Resting

I’m a big proponent of letting your manuscript rest prior to editing.

This is because, for most writers, a great deal of writing happens inside of your head before words ever hit the page. This is where dialogue is born, where setting unfolds itself, and plot twists become twistier and more impactful. Because of that, whatever’s in your head will be overlaid on top of whatever you write, creating a strange phantom book that exists somewhere between you and the page and nowhere else.

The phantom book is what helps you with those fascinating subconscious leaps where you think to yourself ‘I’m a genius’ after having seeded a plot element in chapter one without realizing. It helps you craft theme and atmosphere, foreshadowing and subtext. Whatever you’re not actively thinking about while you’re writing but are deliberately using in your manuscript are all part of the phantom book.

However, I’ve found that if you edit too soon while this phantom book hasn’t faded, you won’t see the words on the page. Instead you will only see what you’d intended the words to be instead. This can result in errors that range from missing words in important phrases, to word salad that is neither grammatical nor sensical,to entire missing chunks of character and plot because the phantom book in your head fills in all the gaps.

Your reader won’t ever have that phantom book to help them, because it’s unique to you. Only the words on the page matter after you’re finished writing them down.

You’ll know when the phantom still lingers by how moving words around doesn’t seem to change anything, by how everything seems perfect one day and complete garbage the next to the point where you’re churning over the same section of prose for a week—or weeks plural, perhaps—with no progress, and by how you know there are holes but you can’t find them or fix them. All these are signs that you can’t see the words as you need to see them.

And so you rest. Let the phantom fade. Rest and live a little, maybe, or work on another project. Write your notes and leave them somewhere safe, and then allow your brain to reset its perspective. That way, when you return, you’ll be able to see the holes and know what to fill them with, because the phantom will no longer be clouding your vision of reality.

How long it takes the phantom to fade depends on the writer, of course. However, if you wait and revisit your story later, you’ll know it’s gone when you can finally read what you have written without getting lost in what you were trying to write.

#writingtips #editing #revising #resting #phantombook