Hooker and Brown

Had a visit from an old friend yesterday and the talk got around to my book. The impression they had was that’d I could retire and write full time. I asked them some questions and confirmed my suspicions: the misperception of writing and publishing is still as strong as it was for me.
Sometimes I tell people I have to edit another draft and I half expect them ti understand the weight and purpose of that, but instead I think I glimpse a slight “Oh, you didn’t get it right when you wrote it?” behind their eyes.
I asked them how many books one would need to sell to have a best seller. My wife remarked that it wasn’t much before I could stop her, so I figured my friend and her husband were duly warned. They still came up with the crowd-favorite number of 100,000 and were shocked when I told them that it was 5000. In fact, I said, non-fiction sells far more, since people really want instruction books for their lives these days, but for literary fiction? It is a good showing to sell 2000. Oddly, the same number that appears on your publishing contract; the amount after which you get a higher cut of the sales. Supposing you get a dollar for each sale? Then you may make $2000 off you labour of love that you have sweated over for many years, poured you soul into it. I still love it and wouldn’t do anything else. But I could see the deflation in their eyes.. There is no money in this. “But what if you’re a Dan Brown?” Either you got the vision and the talent and the timing and the zeitgeist and you’re writing for the widest most controversy-hungry audience you can, or you might as well play the 6/49.
Now, about those edits…
It isn’t something I ever did in school, right along with Character Sketches, but editing makes a better product, period. Some of these people are really insightful and make you look at your story in ways you never saw,. Sometimes their advise is strange and I discount it – but I always consider it. Usually, the editor suggests something that would break your story. You think, maybe they don’t get it. But the point is you don’t need to do what they say, but you should always look at why they though something was wrong. Something prompted them. Maybe a slight disconnect, maybe a concept that was too obscure. Whatever it was, their comment doesn’t have to be read literally, but as a signpost that something needs smoothing.
When you have a 200 page manuscript, (about 75,000 words) and several editor take several passes at it, each time you have to go through and decide to take their advise or analysis the scene on your own terms. You have a better idea than they do (most of the time – since good editors can help you solve tiny problems that you never saw, just felt, and those editors are worth gold) how to fix it. But in a novel, if you change one thing, just one little tiny thing, it can easily ripple through the whole book. It is very hard to trace those ripples and keep them all straight without it feeling like the story is falling into pieces. That’s the pit I talk about. The way I feel before doing (yet) another edit. I have to get the courage up to jump in and then start fighting my way back out. But always, always, the story emerges with you stronger than ever.
In the movies, the way I imagine most people think of writers, you get to sit down at a typewriter, tear our a few sheets and hurl them like snowballs, then you get going and a few slow-mo wipes later you are typing THE END and placing that last sheet on a neat little pile.
Doesn’t happen.
Then you got to get a publisher interested. Then it is at least two years until you have a book in hand. Why two years? Why not just click print.
The fact is, all that editing really does polish the book and force you top look at the book in so many ways that there is nothing that you haven’t intended or accepted.
I hear a lot of people tell me: “Oh, I’m writing a book.”
Think it’s easy? Just remember how much fun writing term papers were. Sure, it isn’t fiction, but you choose the course, so you must have had some interest. Multiply that 1000 word essay by 80 times, then again buy, say, 10 drafts, then again by say 7 editors (so 7 edit passes and rewrites) and what you got yourself is the equivalent of a child, or a doctorate degree. And you finally cash into the big time with a $2000 payout. Enjoy.
You only do it ‘cause you have to. ‘Cause any other life would not be satisfactory. Nature always find s the path of least resistance. If I could get such satisfaction any easier way, I’d do it.