Andy Kirkpatrick_ A house of words

February 18, 2011 04:50 PM

My books finally coming together, and I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the torturous pursuit of writing a book.

At the moment I’m finishing off the last few draft chapters, and these are all very rough, and have had almost no inline editing.  By this I mean re reading as you write, and instead have been written in one or two days without going back over the previous paragraphs.  The reason for this is inline editing means that the further into the chapter the less editing that takes place; for example the first paragraph will be edited every time you go over the text, which can be many many times, while the last paragraph may only get a few edits.  Also inline editing can leave you chasing your tail, as each paragraph turns more into a bit of poetry, and gets in the way of the flow.  The most important thing is the flow and the story, not the individual words. 

On the flow and balance of the book I did something very nerdy and did a pie chart in Numbers to see how the book would balance out.  A very small job, but interesting to see.

I think of this part of writing in terms of building a house, and that I’m nocking up the walls and roof, sticking in the wiring and plumbing.

Once it’s up next comes phase two, and that’s making it a home, doing the decorating, adding the furniture, putting in a carpet.  This means starting at the beginning of the book and going through it paragraph by paragraph, working the words now I have my story.

After this comes phase three - something I missed on Psychovertical - and that’s getting as many people as possible to read the draft, after all when it’s a story that you’ve lived it’s very easy to loose sight of details.

Once all that’s done then I can hand it over to Ed Douglas and Vertebrate Graphics and they can weave there magic.

I think the bottom line with modern publishing is that most companies cannot direct as much editing resource as they once did, and paragraph by paragraph editing seems to be a thing of the past (a good editor can tease out a great book from a crap writer), and so it’s vital to do as much as you can yourself (the same applies to selling and marketing), as many publishers just need a book to be good enough, were as you need to make it perfect!