For my spot on the blog tour, Perdita and Honor will be talking about the editing process of Take Two, and will be revealing all in what went down!
So, without any further ado, I'm going to hand over to Perdita and Honor...
So it’s Day Six of our blog tour and we’ve got all the way to Post-Production. We thought it would be fun to give you an unvarnished insight into the process of editing Take Two. (So unvarnished that you’ll only be reading this piece if it made our editor laugh not cry.)
Our editor is Jane Griffiths – she’s the Editorial Director at Simon & Schuster, she’s ridiculously brilliant (nominated multiple times for the Branford Boase award and The Bookseller rising star 2016 etc.) and she’s lovely but she’s quite demanding. Here’s how it goes behind the scenes:
Jane: ‘I love this joke. Can we have more like that… the same but different.” Us: ‘Absolutely. Not a problem.’ *Panic and look around in despair for the joke bank that is stocked with jokes that are the same but different.
Ok, she didn’t put it quite like that. She warned us it would date and as per she was right. We’d just got a bit carried away by the zeitgeist. We went back and raided the alternative joke bank,Jane: ‘I love this break-up storyline. Can we have more of it.’ Us: ‘Absolutely. Not a problem.’ *Panic. (You try writing break up scenes between teens that are realistic and yet free of swearing and/or dickish behavior – and which don’t use the word ‘dickish’. It’s fun but it’s challenging.)
Jane: ‘I love this realistic teen dialogue but what does ‘basic’ mean?’
Hon: ‘Well, Jane do you like pumpkin spice latte?’
Jane: ‘Well, yes, I do.’
Hon: ‘Do you like Taylor Swift?’
Jane: ‘Why yes, I do.’ …We changed it to ‘tragically mainstream’ a) because P was also quite confused, b) because there was a consensus on Taylor Swift and c) because Jane was feeding us biscuits at the time so was bound to win. It’s probably the right call. In Waiting for Callback she wouldn’t let us have ‘chirpse’ because she said no-one would know what it meant. ‘But Jane,’ we said repeatedly, ‘All teens know what ‘chirpse means.” A theory we then tested out at school visits and it turned out she was right (and we have to stop being honest in print because we’ve never admitted that and now she knows!).
Jane: ‘I love this scene with Amber’s dog, Kale,’ (you’ll have noticed that she always starts very, very gently) “but I don’t think dogs do actually grin do they?’ Us: we just annotated the manuscript with this fetching pic… We won that one. Of course we did. It puts it beyond doubt.But being pushed like this has been so good for us. Our editor doesn’t let us get away with what is lazy or easy, she pushes us to put more and better on the page. We love being edited and we’re just very grateful.
Thank you Alix for hosting us! Tomorrow’s the final day of our tour and we’d love you to come to our Premiere (a.k.a. an extract from the beginning of Take Two – we’re being hosted by Beth over on Words from a Reader!
My review of Waiting For Callback: Take Two will be up at some point this week, but believe me, it's one you'll want to get your hands on...
Make sure you check out the rest of the posts on the tour!
Buy Waiting For Callback: Take Two here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Waiting-Callback-Take-Perdita-Cargill/dp/1471144852/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485614798&sr=1-1&keywords=waiting+for+callback+take+two
Check out Perdita and Honor here: http://www.dhhliteraryagency.com/perdita-and-honour-cargill.html
Until next time :)
Until next time :)
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