Writing is hard work but publishing is a tough business…

I get this question a lot, and most recently when I went to Dallas last year to meet with the wonderful folks at the Dallas Creative Writer’s Workshop:

What’s your relationship with your editor?

And my answer went something like this:

It’s always been great and I’ve been lucky; we’ve never had really had to tear a book apart. Most of our edits together have been pretty minimal.

Cue ominous music…and flash forward two days later, when I got an early alert warning email from my agent:

I think your editor has some issues with your latest book…but don’t panic!

My “latest book” was my first foray outside the comfortable confines of the Big Bend novels I’ve been writing the last few years; another Texas-set crime novel, true, but with all new characters and all new themes. It was a big book (I had a lot I wanted to say) and I’d put a lot of work into it. The pitch was simple – a retiring sheriff has thirteen days to solve the murder of a local drug dealer; a lifelong “frenemy” who’d married a woman they’d both vied for when younger. The working title was THIRTEEN DAYS, but the book actually covered a span of four decades, cutting back and forth across those years as I filled in the relationship between these two men and the woman between them.

It was my masterpiece…or so I thought.

I had a day or so to ponder my editor’s unspoken concerns before I got her editorial letter, and honestly, that was a miserable stretch. I hashed and rehashed where the book might have failed – where I had failed – and what the issues could be. After three books, this truly was the first time I’d turned in one that had even remotely raised a red flag, and despite my agent’s admonishment not to panic, that’s exactly what I did.

Hell, that’s ALL I did.

Worse, I’d just started believing I had a handle on this “whole writing thing.” I’d pitched and sold an original audio series, I was being approached about TV work, and even signed on to co-write a feature-length film!

I was beginning to feel comfortable in my “author skin.”

So, when the letter finally pinged in my email box, I read it with dread…and…well, it wasn’t good. Oh, my editor loved all the usual stuff I do well, but overall the book was simply too dark, too existential. She thought the characters were hard to relate to and even harder to like. The primary issue was balance. I’m a crime writer, and although a particularly brutal crime anchors the story, the crime itself took a backseat to an extended character study, and a particularly bleak one at that.

In short, the book wasn’t “on brand,” and wasn’t publishable as written as my next Putnam “J. TODD SCOTT” novel.

Naturally, my initial inclination was to push back; to pull up a dozen other bleak and dark books for comparison and contrast. I was hellbent to convince my editor that “she just didn’t get it,” and point out all the ways she was wrong (with plenty of page citations).  I told myself that was the natural, expected reaction of any writer or artist who’d sunk months and months into a creative project that meant something to them, but after I thought about it some more (and sat out on the porch with a…couple…of beers), I realized something –

I’d written the book I wanted to write.

It said all the things I’d wanted to say. I’d told the story just the way I’d envisioned it…and nothing in my editor’s concerns or her letter could change that.

But…but…in the end, that didn’t mean anyone had to like it, much less publish it that way. And I think that’s one of the defining differences between being a writer and a (traditionally published) professional author.

The writer in me had achieved my goals with the book, now the author in me had to decide if I could re-work or revise it to meet the expectations of my publisher and my audience.

Now, I get it, some people don’t want to make those compromises, ever, or even face them. That’s a reasonable position, I guess. And others might see that calculation as forsaking some sort of “artistic integrity.” But I see it as the cold, clear-eyed business reality of professional publishing – a publishing career – which means you gotta pick the hills you’re willing to die on, and you can’t die on all of them.

If you do, that’s an awful short career.

A day later my editor and I had a great call about the book where we picked apart her concerns. It was a deep, engaged discussion about what didn’t work and those things that did. I decided I probably could re-balance and re-focus the narrative, but it would take time (I write consistently but not necessarily rapidly), and I knew it would be tough to get it done fast enough to lock it in for a 2020 release, which was very important to me.

I had zero margin of error and I was staring at a lot of work in a short amount of time, with still no guarantee I could get it done or the book would be any better for it when I finished.

But, remember I said I write consistently? Well, I’d just finished up another book (in fact, I was already a third of the way through the book AFTER that), so I asked my editor if she might just want to take a look at that one? I was really happy with it (of course, I’d been happy with THIRTEEN DAYS as well…so…), but I knew it didn’t hit any of the landmines THIRTEEN DAYS had tripped over. I suggested that if the new book was closer to being ready, maybe we could just, you know, swap ‘em? I didn’t have any idea if that was even possible or routinely done, but since it was otherwise just sitting there on my hard drive, it made sense to me that if she liked it, that might give the time I needed to figure out if I could reshape THIRTEEN DAYS in a way we’d all be happy with.

My editor said she’d be happy to take a look at the other manuscript, as long as I went on ahead and started breaking THIRTEEN DAYS apart too, with an eye toward doing whatever I had to in order to get it ready for 2020.

And as I started that deep work, as I started to really re-examine the story and the characters, I did see a path forward. It wouldn’t necessarily be the story as I’d originally written it, but that was okay, it could still be a story, a book, I’d be just as proud of.

But my editor came back and said the new book, tentatively called LOST RIVER, was in great shape, and with some small adjustments (much more in line with what we’d done on my previous Big Bend novels), it’d be ready to go.

In fact, she wanted to move LOST RIVER ahead of my revised THIRTEEN DAYS, so it’d be a win/win. My publisher would get a book they’re thrilled with, and I’d get a more reasonably paced “do over” at a book I’m not quite ready to give up on.

Writing is hard work but publishing is a tough business.

I think publishing is where art meets commerce, and if all you care about is writing what you want, however you want, you can do that. But if you’re working with a publisher, and you’re being paid for that work, then I think it pays to be flexible and open-minded. You’re not always going to have “another book” waiting in the wings, but that doesn’t mean you can’t adjust, when it’s called for.

Anyway, just a few thoughts. And as always, YMMV.

2018 was a great year professionally, and I can’t wait to see what 2019 brings. I have two works coming out, so keep an eye out for them. First, I have a story in the wonderful charity anthology, GATHER AT THE RIVER, and then the big release, the third Big Bend novel, THIS SIDE OF NIGHT!

Also, the paperback version of HIGH WHITE SUN hits stands.

See you around, JTS