The joys of editing:

To my mind one of the hardest parts of novel writing comes after you have typed those two magic words, ‘The End’.

That’s when the editing starts and it is a long, trying road. I don’t know how others tackle it but my method is to put the story aside for a day or two. Once the euphoria of finishing has dissipated I go back to it and go through the whole thing looking for the helpful hints that Microsoft Word has given me. The red underlining indicating spelling errors is easy to fix, you either add the word to the dictionary or spell it correctly. Green underlining is harder to fix, sure I make grammatical errors, but if they appear in dialogue I sometimes leave them in because people do not always speak grammatically and I want my characters dialogue to be real.

Once the easy fixes are done I then read the story through, looking for obvious errors. That usually takes several days and when it’s done I copy the whole thing to a flash drive and hand it over to my very able editor who will go through it suggesting insertions and deletions, pointing out bits that don’t make sense, ‘Britishisms’ (that’s things we Brits say that make no sense in a trans-Atlantic context) and continuity.

My editor is good, very good and I usually get the file back with all sorts of helpful suggestions and comments. That’s when the hard work starts again. I go through each one, seeing if it works for me and fits the story. Almost invariably I accept about 90% of the suggestions and make the appropriate changes.

Then the story goes on hold for at least a week, sometimes two or three before I do my final read through. By this time I’ve read my own story so many times I can almost recite it so this last read through has to be done very carefully otherwise I may inadvertently miss something.

After that the story is done and ready for the publisher. It’s still not perfect though. No matter how many times I re-read my own work I always find something I would change if I could. I guess when striving for perfection none of us are ever satisfied.

Stop Press! Innocent? the fourth novel in the Dean and Steph series is now available on Amazon. Check it out at:

http://www.amazon.com/Innocent-Dean-Steph-Book-4-ebook/dp/B00PUQ68DM/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1416483204&sr=1-1&keywords=derek+coleman

Writing out of sequence? Not for me

I guess everyone has different ways of writing a novel. A friend recently posted that he is working on the third book of his series and he said he already has several scenes written which he will slot in at the appropriate places. Many of these scenes were written for book two and were not used and he says he may even save some of them for a possible fourth book. I've read his books, they are very good, they flow well and there is never a hint that any part is written out of sequence. My wife’s method is similar. She writes parts of her books and then writes round the scenes she has.

I can’t do that. When I sit down to write a novel I start with the first word on page one and write in chronological sequence until I get to the end. I never write a scene and put it in, I just can’t work that way. I may go back and tweak something, put a clue in here, take a too-obvious pointer out there, but I never go forward and write a whole chunk of the book. I think the reason for this is because when I start writing a book I generally know who the principle characters will be, I know how it will end and I know how I want to start it but once I've started to put words on paper and have introduced my people they simply take on a life of their own and go their own way.

I can’t write a scene for the middle of the book because these people I've created may never get to that situation. I don’t manipulate them, they find their own way to the final chapter and I don’t think I can work any other way.

The hardest part for me is always the beginning of a book. The prologue for “Innocent?” (coming out in December) is about three pages long but it took me weeks to write to my own satisfaction. Once I had it done though the rest of the novel just flowed because these characters took over but I agonized about how to get them started on their journey.

As I said, my friend is a good writer, his books sell well and his method obviously works for him. Personally I can’t work his way, just as well I guess, if were all the same the world would be a very boring place.