My…uh…legions of followers know that I was waiting for the editor to comment on the manuscript of my novel Beautiful. This happy event occurred the beginning of February. I’ve devoted my time since then to rewriting my novel. I won’t lie: this has been a lot of work.

I can laugh now, but when I first received the comments, I remembered how I felt as a freshman at Oberlin College. I thought I was a good writer in high school, but my first few English papers at Oberlin were dripping with red ink. Huh? I’d taken care to liberally sprinkle passive voice and big words so that everyone would know I was educated…and college professors hated it. Over time I learned to write. But now, as an adult, I at first felt as though I were starting over.

In a way, I suppose, I am starting fresh. There’s a gulf between getting an A on an English paper and writing a novel that is worthy of being published and read. I read somewhere about the difference between an amateur writer and a writing professional. It’s more than saying “the latter gets paid,” because most writers can’t support themselves through their art. The difference between an amateur and a professional is in how the writer reacts to (intelligent) criticism. The professional wants to improve their craft, and if that means cutting some prose that they liked, or letting go of some plot device that they felt was “important,” so be it.

My editor, Julia, gave me an eight-page editorial memo and a marked-up version of the manuscript with many hundreds of margin notes. I opened a new version of the novel side-by-side with the margin comments in Microsoft Word. Then, I addressed each comment.

Her comments fell into two large categories: 95% of her comments I agreed with; the rest were honestly things that I hadn’t explained well enough. In other words, there were a few places where she concluded something different from what I’d intended, but I could see that if I had painted a clearer picture, there would have been no confusion. I didn’t see any of her comments as the “sorry, editor, but you’re just wrong” variety.

I cut a chapter that I deemed unfixable and half of another chapter that didn’t move the story along (even though I liked it). I completely rewrote the entire first chapter, and I rewrote much of the manuscript. Beautiful is now almost 3,000 words leaner, but it’s tighter, better, faster-paced, and much-improved.

Oh, and for fans of my original title The Chokecherry Tree, I can say only that Julia, with her vast experience in publishing, recommended that I keep the title as Beautiful. She gave me several good reasons why: It fits the major theme of the story – what is beauty? It highlights the juxtaposition of seeing someone with scars as beautiful and may resonate with readers who are trying to see beauty in ways that aren’t usually considered as such. It’s a good, strong, one-word title. The main issue with referencing the chokecherry tree in the title is that it was a negative reference in the story; Cara disparages the idea that a scar that supposedly resembles a chokecherry tree could be beautiful or powerful.

What next? Julia and I have a phone conference coming up. We’ll see what happens after that. It seems to me that the rewrite was so comprehensive that the manuscript would need another edit.