Our guest blogger this week is Diana Evans, whose second novel The Wonder is just published in paperback, in time for this weekend’s Notting Hill Carnival (where part of the The Wonder takes place). Diana writes about what it feels like to be edited (when things go right). This blog will be balanced shortly by a guest-blogger novelist writing about what it feels like to be edited when things go wrong!

Before acquiring an editor, I had thought of writing as a lone act. The writer spends hours, days, years in solitude, laying the material on paper and crafting it to perfection. This solitude imbues the finished product with a certain purity and truthfulness, a ‘rightness’ which, for me, felt threatened by the entrance onto the scene of my editor, Rebecca Carter.
 
Having worked as a journalist before publishing a book, I was used to having my writing chopped up, clipped and rearranged by gung-ho subeditors. But I was much more precious about my fiction. I had spent almost five years agonising over my first novel, 26a, drafting it, dreaming of it, mining and composing, until it was as close as possible to what my subconscious had intended. Suddenly, once the deal with Random House was sealed, I became aware that it was no longer simply my novel, but a product, a commodity. It wasn’t just my job to make it the best book it could be. I now had to share that task with someone else. Weirdly, it felt a little bit like having a boss.

She was a nice enough lady. Coolly professional, pleasingly edgy, bookish. I thought we would get on, but I wasn’t quite prepared for all the negotiation and prodding and tugging that defines the editorial process. Rebecca took 26a off into her lair (a bright little office in Pimlico) and squinted at it. She poked, probed and undressed it. Then she came back and said, ‘Chapter two is overloaded – it needs to be divided into two. And the character of Gideon needs an overhaul.’ My immediate response was reluctance. Probably I said, ‘Really?’, while inside I was wondering why exactly I should listen to her.

One of the annoying things about having an extremely good editor is that they are usually right. On one level, they have a greater understanding of the book than the person who wrote it, because they possess that enviable tool which becomes lost to the writer along the creative way: distance. There was indeed an awful lot of information in chapter two. And it was true that Gideon wasn’t quite working – he was overly ethereal, he lacked immediacy, he was without grit – but I hadn’t been able to find a way to fix him. With distance on her side, Rebecca made some subtle suggestions and left over a large, worrying space for me to figure the rest out on my own. The rewrite took several weeks. Chapter two was cut in half and Gideon’s name was changed to Toby, which immediately seemed to help. It was not always fun having to re-inhabit a place I thought I’d left behind, but somewhere in that process I arrived at a new perspective, a better standpoint, from which I could see everything more clearly. Being edited is being invited to reassess. It is being guided to a window you didn’t know was there and looking out at what you’ve made. After the rewrite, 26a was indeed a better book.

So I was less reluctant the second time round. The Wonder is a much more complicated novel, revolving around the mysterious disappearance of a dancer, and his son’s attempts to find out what happened to him. There are two different time zones, more characters and a more complex, to-and-fro structure. This time the editorial process was less a question of Rebecca pointing out a couple of major, specific problems and me going off and reworking it. The manuscript needed almost a complete, chapter by chapter rewrite, which she initiated with a lengthy, daunting document of comments meant to guide me back to that special window. A long, slow year of revision and rewriting followed, at times painful, at times riveting, as breakthroughs emerged in plot and structure, and during one of our many obsessive discussions the book’s ending was dramatically and satisfyingly reconfigured.

I now see the editor as an intrinsic part of my work. It is not finished until it has been held up to the light by the person who has that precious combination of distance and passion. And the knowledge that this is what is to come brings a greater freedom to the creative journey. Instead of trying to write perfectly, of willing the ideas in my head to fall onto the page fully formed and beautiful, I allow myself to make more of a mess, to explore the sprawling, limitless terrain of a project before tying myself down to aesthetics. Writing is rewriting, and the editor is, eventually, a crucial part of that process.

It is still, though, a lone act. I have little contact with my editor when I am writing. It’s back to me in my solitude, except that now there is a sniff of her in the room (as well as my agent and whoever else might read the book when it is finished). It’s part of my job to tell them all to go away, and I re-enter that pure and truthful place, the place of rightness. It is still agonising, haunting and frightening. But it’s a comfort to know that there is someone very meticulous waiting outside, ready with a pencil and a beady eye.

Diana Evans - August 2010.

Diana Evans is the author of 26a and The Wonder, both of which are both available in Vintage paperback.