WRITING TIP - How to recover the mindset

Fair warning; this post is going to be a bit more ‘writing technique minutiae’ than normal. But it discusses something that only came into focus for me recently, which I wanted to share in case it helps any other writers as much as it helped me.
 
Recently I have had three main novel projects. There’s Andromache in the Dark, out in early July, a middle grade adventure full of colourful characters and parallel worlds. There’s High-Rise, out late July, another action-packed siege story in the same vein (and universe) as The Hunted. Then there’s Backstory, on Audible in October, a murder mystery told entirely through emails, articles, interviews and four unreliable accounts of the same night. They are all extremely different, they are all at different stages of editing, and at the moment I’m effectively working on them interchangeably.
 
There are generally three major stages of editing a book goes through once you’ve delivered a draft to your publisher. The first is a structural edit, which deals with the overall story, shape, characters, themes. Basically, does this thing work as a story and if not, what major changes are needed to get it there? This is the most labour-intensive part because depending on the notes you get back you could be either massaging certain elements to make it stronger (as I did with The Hunted) or rewriting entirely (The Inheritance).
 
Once you’ve delivered the structural edit, what follows is a copy edit, focusing more on smaller elements of logic, consistency and character. By this stage the shape of the story should be basically set, it’s just about making sure that everything is working as it needs to. The final stage is the proofread, which is largely checking spelling, grammar, and any last little tweaks that might need to be made.
 
The lines often blur. For example, if your delivery draft is unusually solid then your structural edit could be closer to a copy edit and so on. And I have had major problems caught in the proofread stage that have necessitated scrambling last-minute rewrites. Which just goes to show how essential all of these stages are because even with that many eyes on a book, things can still get missed.
 
So of course it gets trickier when you’re working on several books at the same time, necessitating a split focus that isn’t ideal for any of them. Currently I’m juggling the structural edit for Backstory, the copyedit for High-Rise and the proof-read for Andromache in the Dark. Which is tricky because as any writer will tell you, editing is often the least fun part of any story. It’s the stage where you bang your head against the wall trying to solve problems you’ve created yourself, where you second guess everything you write and become convinced your career is over. Don’t get me wrong, a good edit can lead to all sorts of thrilling discoveries, but it’s never the same as the rush of a first draft, when you’re getting everything out for the first time and not fretting too much over coherence.
 
What this can lead to is a stalemate where deadlines loom for every project, you have major problems to solve for all of them, and you would rather do anything else. So you focus on the work you’re most enjoying and leave the genuinely pressing issues until you’ve left them too long and you start to panic.
 
A few days back this happened for me. I’d faced a bit of a crisis moment as I realised the copy edit deadline for High-Rise was around the corner. The problem was that whenever I sat and opened that word document I just could not engage my brain. I’d lost the mindset.  
 
Finally, thinking a change of scenery might help, I walked down to a local café, the whole way trying to force my head back in the game. And then an idea struck me.
 
Lately I’ve taken on an exercise during the drafting process of any story, which is that the deeper I get and the most lost in the reeds I am, I more outlines I write. By which I mean if I’m struggling, I write a full start to finish synopsis of the story. I try to keep it only to a couple of pages, to not get lost in minutiae because there more minutiae I get lost in the more likely it is that the story is too messy and confusing. Instead I focus on the big picture sweeping plot events and in doing so try to remind myself of the overall structure of the story, the logic of how the narrative progresses, and what, at its core it’s really about. Very often I’ll do this before I’ve reached the end of the story, and very often focusing on the major bones of the thing helps give some sense as to next steps.
 
It's a process that I tend to abandon after the drafting stage. But I wondered, could it be a way to get myself into High-Rise copy-edit mode?
 
In short, yes. I sat down and despite having not looked at the manuscript in about six months, I wrote the entire plot out. The shape of the story, the arcs of the characters, everything. I did it in about half an hour and the moment I was done I opened the manuscript and I got to work on the edit and worked through three chapters there and then. Later that afternoon, three more. The next morning, six more.
 
By focusing on the big picture rather than some more nebulous notion of recapturing the voice, I reminded myself of the story I wanted to tell, of what really mattered and what is so good about the book. It blew away the cobwebs of Backstory and Andromache (at least until I’ll have to do the same for both of them) and somehow reset my brain to where it needed to be.
 
I’ve often quoted the best bit of writing advice I ever got – to write the first draft as though you’re in love, the second as though you’re in charge. But writing that second draft, especially with extensive notes and the overanalysing they can invite, doesn’t always leave you feeling in charge. You get lost in the reeds and lose your confidence and wonder if this is really the story you wanted to tell. The best way out of that trap it to blast away the reeds and write out that story in its simplest form. Even if you’ve done it fifty times before – especially if you’ve done it fifty time before, it can remind you of the most fundamental truth of this vocation, that nobody knows your story better than you. 

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