The Thing That Makes All Writers Crawl Under Their Desks and Weep
Plus a sneak peek at my 2026 novel!
Last week I started on the structural edit for The Chateau on Sunset, which is my 2026 book. Yes, there’s another book coming next year—yay!! This one is a reimagining of Jane Eyre set in Los Angeles’ infamous Chateau Marmont during the 1950s and 1960s. It's been super fun to write and I can't wait to share it with you.
Before that can happen, the book has to go through all the different editorial processes with my publishing houses. The first of those processes is what's called a structural edit in Australia and a developmental edit in the US, but is more commonly known by authors as the thing that makes us want to sit under our desks weeping!
We Love this Process and We Dread this Process
What happens during this edit is that your publisher sends you a few (or many!) pages of notes about the broad foundations of the story. For example, is the structure of the book working or do you need to rethink that? Are all the characters fully developed or do you need to flesh some out a little more? Is there enough narrative tension or does the tension lag in places? How is the pacing? Is it too relentlessly brisk? Or are readers likely to fall sleep?
That's a very short list of all the things an author is likely to consider when working on this edit. It's definitely one of the most important parts of the writing process because it’s where you take your story from good to amazing. All authors dream of submitting a book to their publisher and having the publisher come back to them and say, it's perfect. All it needs is a good proof read. Unfortunately, that never happens. And if it did, I'd be very suspicious that the publishing house simply didn't want to invest any more time and money into me as an author.
I believe in the structural edit the way I believe in respiration: it's essential. And every time I've done a structural edit on a book I've become a better writer. I learn how to notice things about my writing with an editor's eye. I start to understand why a certain chapter was making me frown and how I can transform my frown into a smile.
That doesn't mean that authors welcome the editorial notes initially with open arms. Most writers I’ve spoken to say that they spend a day sitting under their desk weeping whenever they receive these notes. But then, we dust ourselves off and climb out and get to work.
For The Chateau on Sunset, I received my structural edit notes while I was on an aeroplane, so the options for crawling underneath anything and weeping were limited. And perhaps I've developed a tougher skin over the years or perhaps it was just that I agreed with everything in the editorial notes, but I didn't feel the need to do any weeping this time. It could also have been that I was simply too tired from the book tour to summon up the energy to do anything besides stare at my computer screen!