Contributor: Sally Jane Smith

This article is Part 3 of a three-part series on tackling a professional line edit. Read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

It wasn’t a magic wand.

It was the most strenuous – and the most confronting – practical task I have ever undertaken.

The Preparation

My work had already been through a manuscript consultation and multiple beta readers. Feedback had ranged from uplifting, through uncomfortable, to bewildering. I’d delved into it all, drafting and redrafting as the months and years ticked by.

I’d expected that this preparation would stand me in good stead, and I was both right and wrong.

Elisabeth from NY Book Editors agreed that I could skip a developmental review and progress straight to a line edit. I’d saved myself thousands of dollars.

But the text she sent back was riddled with digital redlining, and my smug anticipation of a light revision collapsed.

The Editorial Package

Two Word documents arrived in my inbox.

The eleven-page editorial memo was a gentle arrow to the heart of my book. It dealt with theme and structure, pacing and voice. And it exposed a mortal weakness: characterisation.

There was a reason why these particular travels had inspired me to write. The narrative might be a Bill Bryson-style travelogue, but it was based on a journey steeped in emotional growth.

Greece was where I reclaimed the wanderlust I’d lost after a traffic accident shattered my life a decade before. It was on Rhodes that I conquered temptation, and on the rim of Santorini’s volcano that I laid to rest the discontent that had me at risk of becoming a midlife stereotype. I abandoned anxiety in Delphi and faced fear on Kefalonia. I unearthed the decades-buried shortcomings in my relationship with my mother as I traced her footsteps on the Saronic islands, and found peace with her memory on the Peloponnese Peninsula.

It wasn’t until Elisabeth pointed it out, though, that I realised little of this character arc had made it onto the page. I’d given the reader no reason to care about me or my journey.

Her memo was perceptive and sensitive. It built me, and my story, up.

The second document, a line-by-line edit of my manuscript, almost broke me. Barely a paragraph had escaped her electronic pen. She’d sifted through them, critiquing, rearranging, striking through over-explanations and questioning assumptions of prior knowledge. She pointed out flaws I’d learned about in theory – filter clauses, passive sentences and nominalisations – but had difficulty recognising in my own work.

The Pain…

It certainly wasn’t the straightforward accept-or-reject exercise I’d expected.

I’d dreamed of an editor polishing my text with a soft cloth, handing it back to me all aglow, but what she did was point out the rough edges and pass me the sandpaper. She’d done her job; now it was my turn.

Most frustrating was that I couldn’t simply accept the majority of Elisabeth’s amendments. Sure, she’d caught typos that astonished me at having survived my countless revisions. Plus, she’d found a few startling inconsistencies.

Had I really said there were three gringas in the bus, when there’d been four of us all along?

And she showed a masterful touch in shuffling my words about, giving power to a sentence through a deft reordering of its phrases.

But her voice was very different from mine. Her version had a stranger telling my tale. And, try as I might, I couldn’t warm to the way she was telling it. Yet, her unsatisfying alternative opened my eyes to a distressing truth: I hadn’t told it as well as I’d thought I had.

Shouting, “You just don’t get it!” at my computer screen was one thing. Acknowledging it was my responsibility that the reader “got it” was another. If Elisabeth didn’t understand what I was trying to communicate, the problem was mine, not hers.

The Battle

I tackled the task in three rounds.

The first was the most painful. I grappled with the gritty detail, one phrase at a time. I ticked some of Elisabeth’s recommendations and flicked others. But the bulk, I sweated over, cursing as I wrestled the words into shape. Sometimes, they fought back. I’d pick my battles, highlighting the offending passages in yellow and moving on.

Elisabeth had pointed out spelling, idioms and measurements that might cause an American reader to stumble out of the story. I coloured these green. Occasionally she surprised me, both in what she’d changed and in what she hadn’t. I cross-checked a sample of potential omissions with an American friend who is a talented Spanish-English translator. He backed her up every time.

All the while, I kept her over-arching critique in mind, inserting a couple of rough paragraphs here or a cue to develop theme there. These, I highlighted in turquoise.

The manuscript was to become more colourful yet. In the second cycle of edits, I returned to the turquoise to work on the character and narrative arcs. In went the purple (anything to do with my mum) and the grey (my fear of buses or my middlescent discontent). I struggled through the yellow as I went, tussling with the recalcitrant sentences until they surrendered to my will.

By the time the bell rang for the third and final round, I knew I was winning. I turned back to Page 1 and worked my way through to the end, resolving any outstanding highlights and checking that the story still flowed.

…and the Glory!

Somewhere in the second round, the magic happened.

It was as if I’d turned a corner I didn’t even know was there. The words started to dance with life, rather than just report on events. The elusive “show, don’t tell” maxim made sense for the first time.

It’s hard to explain, because Elisabeth’s specific suggestions didn’t focus on this aspect of my writing. But the timing couldn’t have been mere coincidence. Somehow – combined with the cumulative effect of the advice I’d received from authors, the courses I’d completed, the reference books I’d read – the tortuous process of line edits set my words free.

I’m under no illusion that I’ve mastered the craft, but I am more excited about my writing journey than ever.

About Sally Jane Smith

Sally Jane Smith was injured when the bus on which she was travelling through Sri Lanka suffered a head-on collision. A decade on, she journeyed to Greece in a quest to recover her wanderlust – and proved it is possible for an out-of-shape, middle-aged traveller on a budget, armed only with a guidebook and her mother’s 1978 travel diary, to take that single step away from the mass tourism track and experience a life-changing adventure.

Connect with Sally Jane:

• On Facebook: @JustOneStepGreece
• On Twitter: @Just1StepGreece
• On Goodreads: @sally-jane-smith
• On her website: www.justonestepgreece.wordpress.com