Structural Edit

By Jemima Lawrence – Octangle Media Consultancy.

My only complaint with Alexander’s, otherwise excellent, first draft of Dark Pools was that he gave Marcus Flint far too easy a ride; but, then again, I was never a fan of my brother-in-law even before his ‘secrets’ came to light.

All of us beta readers were generally positive about the script, but we weren’t professionals, and our suggestions were often inconsistent – I think Alexander struggled with what to do with them. But, perhaps, encouraged enough to think that there might just be some commercial potential for his book, he decided to seek a professional opinion.

I had left the publishing world a while ago but asked around my old contacts for a good editor recommendation, and we were put in touch with a company that undertook structural edits.

Alexander sent them his script with a brief description of the plot, and they sent through a short list of suitable potential editors with thumbnail CVs, or maybe they were just the ones available. None were familiar with the financial world, but Alexander thought it shouldn’t matter and might even be beneficial.

However, it definitely became a theme of the whole publishing and marketing process that organisations, who clearly didn’t have time to read all the submissions that came their way, would nominate advisors on a bit of a punt (i.e. our brief summary) and then leave it for us to select our choice, also on a bit of a punt (i.e. the thumbnail CV). It certainly felt sub-optimal.

Nevertheless, Alexander was quite excited about his report and braced for the criticism. A few months later it arrived. The company emphasised the need to let the comments seep in and reflect on them before reacting, but when Alexander shared the report with us beta readers, my first thought was ‘Have they even read the book?’. It just felt like a copy-and-paste of another unrelated report, and the recommendations seemed impossible to implement.

Alexander was more circumspect – he had built a positive relationship with the company, and his only comment was that maybe we had selected the wrong reviewer.

Over time, and certainly looking back, I think my initial response was a bit unfair – the report’s primary focus was on the book’s commercial potential, and the comments should have be taken in that context.

But suggestions to enhance the clarity of plot, narrative or language felt like simplifications that would have cost the story’s layering and depth. At one point it was even proposed that Dark Pools could be three different books: a manipulative love story, a guilt-induced human meltdown, and a psychological thriller!

The reviewer felt it took a while to get into the story – there was a lot of detail to take in up front. I said to Alexander that the best books do take time to set the scene and develop characters – which his target readership would likely appreciate; it was an upmarket thriller, after all! At other points the reviewer suggested more detail, but Alexander was concerned about maintaining a certain pace and keeping the book to around 300 pages.

Another idea was to diminish or explain the financial ‘shoptalk’. One of the other beta readers, a banking colleague, was adamant that this added to the authenticity of the novel, and it was not necessary to understand every detail to follow the storyline – any contrived explanation would be obviously distracting.

I have to say that I am so pleased Alexander stuck broadly with his original structure, though he did make some changes.

He tried to address the few cases of ‘head-hopping’, as we were told this was a pet bugbear of agents, but the prose often became clunky, so he rowed back and ended up just accepting some instances.

I did agree with the reviewer that prose can be heavy sometimes when compared to dialogue – ‘show-not-tell’ – but I find it so frustrating when the emphasis on this leads to contrived and utterly unrealistic conversations. Anyway, I know Alexander went through the chapters diligently trying to address this, with me ensuring any dialogue still passed a realism test.

I confess it sometimes felt like we were fighting back against the criticisms, but the illustrations given from the script just added to our conviction. Alexander would often complain how codified a commercial creative process could be.

In the end the structural edit did make some improvements – but would I recommend it to other writers? I’m not sure, though despite his reservations, I think Alexander probably would.

I’ll leave it for you guys to judge the end result.