the thick humidity or nerves? I was about to meet a legend, and inside his freaking house! Arnold wouldn’t know me to look at me, and I’d never walked his dog—does he even have a dog again?—but before too long, there it was: the driveway to Arnold’s home, white buildings set against grand foliage and swaying palms.

“You can call me Arnie,” he said to my “Mr. Palmer.” His handshake was firm, his gaze warm. But I soon sensed an undercurrent of . . . was it boredom? “Tired for it,” as Tosh used to say as he’d torpedo green beans to the floor of a crowded restaurant, demanding candy. Arnie wanted candy; I could see it in his eyes as he glanced longingly out the windows at the growing green swampland that was his lady love.

Being professionals, we both faked it. He looked as if he was doing his best to appear interested, but his answers were short, without elaboration. I stayed chipper and light, unlike the weather. And then it came. Every cell in my body could feel the futility of this exercise. Arnold hates this. I’m only here for a favor. Change the energy to engage his higher nature, or the interview’s a dud!

“Does the wastefulness of modern society bother you?” I asked, proud of the hours of research behind that question. Arnold was born the month of the start of the Great Depression. He detested two things: wearing hats in restaurants and our throwaway culture.

Arnold froze as if I’d just put my feet up on his desk, his eyes steely, glaring into the frigid air-conditioned space between us.

“Does the wastefulness of modern society bother me?” Arnold shook his head, bit his upper lip. “What in God’s name would you know about that?”

There it was. He loathed that I was here. I stared right back, refusing to be intimidated. I didn’t come this far to be treated like the asshole I wasn’t. With nothing to lose at this point, I went for it.

“I know a lot about that,” I said, making my own eyes steely and sucking air into my lungs. “I had my baby at home with a midwife after a thirty-six-hour labor without drugs and breastfed him until he was three and a half. By choice, I live in a cabin on 365 acres of raw land in northern New Mexico that we saved from tree poachers. I use an outhouse in freezing temperatures. We don’t have running water or electricity or even insulation; our cabin runs on solar power. I chop up dead wood for heat and lug water in jugs to do dishes. This book I’m interviewing you for is heavily focused on saving the environment because I personally think humans are a plague on the natural world, and the wastefulness of modern society is killing all of us.”

Arnold was quiet for a few beats. Then he let out a huge belly laugh. “No kidding!” he bellowed, his cheeks rosy. “Hot damn! I thought you were some rich Beverly Hills brat!”

“Nope,” I answered. “At one time, I had a dog-walking business in Beverly Hills, but we left because, frankly, all the wealth and shallowness freaked us out.”

For the next hour, Arnie explained that in rural Pennsylvania, where he was raised, his father wasn’t allowed to use the pool at the country club for which he was a greenskeeper. “Nothing made me happier than buying that golf course,” he said, chuckling. Then he explained at great length how to shoot rabbits for food—not that I ever could—in case Jesse, Tosh, and I ever went hungry living so far from civilization. We compared outhouse notes, laughing about the racket hail makes on the ceiling when you’re trying to do your business.

In the weeks that followed, as I edited Arnold’s chapter, again and again, I felt grateful and proud that I’d been stubborn enough to stick with the book long enough to warrant his involvement. Please, let his chapter be Arnie-approved!

Another prayer answered.

“Linda!” Sue Brodie said with excitement weeks later. “I just saw Arnie at a tournament, and he said that his interview with you was one of the best of his life. Maybe even the best.”*

Sabaa Tahir

Oh my God. If you could see my first drafts, you’d think, Sabaa doesn’t know what she’s doing.

There’s a whole draft section of The Writer’s Home Companion about how Elizabeth Bishop rewrote the poem “One Art” over and over and over again. I remember reading it—my brother got me the book when I was thirteen, and it was life-altering. It put me on this trajectory because there’s an entire chapter that’s just about her many, many drafts of one of my favorite poems, showing how bad some of the early drafts were. You read them and think, Wait, but she made this publishable?

