The Invisible Work: Editing 🔎

People often think the job ends with the final word. In truth, that’s precisely where the hardest—and most fascinating—work begins: editing.

Editing means returning to the pages no longer as the author, but as your sternest reader. It’s reading with a colder eye, stripping away what drags, strengthening what sings, listening to the quiet between lines, and chiselling every sentence until the story’s voice comes through clean.

Sometimes it hurts. You delete pages you loved writing, cut scenes that once felt essential, change the pace of chapters you thought were perfect. Yet it’s in these choices that a novel finds its true power.

I’m not alone in this journey. I lean on my beta readers—careful, candid readers who receive the manuscript early and approach it without indulgence. Their reactions, their doubts, even their silences, offer the outside perspective no author can summon alone. They are part of the process as surely as commas and chapters.

Editing is where an idea finally takes shape, where a dream becomes a book. It’s slow, meticulous, sometimes exhausting—and necessary. Telling a story isn’t enough; you have to give it the best possible form, the one that travels straight to a reader’s heart.

That is exactly where I am now with The True Story of Alan Scott: in the thick of the work that demands time, energy and feeling—and that gives back the greatest magic of all: watching a novel truly come to life.