The Heartbeat Hypothesis by Lindsey Frydman

I allowed myself a few days to freak out about the two-week deadline and the thought of going back to my editing cave right when I thought I’d been set free. Crippling self-doubt is a dear friend of us writers.Īs soon as I finished my Pitch Wars manuscript- literally-I received my first set of edits from my editor at Entangled for my upcoming NA novel. What if I didn’t add enough emotion? What if I missed something? Ah, yes. There were plenty of times while editing my YA that I thought: I don’t think this is good enough. The end result is beautiful.īut along the way, it’s so easy to want to give up and throw in the towel. Your words, your story, your voice-they matter to you, and you want them to matter to someone else.Īnd this is why we put ourselves through the endless torture of editing.

By now, you haven’t given up because something inside you insists you write. But once you get to the point where you’re editing a novel, you’ve already completed a draft, which is an amazing accomplishment on its own. Maybe it makes us crazy-or maybe just plain awesome. And every writer knows it.īut it’s a self-induced torture, and we write because we love it. There were days I’d stare at the screen and my words for so long that I’d fall into that special brand of writer’s despair. There were certain scenes that needed fixing and I simply didn’t know how to fix them. Well…the joke was on me because-ha ha!-it was hard.

So I set up a plan: if I edited one chapter a day, I’d finish by the due date. This was my first time with strict deadlines that weren’t self-imposed. Now, my editing spree began with two months of editing a YA novel for the writing contest, Pitch Wars. Some writers claim drafting is easier than editing. We’ve all pleaded to the writing gods to help unflatten our characters, help add to or lessen our word count, help turn those ear-grating sentences into shimmering gold. The desire to slam your face into your keyboard because hey, maybe that will solve your plot hole. Months.Īll writers know the woes of editing: The empty loneliness that sometimes accompanies us in our dark, dank, and dusty writing caves.

As I write in this terribly uncomfortable chair, I’ve just finished over five months of straight editing.

The Heartbeat Hypothesis by Lindsey Frydman