The Page Sabotaging Your Book

Across nearly two decades of developmental editing, I’ve kept a mental tally of how many writers came to me convinced their manuscript needed a full rewrite, and how many actually did.

The first number is over forty. The second is three. And that is its own story.

Manuscripts have structural problems too, of course. But those issues are easier to pin-point. They don’t make you feel that the whole thing should be expunged and you should start over.

All too often, the aberration is a mere blip, influencing subsequent chapters. For some reason, writers read their own work with the particular cruelty reserved for things we care about, elevating a local failure to a global one.

I worked with a nonfiction client two years back. She was writing a book on decision-making for mid-level managers. Her central argument was that intuition, trained properly, outperforms slow, deliberate analysis in time-pressured calls. Her thesis was sound and well-supported.

In chapter six, she used a case study in which a manager’s gut call almost cost them the contract. The deal was saved by someone who insisted on running the numbers first. She included it because it was a good story. She hadn’t noticed that the incident argued against her own premise.

By chapter nine, she felt something was off but couldn’t locate it. By chapter eleven, she’d started hedging her own thesis, softening claims she’d stated with confidence in chapter one.

She came to me convinced that her premise was in error and that she had to abandon the project.

I asked her:

1. When did you feel the book was falling apart?

Her answer: By chapter 9 I felt something was going off tangent.

2. Which chapter or scene were you writing when you became sure? This establishes the point from which we need to backtrack to chapter one.

Her answer: I was on chapter 11 by the time I became sure.

3. What did the book promise in chapter one? A protagonist’s values, a thesis, a tone, a reader’s expectation of what kind of story this is. Somewhere, the manuscript made a commitment.

Her answer: To prove that trained intuition outperforms deliberate analysis in time-pressured situations.

4. Where did the manuscript break that commitment? I urge them to scrutinize their work from chapter one onward to the backtrack point.

Her answer: I cannot identify it for sure. Chapter 5 maybe, or six. Can you help?

I went through chapters one to nine.

“Up to chapter five, everything was great,” I told her. “Your premise is sound. But chapter six is working against the book. Specifically, that one case-study is diametrically opposite to what you were saying. You have written every chapter after it in a way to compensate for that contrary stance. That’s the place the manuscript needs repair. Either replace the case study with another or delete it entirely.”

One case study in chapter six. That was the eye of the spiral.

It astounds me how well this principle applies to all manuscripts—fiction, memoir, or a business book. A specific structural or conceptual error disburses a sense of failure that spreads everywhere.

The writer doesn’t experience it as “one part of chapter six is inconsistent with chapter one.” They experience it as “something about this book idea is flawed and I should stop.”

Once you answer the questions above, you will find the point of aberration. Repairing that point needs an edit, not a full rewrite. It might take weeks, not months.

The hard part is the diagnosis. This is the part you need a pair of fresh, experienced eyes.

Writers cannot diagnose their own manuscripts just as a student cannot evaluate their own exam answers. They have the skill, but not the detachment of distance.

The diagnosis is the job of an author coach. To confirm that three hundred pages are structurally fine. They are just standing near the damage and taking the blame for it.

If you’ve been carrying “something’s wrong with the whole thing” for months, know that it is insulating you from a smaller, more specific problem. Somewhere in your manuscript there are pages working against the rest of the book. Identify and correct them.

Don’t let them be the reason you give up on a book you started because you had something important to say.

Mother of three adult, opinionated humans and two boisterous dogs. An idealistic, outspoken woman of scrupulous integrity. Author coach and developmental editor. And a passionate bibliophile, of course.