That’s also something I saw in the news a lot. We had reporters at the Washington Post who were Pulitzer Prize–winning reporters. I’d seen their first drafts, which was so enlightening. To know that these people who were considered the top of their game would sometimes turn in garbage. Then, they would get it to where it needed to be over the course of days or weeks. What a wonderful thing. Kind of a reprieve for our souls, to know that it’s possible. I wish more young writers knew that this is the process, the real process. It’s not just that you come up with these magical things. They’re iterations.

Being a writer was like living on a roller coaster—one of the rickety old wooden ones that look as if it might not last another day or tear you up, limb from limb, but instead gifts you with the ride of your life. (Witness: When Dan finally did get me a book deal, one of the most vocal Team Linda executives at my publisher just happened to be a long-term die-hard member of Arnie’s Army.)

With the addition of a world-class icon, it was time to ensure my sample chapters and proposal were world-class. I had to further “kill my darlings”—a famous editing term.

The expression first appeared in a Cambridge lecture in 1913 by author and critic Arthur Quiller-Couch, who instructed writers to “murder your darlings”—that is, be ruthless in the elimination of things you adore but that don’t help your story. (Like any truth that hits a collective nerve, the idea’s been adapted many times and attributed to a handful of authors, including William Faulkner, Oscar Wilde, Allen Ginsberg, Chekov, and Stephen King—who wrote, “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”)

Not an easy task when everything that came out of my new best friend Arnie’s mouth was darling to me. I had forty pages of transcripts and hundreds of pages of research to condense down to the twenty or so book pages I’d allotted each celebrity. I longed to make his chapter at least forty pages, but if I gave in to my whims, it could upset the book’s balance, and make manufacturing more costly for my eventual publisher. Fortunately, I’d been on a murderous rampage for years already. I could do this!

I’d been collecting personal photos for every chapter, and Arnold gave me carte blanche to use as many pictures from his life as I chose. I wanted to use twenty, but again, in thinking about the book’s balance and costs (images are expensive to publish—who knew if I’d be allowed), I settled on five: Arnold with his dad, Deke; playing golf as a kid with his little sister, Lois Jean, holding the bag; Arnie and Jack Nicklaus walking in a tournament; Arnold’s 1964 Master’s victory at Augusta; and a pic with his wife, Winnie, their daughters, grandchildren, and dog. I made sure I had permission in writing from each photographer and triple-checked the spelling of all photo credits.

As I’d done with each interviewee, I gave Arnold final editing approval of his chapter. For most journalists, this is a big no-no. Can you imagine the disaster of working for a newspaper or a TV network and giving your interviewee the chance to vet everything? You’d never get a true news story! But this wasn’t news, and no one was on trial—and there were several points that needed clarification. But doing so was risky. Anyone could change their mind once seeing our words in black and white. Being such a fan of all of my interviewees, I also never wanted to turn anyone off if what I sent made me sound like a sycophantic kiss-ass.

My fears disappeared with Arnold’s final approval. Breathing easier, I made the agonizing decision to cut the last non-celebrity interviewees. Carol was worried. “You’ve spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours on those chapters. Are you okay?” I was. I wasn’t disappointed for the book’s content, which had only increased in value in my eyes with the addition of each well-known personality. What I hated was letting those worthy unsung storytellers down. I’d been passionate about sharing details of their work with the world and my heart and my arm felt heavy picking up the phone for those calls. But this was business. I wasn’t going to let my emotions hinder my chances of being ready for market.

On the plus side, no writing is ever wasted. I’d been building my editorial skills with every hour spent. Do concert pianists, presidential portraitists, or Olympic ice skaters regret their hours of practice? I rest my case.

Laura Munson

I’m about to go out on book tour with a novel. I’ve got two books I’m working on, so it’s a little like I’m leaving them hanging. But I have to believe that when we’re so close to our work, we memorize it like a song, and it actually might not be harmonious. It might even be discordant. I think it’s important to leave our work so that we can un-memorize it, come back, and read it fresh to see if it really sings.

