When I wrote my first book, I held on to every word I'd written.
And when I was asked, "What are your wishes for the editor, and what exactly are we editing," I said without hesitation: "I'm not deleting anything! Edit it while keeping the author's voice."
As a beginning writer, I couldn't have deleted a single line back then anyway. Every one had been agonized over and relived. Let the readers feel and understand the depth of it too.
The editor at the printing house was gentle with me, and after reading the manuscript, she left me this note: "After working with the manuscript I was left with such a pleasant reader's impression :) it came out heartfelt, sincere, easy and interesting to read — I want to thank you for your work! Great ending, intriguing, open. If you're thinking about a second book — that would be wonderful :) There are no major issues with the text, good narrative logic, good pacing, the format came out as a kind of light, conversational genre."
Can you imagine the emotional charge I got from that! An editor who'd surely been at the printing house for a while, who'd read dozens if not hundreds of manuscripts, liked mine. I'd clearly written a masterpiece. And it deserved to have every single letter preserved.
A couple of months after the editorial pass, I decided to record an audiobook of my book myself. It's my own story I wrote, after all — who else would narrate it?
When I started reading in front of the screen, into the microphone, I kept running into sentences that were too long, or lists that went on too long, too many epithets, and other rough patches. You don't notice them as much when you're just reading the manuscript — I wrote it myself, after all, I know what intonation I intended for every part. But when I recorded it aloud, everything that made me stumble came right to the surface. I had to sit down and edit it again, cleaning up certain spots.
A year later I wrote my second book, and the same thing happened with the narration. This time I didn't have an editor, because my energetic husband had gotten tired of listening to me complain about editing and proofreading, and by the time I finished the book he'd built the service editroast.com, which does an editor's job. We tested it on my second manuscript at the same time. I was stunned. How precise, to the point, and fast it all was! I did three rounds of editorial passes with the service and then recorded my second book.
Which brings me to the point. I got curious what kind of assessment my first book would get. To find out, I had to dive headfirst back into the text. That wasn't easy, because I hadn't just written an entire tome — I'd already gone through it twice with an editor, then twice more on my own with proofreading, and edited it once more after that. I was so sick of the text that, a year earlier, I'd simply finished it and put whatever I had up on the platforms.
The service handed me a mountain of corrections... I groaned, but I didn't give up. For two weeks I went through the text again and again, doggedly working through every correction. I tore out the foreword entirely, wrote a whole new chapter and an afterword. I spent two days on one chapter alone, without lifting my head. It felt like cleaning the Augean stables. I deleted words, lines, and entire paragraphs without a shred of regret. I saw repetitions, empty words, unnecessary descriptions. I watched the text start to breathe. Watched it become easier to read, the thought grow clearer. And for the first time I understood what Stephen King meant in On Writing.
We often hold on to the best-written parts because they cost us effort. Because we poured time and feeling into them. But a book doesn't have to include everything you wrote well. A book is a whole, and every part has to serve that whole.
P.S. I re-recorded the handful of chapters that got the most corrections, along with the ones I rewrote from scratch.