Hey there, it’s been a while!
This post is my attempt to get myself slowly back into blogging after another extremely long hiatus, but this time I bring with me exciting news: the thing is happening! I’m gonna actually publish a book!
For the last several months I have been receiving and processing feedback on a draft of Hunter of Seals, which is the first book in a contemporary fantasy series about selkies, which just got its official introduction on Instagram!
I truly never thought this book, which I lovingly called my Trash Project during its early stages, would be my debut publication, but it’s really starting to look like it! I was very lucky to have some extremely talented editing minds among my early readers, who turned my initial beta read into an unexpectedly thorough developmental edit for which I will remain unspeakably grateful until my dying day. I’m now in the process of implementing those edits and cleaning it up for another round of beta readers, which is a part of the editing process I’ve really never embarked on before. So I thought it would be fun to do a little series of posts documenting the journey.
Today, I want to talk about the first and hardest part of editing anything: letting somebody else read it at all.
Letting other people read my writing was something I struggled with for a long, long time. Or maybe “resisted entirely” would be a better term for it. I started writing novels when I was 14, and by and large kept all of them to myself. I wrote prolifically, churning out ten (yes, you read that right, ten) first drafts the year I was 15, but showed not a single one of them to anybody. It wasn’t because I was afraid to, or didn’t think they were good (most were quite terrible, actually, but I neither knew nor cared). And while keeping my writing private did afford me a level of creative freedom I don’t think I otherwise could have dreamed of, even that wasn’t at the core of it. My real reason was a funny little feeling I’ve barely heard anyone talk about, and when they do, they typically do it in the hushed tones of someone who isn’t quite sure if what they’re saying is valid, or even makes any sense at all.
Hearing what someone thinks of your writing – even when they like it – feels incredibly, indescribably strange.
I don’t even think there’s a term for this feeling. I guess the closest would be the Uncanny Valley of Editing, because there is something about the experience of having someone else read your book that warps it. Let me explain.
Before handing off a story to readers, you have something that has only ever lived in your head. The story is still the shape you first imagined it to be. It holds only the meaning you have ascribed to it. The characters and world look the way they look in your head, and are subject to no one else’s visualizations or daydreams. The parts you think are funny are the funny parts, and the parts that made you cry while writing them are the sad ones. The biggest twist is the thing you wouldn’t have seen coming if you were reading it – the thing that made you gasp out loud at your desk when you thought it up. The book and everything else in it is molded to the inside of your brain.
But you have to remember, it’s not set in stone yet. It’s still liquid in there, still pliable. So when you pour it out of your head and into someone else’s, it molds to the shape of their brain instead. And as the feedback rolls in, for better or worse, and you see the story through the eyes of another for the first time, it begins to look very, very different. Things you wrote with a perfectly straight face are suddenly hilarious. Things you thought were minor reveals at best become mic-drop, jaw-on-the-floor surprises. An innocuous side character in your eyes becomes a fan favorite in someone else’s. Some of these changes will be markers of things for you to fix, but as you’ll quickly find out, absolutely not all of them.
The story morphs on a deeper level, too, and this is true no matter how far along in the process you are – talk about any published book with a friend to see what I mean. Even if you both agree the book was brilliant, you will undoubtedly have read it in different ways. A wonderful phenomenon that arises when human beings consume media is that we all pluck out the bits of it that are most meaningful to us personally. In editing Hunter of Seals, one of the most interesting things I’ve noticed is that the themes I focused the hardest on when I was writing the book don’t seem to have jumped out at people nearly as much as the ones that ended up in the story unconsciously. I think this is at least partially a product of how themes tend to end up in books in the first place (the strongest ones often sneak in without you noticing), but I think it’s also because of how reading stories works, period.
And so your story comes back changed. Not only because edits have been suggested and mistakes pointed out, but because the story will never again be a static thing, existing only in your head, in the reassuring but false solidity of the inner world in which it was born. And like parents welcoming our kids home from college only to find that they’ve grown up without us, I think it’s normal for us to feel a certain sadness at this, even if the feedback is largely positive. Take into account the inherent vulnerability of handing off something like a novel – what can feel like a piece of your soul – to someone else and asking them to please tell you what’s wrong with it, and you have a recipe for an existential crisis.
Not to say that this process hasn’t been fun – it absolutely has. But like I said, it’s a weird, weird feeling. Like the story itself, I now feel like two categories of things at once: elated, inspired, proud, and grateful, but at the same time, nostalgic and uncomfortable and thinking wistfully of the days when I called it my Trash Project and it belonged to no one but me. Once upon a time, Hunter of Seals was my home for all the random bits of inspiration and creative energy that couldn’t be funneled into other projects. It was my dumping ground for big feelings as I navigated a thorny quarter-life crisis, complete with grief, loss, anxiety, and a 180-degree career change. I’ll never experience that level of intimacy with this story again, and although I know there will be countless other stories to fill that void in the future, there is an undeniable mourning that comes with letting a novel grow up and out of that stage.
This is why one’s choice of early readers matters so much, and I’m happy to say I hit the jackpot there. Four of my friends – three being other writers – have now read Hunter of Seals, and a couple of incredibly generous souls have even read it more than once. All of them are people who know me well enough to have seen the heart of this story before they even read it, whether from the ramblings and snippets I drip-fed them over the last year and a half, or simply by virtue of knowing my heart and what’s in it. Each one of them brought a unique perspective to the story, and I knew them well enough to know that when the shape of it in their minds began to emerge, it would be one that, while new and strikingly different, I would adore just as much as the shape it has in mine.
I may have sent my baby off to college, but it’s okay – she lived with friends. And she came back so much smarter for it.
More chronicles of my editing and publication journey will be coming soon, so stay tuned, and happy writing!