Organizing the process

A couple of years ago, I was at a seminar on getting organized (I am a sucker for that kind of thing), and the presenter asked for examples of our current projects-in-process. Naturally, the example I came up with was the book I was working on at the time. Equally naturally, the presenter latched onto it as an interesting and unusual example, and proceeded to lay out the steps that would get me to “finish the project.” It went something like this:

• Finish the scene
• Finish the chapter
• Repeat 1 and 2 until rough draft is complete
• Revise and edit
• Mail to agent
• Sell to editor
• Publish book

I started to object, and the presenter explained that the project wasn’t finished until it was finished, all the way through to publication, and part of his point was that we needed to figure out where the “real” endpoints were. And everybody else in the seminar nodded sagely.

I sat there trying to figure out how to explain what was wrong with his list, and just how many additional steps were missing in between “Sell to editor” and “Publish book,” and why “publish book” wasn’t actually the ending point he thought it was, but after a minute I realized that as far as the seminar was concerned, it didn’t matter. That list is pretty much how most non-writers and pre-published writers see the process. Since all the other seminar participants were not writers, all of them got the presenter’s point. Heck, even I got the point, in spite of the fact that the way he was applying the principle was, in this specific case, oversimplified to the point of unworkability.

The problem, from my perspective, was that he’d taken several related projects, at different levels of detail, and jumbled them all together as if they were one project. (That, and he didn’t have a clue about the actual publishing process or where I was in it; for instance, “sell to editor” was irrelevant, as I’d sold the book as part of a contract signed several years before.)

When I think about the process of writing and publishing a book, it looks more like this:

1. Finish rough draft
2. Revise and edit rough draft
3. Email (or mail) final manuscript to editor and agent
4. Do editorial revisions
5. Do my part of pre-publication production work (e.g., copyedit, page proofs)
6. Do whatever publicity stuff I’ve committed to

Each of those numbered items above, I think of as a separate project that depends on finishing the previous project, the way decorating the living room depends on having first built the house. I think of them this way because each of them requires me to be in a different mental space. Writing the manuscript (#1) is totally different from revising and editing it (#2). Getting the final ms. formatted and mailed off to my editor (#3) is a purely administrative task I can do when I’m nearly brain-dead. Editorial revisions are a moveable feast; sometimes they’re big and take months, other times there are only a few and I can knock them off in a couple of days. Copyedit and page proofs (#5) are a different sort of administrative task, and publicity (#6) is like nothing else anywhere on the list. Lumping all of them together as one giant meta-project is discouraging.

It’s already going to take me a year or more to get the book written; adding a couple of months for revising and polishing and mailing off to the editor might be OK, but tacking on six more months of waiting for and doing editorial revisions and another year or so spent mostly waiting for the copyedit and page proofs, and then another year of pre-and-post-publication publicity, and it becomes soul-killing.

I may not be “done with the book” when I write “The End” at the bottom of the last page for the first time, but I absolutely am “done with the first draft,” and I want to check it off, secure in the knowledge that I am done with something, even if there’s still a lot left to do.

On the other hand, I have to admit that from another angle, the guy was right: there is a meta-project involving getting from a blank page all the way to a book that’s available and selling, and being aware of that ultimate end result can keep people from neglecting the later projects. Of course, if one’s ambition is to be the next Emily Dickenson, one can stop at project #2 and stick the final revised ms. in a drawer somewhere for one’s heirs to find and deal with later. It depends on what one’s meta-project is.