Enough is Enough

The pundits say make your manuscript the best it can be before you start sending it out. I wouldn’t think of doing anything else. But my dilemma is, how do you know when it’s the best it can be?

At Sleuthfest in April, I had a pitch session with an agent I greatly admire and I was thrilled when she asked to see the full manuscript. In the months before the conference, I had completed two major edits/rewrites on the book, one to include some changes that I thought were necessary and the second, in response to the critique of a writer friend, to tighten and clarify. So I left the pitch session confident that the manuscript was ready to go in the mail as soon as I got home.

But on the plane flying back from Florida the nasty little voice in my head convinced me that I couldn’t send the book out without checking one more time for spelling errors and stray commas. It has to be the best you can make it, the voice said, you’d better ask Sherry, an excellent copyeditor, to read the book again and do another edit at the same time as you.

Sherry did her part quickly and she found surprisingly few problems. I, on the other hand, could not limit myself to copyediting. In fact, I found myself in the midst of another extensive rewrite that included slashing, tightening, rearranging, searching again for the perfect word, and … well, you get the picture. Three weeks later, it was ready to go. But then I asked Sherry how she liked what I had to done to the book since she last read it, several versions ago. “It’s great, much stronger, the writing gets better and better, I like it a lot,” she said. But, I pressed, tell me, did it drag or not hold your attention anywhere? “A little slow before we get to the murder,” she said, “but you can't change those scenes, they’re so well-written and, in and of themselves, interesting and exciting.” I knew what she meant. I loved those scenes too.

But how could I expect an agent to read the entire manuscript if a friendly reader thought it dragged a bit in the beginning? Was it really the best I could make it? I went off to think and gnash my teeth. It wasn’t the first time I had considered these scenes. In fact, each time I did a draft (many, many) I struggled with this section, trying to figure out how to speed it up, but I couldn’t see a way. Then, suddenly, as often happens with writing, it was clear that those wonderful scenes, my darlings, didn’t move the story forward and they needed to go. Not only that, I knew exactly what to keep from those scenes and where to put it. So I got rid of my darlings and rewrote other scenes to include the important points. At the end, I had deleted 5,000 words from my 100,000 word book. I think it is a better book now. Is it the best I can make it? Right now it is. At least I hope so, because I sent it to the agent last week.

Catherine