I’ve been pretty lucky with readers’ responses to my writing style. I’ve had so many questions about how I write the way I do, and what I try to explain to other writers is that I don’t write like that–I edit like that. When I’m writing a draft, I’m simply trying to get the words, ideas, and places onto paper. My first drafts are pretty funky, I promise you. When I’m editing, particularly in the final editing stage, which is where my editor and I are now, to be sure that everything is all nice and pretty-like for the publication date of April 7, 2026, I’m editing for flow and poetry. 

It depends on someone’s writing process, but as the executive editor of a literary journal for more than 20 years, I’m keenly aware of how much of the magic of writing happens in the editing process. There are a lot of writers out there who write one draft, run it through spell check to check for spelling and grammar errors, and think they’re done. 

I know that finishing the first draft of a novel creates the illusion that the hardest part of writing is over, but the truth is that for many writers, myself included, it’s in editing that I find the magic. 

I agree with the old writer’s adage that you should keep the creator and the editor separate, but at a certain point the editor must come out from the shadows. I don’t begin editing, as in setting the sentences into their final form, until I have everything in the story in its correct place. In other words, the story is done, so now I have to make sure the language is smooth. Charles Dickens called it the “music” of his language and I can’t think of a better way to describe it. When I edit, I’m editing for rhythm, flow–you know, music. 

Editing a novel is difficult in a different way than writing. When I’m in the drafting stage, which I was for 16 months with The Professor of Eventide (for a total of five drafts) I was in the discovery stage, which is fun for me. I’m discovering all of the pieces of my story puzzle and figuring out where they go for the best effect. When I began editing, I had to start looking critically at my work. I don’t mean critically in a negative way, but you do have to be brutally honest with yourself at this stage. I had to figure out what actually works, what doesn’t, and I had to be brave enough to discard chunks of my manuscript when I realized that the story wanted to take a completely different turn from what I originally thought it would be. I’ve learned over many years of writing that I have to allow the story to be what it wants to be. 

One of the tricks I’ve learned over the years is to put the story away for a while after I’m done drafting. I call this “baking time.” This way I have some distance and I’m able to see the story with fresh eyes. When I’m in writing mode, I’m often writing toward understanding the story. There is so much about The Professor of Eventide that surprised me. Scenes completely changed from what I thought they were going to be. Characters had entire conversations I had never even considered. But then when it was time to revise, I had to make sure that all of the puzzle pieces fit correctly. I knew who the murderer was and why, but I had to make sure the readers (and my protagonist) could figure it out too. Actually, I wrote it so that readers would figure it out before the protagonist. That’s the point. He doesn’t see what’s right in front of him. But that’s another blog post.

The easiest way to describe it it so say that when I’m writing, I’m reading like a writer. When I’m editing, I’m reading like a reader. Editing needs a broader view than I bring as a writer. Does the structure hold? Does the middle sag? Is the ending earned, or merely arrived at? This is also where I leave a trail of breadcrumbs for my readers with foreshadowing, but that also means I need to go back into earlier chapters to make sure the breadcrumbs are there for the readers to find. 

Cutting is perhaps the most visible and most painful aspect of revision. As my understanding of the story shifted, I ended up cutting literally thousands of words, and I’m not misusing the word literally here. I mean literally thousands of words. No matter how much I loved some of those sentences, paragraphs, pages, passages, if they didn’t serve the story they had to go. Sometimes I rewrote some chapters to such a degree that they had no resemblance to the first draft. 

Still, cutting is only one part of editing. The Professor of Eventide was a unique experience for me because usually, my draft manuscript is long and then I’ll whittle it down. For example, the draft manuscript of The Duchess of Idaho was 101,000, words, but after editing it was 92,000 words. The Professor of Eventide’s draft manuscript was 103,000 words and the final draft is 101,602. What happened? Well, I noticed that a number of turning points and important scenes needed expansion, needed more. Some moments needed more tension, or a revelation arrived too abruptly and needed to be prepared more carefully. This was the first time I ended up adding a lot instead of always subtracting.

While drafting can be fun, editing is not. Editing is tiring. I was more exhausted during the four weeks I edited the book than I was during the entire 16 months it took me to write it. Now it’s my editor’s problem. Editing is repetitive and methodical, and let’s not beat around the bush–it’s boring. I’m the kind of writer who will spend 30 minutes taking the same comma out and putting it back because I can’t decide if the sentence needs it or not. 

And yet editing is where the novel becomes what it was meant to be. This is where I finally go “Oh…this is the book I meant to write in the first place.” I’ve had this story in my head since 2023, and to finally see it come to life on the page is something special indeed. 

For me, when the writing is done, that is when the real shaping begins. The novel I first imagined is not the novel I ended up writing. The original spark of inspiration is the same, but I had to let a lot of ideas go. So many things changed from my first impressions of the story–from the characterizations, to the through-line, and other odds and ends. Even the murderer changed a few times. There are some things I can’t share yet because of spoilers, and those things changed too. 

I began the first draft of The Professor of Eventide in October of 2024. I finished it in February of 2026. That’s a long time to work on one story. I’m happy that I pushed through because there were a couple of times when I almost gave up. There were a lot of changes and ups and downs, but I know that all of the editing helped to make the book the very best it can be.