Renovating a house

I mean, editing a book

I used to say that editing a book was like cleaning out a closet — you have to pull a bunch of stuff out, figure out how to reorganize it, figure out what to donate or throw away, and then figure out how to get it all back in there.

And then my husband and I renovated our house.

In many ways, it was a lot like cleaning a closet, but the stakes were bigger. It took longer. It required a lot more discomfort. There were frustrating surprises. The cats absolutely hated it.

This is one piece of a much, much larger project:

Years ago, we had central air and heat installed (yay!), but the house still had all the baseboard radiators, plus a couple of the original cast iron radiators. Behind those? Damaged plaster in the walls! Removing the no-longer-necessary radiators would require us to fix those walls. And then repaint them. Which naturally turns into repainting all the walls. Plus, since all the radiators sat at the base of the wall, guess what wasn’t there — baseboards! There were huge gaps along walls in every room.

That introduced a choice: try to match the current baseboards . . . or replace all the baseboards in the whole house. Well, our house was built in the 1940s. Finding something that matched would require a lot of searching. But replacing everything sounded really expensive.

Fortunately, we were able to find something close enough to the original style that no one would be able to tell the difference. My husband repaired the plaster in the damaged walls. And when all the pipes that sent hot water to the radiators were removed, he repaired the holes in the subfloor. (Didn’t realize holes in the subfloor were coming, did you? Me neither.)

But speaking of floors! We replaced old wall-to-wall carpet with hard floor, which came with surprises like the floor not being totally, um, level. And not having enough new floor to cover the whole house. And so on.

Anyway, enough about my house. I think you get the point that changing one thing revealed other problems. How to fix something was not always an easy decision. There were often surprises.

The same is true of editing a book. Adjusting a character’s motivation affects their actions throughout the rest of the story. It affects their development, their relationship with other characters, and even their resolution at the end.

Removing an unnecessary subplot can require patching up all the scenes it was mentioned in (revising conversations, changing timelines, and so on).

Like a house, all the parts of a book touch other parts. Changing one thing means you have to inspect everything around it. And it means that — for a significant amount of time — the book is in massive disarray. It barely looks like a book at all. And it can be discouraging to see plots and character arcs and themes strewn across the floor (assuming there is enough floor, sob sob) and not be sure how it’s all going to work out.

But eventually, you’ll piece it back together. Tackle one thing at a time. Start with the biggest, most obvious things. You need to make sure your floor is level before you install the new one. And there’s no point in trying to repair the holes from the radiator pipes if the radiator (and its pipes) are still there.

That is, get your story structure right. Your character motivation. Your plot. Leave the flow between scenes for later, because you might not keep all your scenes, or keep them in that order. And don’t even worry about how pretty your sentences are right now. That’s like arranging your beautiful area rug and furniture — do it when you have a floor, the walls are painted, and you’re not going to be getting dust and dirt on them all the time. No need to create extra work for yourself.

I actually like editing a book. It’s a challenge. It’s sometimes overwhelming. And depending what else is going on (for example, am I renovating my house at the same time a book is due?), there might be an increased number of crying days. But I’ve done it enough (and rewritten entire books from the ground up) that I know I can do it. The process is familiar, even if the work is different in every book.

Not everyone likes this part of writing, but I get a lot of satisfaction out of improving my book, even when it’s hard.

What about you?

(I did not enjoy renovating the house. But I’m happy to be living in the result.)

(Related: my husband has moved onto the basement. Fortunately, this is more his problem than mine.)