A month before Willa’s Grove was due to my publisher, I decided to cut a hundred pages and rewrite them. I don’t recommend doing that, but if you’re a true writer, let the book give itself to you. Sometimes that means working until the very end. And then you have to let it go.

Mary Karr

I threw away 1,200 finished pages. I threw away the equivalent of four finished books before I turned in the final manuscript to Lit, so it was very agonizing for me. At one point, I considered selling my apartment and giving all the money back. I despaired of ever finishing it. But none of my books has been particularly easy to write.

When I threw those pages Away with a capital A, I knew how crummy they were, or else I would have saved them. They were terrible. Trust me. If somebody says, “How do you know?” I’m like, “I know. I know for a living. I’ve been teaching for thirty years. I know what bad writing looks like.” Everybody generates tedious work. It stands between you and the truth—it’s brush you burn before you put the garden in.

When I was at my nadir, I had a wonderful moment when I had finally thrown it away. It was my third sort of pass, and I had thrown away my last hunk of it—a big hunk, several hundred pages. I sat at home and wept for five days. I walked around in my underpants, and I didn’t see anybody but the guy who delivered curry. I just wept and watched Oprah. I just didn’t know what to do. Finally, I called Don DeLillo, whom I’m lucky enough to know. I was snubbing and wiping my nose on the back of my hand.

He said, “What’s the matter?”

I said, “I’ve written a really bad book. It’s terrible. You can’t believe how bad it is.”

And he said kind of the perfect thing. He said, “Well, who doesn’t?”

I thought, This is arguably the greatest English language novelist alive, and he’s saying, “Well, of course, we all write bad books.” I was able to exhale for the first time in seven years.

After whittling down the remaining interviews in my manuscript, killing darlings left, right, and center, I sent the whole shebang back to Deborah for polishing. “You can fix anything but a blank page,” says Nora Roberts. Well, at least I had PAGES! Through friends, I also enrolled a few people I didn’t know—who would therefore not be biased—to read the book and offer feedback. Nowadays, there are places where you can hire these “beta readers”—people in your target market who will give you a detailed written assessment of your project. (I’ve used one company for this book and loved the thorough report. See BookMama.com/BWBookLinks for recommendations.)

Overwhelmed by writing and editing? Every writer you love has been there. They found their way. You will too. I didn’t know it when I started, but there are several levels of editing. Developmental editing saves many a writer from the time suck of falling down deep story rabbit holes from which they may never emerge. How incredible it is to have help with your big-picture thinking, as in: What are your book’s themes? How should it be organized? What’s the narrative arc?

After the developmental editing is done, you can commend your manuscript to the very capable hands of a copy editor, whose job is to make sure that grammar and spelling are correct. (Deborah Susswein was my freelance copy editor.) After the book is set into type at your publishing house, the copy editor hands off the eagle-eyes job to the proofreader, who checks carefully, word by word, line by line, that the manuscript has been typeset correctly. If you’re planning to self-publish, it’s a good idea to hire both a developmental editor and a copy editor who can also pinch-hit as a proofreader.

Some writers have the good fortune of getting a crack editor’s eagle eye as part of a publishing deal. For all of us, however, I recommend hiring that outside help before you or your agent submits your manuscript to publishers to better the odds of getting a book deal. My in-house editor friends tell me that lousy grammar and punctuation are grounds alone for rejecting a proposal; publishers are concerned that this kind of sloppiness and laissez-faire attitude toward accuracy can leak into the book in other ways.

