Posts
Revise? Or advise?
Somehow I am still surprised at how the process of line editing can cause me to go back and revisit the work at a higher level.
When I posted an excerpt from Chapter 6 on Holiness, after having read through it, I thought it was in fairly solid shape. But once again — by now I should know to stop predicting these things — when I settled into the editing process I realized that additional changes were probably in order.
This is not Brian's fault. Writing anything of any substance is a process of continual reworking. I once read that in a reasonably well-written book the average sentence will have been redone seven times. That sounds about right. If anything, it's conservative. As I recall, Josh Harris once told me he rewrote the opening chapter to I Kissed Dating Goodbye 12 times. Of the 12 or 15 complete books I have edited, only two did not need substantial work, and one of these still needed to have several chapters shuffled around.
