Marcelo in the Real World

For the past month or so I have been working on the final edits to my third novel, Marcelo in the Real World. Today we finished the copyediting process. It is a funny feeling to see my work “corrected” that way. It is a humbling experience to see all that I missed despite the reading and re-reading and revising that I did before sending the manuscript off to publishers. It made me realize how much I need others with different skills to bring a book to completion. Even though the book is different now than the first submission, it is still very much my own. It is as if the initial vision of the work lay hidden and the editing cleared the way for it to emerge. This, I think, is what a good editor does – she opens the way so that the beauty and the light of the work can shine forth. Marcelo was very fortunate to have found an editor like Cheryl Klein at Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. It is truly beautiful when a book and an editor are made for each other – when the characters and ideas in a book resonate with the sensitivities of the editor and when the editor has such kinship with the book’s meaning that she can articulate for the author what the author dimly feels. Publishing a book is such hard work. And in the midst of the hard work there is the element of “luck” or “fate” or “grace” – some mystery that cannot be accounted for in rational terms. Dozens of people read a manuscript and one likes it. Why that person? It is a mystery – like love.