These days, before sending my work off to my freelance editor Betsy Rapoport, or Vy Tran, my editor at BenBella, the publisher for this book—or my sister, who jokes that everyone should have an early reader who was actually there and will write over your shoulder—I copy and paste my chapters into Grammarly.com or ProWriter. This is not an ad (maybe it should be—I need to work on monetizing my work!), but I love editing apps. I’m an obsessive editor, but I’ll never be the grammar or punctuation master that Deborah was or that Betsy and Vy are. I don’t have to be. There are apps for that! That doesn’t mean this step is always foolproof, however. AI is fallible. And finding the right editorial support is not unlike dating. You wouldn’t want to marry upon first glance, and you might need several dates before finding the right editing partner. Maybe test your compatibility with a chapter or two versus a whole book.

Lastly, it’s good to know that agents are not editors! Sometimes you’ll get lucky with one that can do double duty, but make it your priority to turn in clean copy.

Rosie Walsh

I rewrote forty thousand words, completely scrapping what had come before, not using a single word. I could tell that nothing about what I had honored the pace of the first two-thirds. I sent it to my UK editor anyway, hoping she’d say, “Yeah, it’s fine,” and I wouldn’t have to work on it anymore. She didn’t say that.

I’d gotten my UK deal on a partial manuscript because she’d fallen in love with it early, which was lovely. But then I delivered an ending she wasn’t happy with. I felt terrible; she’d taken a risk buying a book on a partial manuscript—a big leap of faith for any publisher—which is exactly why they don’t do it. In many ways, I found it more stressful because of disappointing her, just obsessing, “She’s got to be thinking, My God! Why did I buy this bloody author? She’s terrible!” Of course, that’s not what she was thinking, but rather, I want to make this book outstanding. Instead of emailing me her thoughts, she emailed: “Are you free to talk on the phone?” Shit. Needless to say, her feedback was that it didn’t work. She said it very nicely, but firmly.

I rewrote it again, completely scrapping those forty thousand words. She sent another email: “Free for a phone chat?” The same thing happened. I rewrote it for a third time. Once again, there was maybe a couple of hundred words in that forty thousand I could salvage (not including the ten thousand my US editor, Pamela Dorman, would later chop out, in addition to all of the other words I’d chopped as an author when making my own previous passes). There are about three novels’ worth of outtakes if anyone wants them.

We have to find ways of not caring. The reluctance to give up and start again is paralyzing. The horror we experience ditching our hard-written words is intense. I owe my UK editor, Sam Humphreys, a huge debt of gratitude because I don’t think Ghosted would have sold around the world had she not sent me back to the drawing board again and again.

Pam [Dorman] was everything I had hoped for and more. I learned more with my initial six-week edit with her than I had in eight years of writing full-time. She is incisive and thoughtful, with an incredible ability to drill down to the core and cut out all the surrounding crap, which never feels like crap. “Clean” is the precise word; it felt so clean once she was finished. Like there wasn’t a word out of place.

It doesn’t matter what your intentions are. Sometimes your best-laid plans are appalling. There were many details that got scrapped. I thought they added dramatic tension. But they, like other ancillary characters, were unnecessary. They detracted from the tension, whereas when I was plotting the book, they felt so important. The first time I saw entire chapters being crossed out by my UK and US editors, my heart was in my throat. I thought, Oh my God! What is she doing?

“Just try it. See how it reads,” I said to myself. Surprise, surprise, it read well.

My writing partner said, “I can’t believe you’re so willing; some cuts seem so brutal.” But when I look at myself, who has completed five novels, and then I look at Pam, who’s edited hundreds of novels, many of them global bestsellers, I think she’s more on the money than I am. That’s my rule. Give it a go. Leave it for a few days. If you cannot stop thinking about it, put it back in.

Gabrielle Bernstein

I was a speaker and hired an editor to clean up after me. I suddenly knew exactly what to do because there was somebody sweeping up and reorganizing and restructuring my sentences, fixing the grammatical errors. I didn’t have to be afraid of writing and could let myself be free.

I had recently befriended [a famous author]. I said, “Lady! What did you do? Did you know how to write a book? How did you do it?”

