As an editor, I work mostly on completed or nearly completed manuscripts. I straighten out the punctuation here, insert a paragraph break there, invert a couple of sentences here, point out an inconsistency there . . . It’s all in a day’s work.
What I seldom think about is what an astonishing feat it is to complete a 300- or 400- or 600-page manuscript of any kind, to get it to the point where pretty much all it needs is fine-tuning.
As a writer, however, I think about this all the time. It’s the reason the subtitle of Write Through It includes “how to keep going.”
If you don’t manage to keep going, you’ll never have a completed manuscript. It’s hard to keep going. It’s so easy to stop — or to not start at all.
And the authors of all those completed or nearly completed manuscripts managed to do it. Hats off to all of them — all of us. How the hell do we do it?
This is why I eventually turn to the acknowledgments section of every book I work on and every book I read. It’s not so I can find out if my name is there, although sometimes it is. What I want to know is how the author managed to accomplish this amazing thing: completing a manuscript and getting it into print.
Lesson #1: No writer who gets anywhere gets there alone.
Most authors thank their editor(s), agent (if any), and, often, the designer, proofreader, and others involved on the production end. They may thank the parents and teachers who inspired them, and the partners and children who put up with them while they worked on the book. Both fiction and nonfiction writers often acknowledge those who read, commented on, or critiqued various drafts of the manuscript. With academic authors, the list of names can be quite long — and readers familiar with the field will often skim that list in an attempt to ascertain whether the author has done her homework.
Fiction writers often include the friends and acquaintances who gave them crash courses on police procedures, quantum theory, dog training, life in an urban hospital’s ER . . . Writing what we know usually leads us into stuff we don’t know, and there we need some help.
I recently edited a university-press book whose author had done extensive research in several languages and far-flung places. Her acknowledgments section included the people who’d opened their homes to her while she was on the road. I loved it.
Moral of story: Don’t get too caught up in this writing-is-a-solitary-endeavor thing. You may be alone when you write, but you’re not writing in isolation.
Write Through It 
Hear, hear!
I could NEVER have completed my books, much less gotten them up to publishable quality, without a devoted and skilled support group, plus all the other people in my life who contributed directly or indirectly over a long period. But yes, the actual writing part is solo. All the rest: It takes a village!
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I think my next post is going to be about the voices that follow me into my solitude and try to shut me up. 🙂
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Love to skim through acknowledgements…sometimes juicy little tidbits emerge that give a bit more insight to the author.
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I always read the acknowledgments too! I chuckled when I read the part where you mentioned authors thanking children who put up with them while they wrote. I always thank my long-suffering husband and children who have endured late dinners and a number of other inconveniences while I’m struggling to finish edits or am lost in the writing-zone.
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Since I live alone, I marvel at the tolerance (forbearance?) of partners, children, housemates, and others who manage to respect the author’s Do Not Disturb sign. Well, I don’t live completely alone. I’m thinking of thanking my canine companion for getting me up often enough that I don’t put down roots in my chair. 🙂
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I read them too! The best acknowledgement essay I’ve read was one by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for The General in His Labyrinth (1989), about Simon Bolivar. Here is my favourite passage, which ends with what is the final sentence of the book:
Finally, Antonio Bolivar Goyanes–a distant relative of the protagonist and perhaps the last old-fashioned typesetter left in Mexico–had the kindness to revise seven different versions of the manuscript with me in a millimeter-by-millimeter hunt for contradictions, repetitions, irrelevancies, mistakes, and typographical errors, and in a pitiless examination of language and spelling. In this way we surprised in flagrante a soldier who won battles before he was born, a widow who went to Europe with her beloved husband, and an intimate luncheone for Bolivar and Sucre in Bogota when one was in Caracas and the other in Quito. Nevertheless, I am not very certain that I should give thanks for these two final pieces of assistance, for it seems to me that such absurdities might have added a few drops of involuntary–and perhaps desirable–humor to the horror of this book.
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Oh dear, that’s brilliant. What a treasure. But from Garcia Marquez, what do you expect? Thanks for sharing that one.
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Oh, I LOVE that. Thanks for posting it!
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Thanks so much – as an intimidated author-to-be, it is good to know.
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You may be an author-to-be, but you’re a writer now. See my comment to Carolyn — my next post is about to be about those not-so-helpful voices that follow us into our solitude and do their best to intimidate us. We learn how to talk back to them and shut them up. 🙂
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Ha ha ha. That “next post” has been delayed by Forces Beyond My Control. It’ll be along shortly, I promise.
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I love reading the acknowledgements because it sometimes gives a glimpse into the author as a person.
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Meant to reply to this much earlier. I also love to read the acknowledgements, not just to see who helped the author, but to get to know the author a little better.
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