THE BOYS IN THE BASEMENT

The Joy of Editing

The Boys in the Basement is the phase that Stephen King uses for the process when he’s stuck on a writing problem. He goes to bed and lets his subconscious, the boys in the basement, go to work on it. More often than not he wakes up with it solved. Many of us have experienced the same.

Yesterday my boys worked at breakneck speed.

I’ve done lots of edits of my forthcoming book Hinterland and then sent it to my new editor. She got it back to me on the 1^st of November with problems she discovered and suggestions to improve things. It’s been a great voyage to work on it, although some mornings, I feel like I’m about to start work on painting the Forth Bridge. The story goes that it took so long to paint the Forth Bridge in Scotland that the moment the job was done the painters had to start over again. It’s an apocryphal tale but a nice one.

Yesterday, I spent the whole day working on a chapter my editor said slowed the pace down too much. It concerned the central theme of the book so I was rather attached to it. I thought I’d hit on a solution, trimmed it down and moved it to an earlier chapter which I also changed quite radically to accommodate it. I felt very pleased with the day’s work.

And then I went to bed. The boys in the basement didn’t even let me close my eyes. They said, ‘Cut the lot. Ditch about the whole day’s work.’

You might have thought I’d have been at least a trifle annoyed. Far from it. I was pleased and had a very restful night. So after breakfast, I’m going to undertake a lot of pruning.

Hinterland will be completed, edited and polished soon. Look out for it on Amazon and treat yourself for Christmas. You don’t need a Kindle to read it, you can download a free Kindle app for computers, tablets and phones.