She said, “Call Bonnie B. She’s a writing coach, and she’ll help you get your outline together, find your voice, and help you get organized.”

I worked with Bonnie for four months. She was an angel sent from heaven with a southern accent. She said, “Darlin’, I don’t know why, but I think I need to work with you,” and I was like, “All right, whatever it takes.” I sent her a check and said, “Let’s go.”

Bonnie taught me how to write an outline. She said, “You know what, Gabby, just write, and I will clean it up after you.” She didn’t want me to edit myself. She was brilliant. She set me up to win as a writer. She said, “Write how you speak.” I was so comfortable speaking. After the first chapter, I was off to the races. I knew exactly what to do because there was somebody editing behind me.

I found so much freedom in that process. That was my first book, Add More Ing to Your Life. In the five books that followed, I worked with another editor, Katie, who has become my writing companion. Katie doesn’t ghost. I write every word of my books, but she cleans them up. She sweeps up the chapters behind me. I will write a chapter, and let me tell you a little secret, I won’t even read the chapter, and I’ll send it to Katie to edit. Then I go on to the next chapter. Once she sends it back, I’ll go back and read that first chapter and start moving things around.

I write the whole book. Then I have Katie clean it up a little bit more, and then I send the book to my husband, who reads the book to reorganize. He’s a really good writer, much better than I am. He’ll read for content to make sure things are making sense. He pushes back and moves things around. By the time I submit to publishers, I have maybe five line edits. It’s done, so clean. Any one of my editors will tell you this—that they get the cleanest manuscripts from Gabby Bernstein. And they’re always on time.

Cheryl Strayed

It’s interesting to hear the perspectives of others. If it’s an editor I trust, I try hard to listen to that person—my editor, Robin Desser, for example. She always has really wise things to say. I don’t do everything she suggests. Some of it I take, some I leave, and some I make into something else. But across the board, I try to hear what people have to say and respond to the extent that I can. But I also recognize that there’s no accounting for taste. There’s no book or script that anyone has ever written in the history of books or scripts that everyone loved or that everyone hated.

Subjectivity is part of art. It’s my own subjectivity—I think that sentence is good that way, instead of that way—versus somebody else’s idea of that, where I’ve learned to either stand my ground and say, “No, this is the best way,” or “Oh. You know what? You’re right. Thank you.”

Thank goodness for editors. I love editors. We are not working against each other. When I think about the first draft of Wild versus the final draft, I feel nothing but gratitude for Robin, who weighed in mightily. I did all the work. I did all the writing. But she really helped me think about some very important things, large and small.

Not every writer likes sitting alone in a room staring at a screen. Many agree that it’s more fun to have written a book than to write one. But as my sister says, “Better right than rushed. Better WRITE than rushed.” I wonder who she plagiarized that from?

An unexpected benefit of so much rejection for Lives Charmed was that I’d had the space and motivation to edit my book a jillion times. Make it as clean and tight as I could.* Those efforts paid off. When Matthew, my eventual editor at my first publisher, sat down to clean up my manuscript, he said there wasn’t really anything to do!

Imagine that. The girl with the C+ average in high school didn’t need no fixin’. With my biggest interview yet now in the can—edited to perfection, I must say—and my first of two Woody interviews done, I was excited. Ready for even BIGGER things. Surely, they were coming—maybe even to our little forest, such a magical location. I’d put in the time. Followed directions, both internal and external. And become a good student. I’d done everything right, right? My sweet book project felt positively magnetic.

__________________

*Tip! When someone raves about you or your work, even in passing, act quickly and ask permission to use their quote for your book and/or marketing materials. Arnie didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by choosing me over them. But he did give me carte blanche to quote him saying our interview was “one of the best.” Score! That blurb lives forever on the back cover of Lives Charmed.

*Trust your readers. Resist overwriting. (Despite what you may have heard, the masses aren’t all asses.)

18

Edit, Edit, and Then Write Some More

Fun Fact: Writing Is Rewriting