Torture for fun and profit

It's Friday. WOOT! And I've got a day off. Bigger WOOT! So what am I doing with my precious, hard-earned free time? Why, torturing myself, of course, I'm editing one of my fiction books.

Anyone who says 'writing a book is easy' has never written one, no matter how true the words might be. The writing ,is the easy part but not in the way you're thinking. Remember that when you sit down in front of your keyboard intending to write that great epic roaming around in there.

There are many phases to writing: the spark of an idea, getting to know your characters, your theme, building your world, then there's outlining, plotting, working out how long your book is going to be. Then you can get down to writing. How long will it take you to do the first draft? A month? Two? Six? A year? More? How fast is your typing speed? Can you eek out the hours to do this? Is your family going to interrupt you at the drop of a hat? A few calculations then, with a moderate speed and no interruptions: ambitious page count, say twenty in a day, that's about 5000 words - at least it is on my screen (Times New Roman font)- that's gonna take you 20 days if you're conscientious for a 100k book, 24 days for 120k. Not quite so ambitious, ten pages a day, 48 days; not ambitious at all, five pages, 96 days, okay 2000 words a day, 50 days and so on. Not looking so easy now is it?

What about the genre? Are you even writing in the one that's right for you. If you think writing a romance is easy, guess again. If you don't love the genre you're writing in, it will show.

So, you've finally finished that first draft. Take a bow, have a celebratory drink, dance and laugh, hug your spouse, children, partner, shout to the world you've done it, because so many others out there have never written 'The End' on their manuscript. You've got grit, you've got determination, you've sweated, cursed, thumped your forehead on the keyboard so often you have 'wer' imprinted above your left eyebrow and 'iop' above the right.

If you thought that hard, you were wrong. The next step is to edit. You've got to leave your magnificent work alone to ferment now. You've got to walk away and let it stew. A month is good, two maybe, but no more. Now, you can go back with your list of things to look for: over-use of 'was', 'were', 'that', 'look', 'glance', 'just'... all sorts of words that will leap out. Then there are things like your characters motivations: would they really do that, say that? Are there plot holes, disappearing characters, scenes that don't advance the book, characteristics that change. You don't want a blond haired, blue-eyed hero suddenly turning into a dark haired, blue-eyed hero. So many things to look for: adverbs, name checking, tech checking, is the weather right, the timeline... And how long is this going to take you? Well, it's up to you, of course. The good news is the more you practice, the better at it you'll be.

This is what I'm going to do this weekend: edit - torture myself - to get this book right. After that, who knows? I might start the process all over again. I've got a great idea for a murder mystery. See there's this serial killer and he's targeting obsessive women...