Chapter 3 – writing the first full draft is an account of the the process I followed to write the complete text from start to finish, but I missed something out because I think it belongs better in this chapter about editing. So let’s rewind to a couple of months before full draft submission.

In researching Wild Pavements I met lots of people – at least 60 – who care for urban nature, and in many cases I quote them. Before I sent a complete draft to Flint Books, I forwarded each draft chapter to all of the people I wrote about or quoted in that particular chapter, to check they were okay with how I represented them and their views. I hear from other narrative non-fiction writers that this is quite unusual, but it’s something I’ve always done in my feature writing and it seemed even more important to do it for a book too, given its much longer shelf life. Why did I bother to do this, which added on at least a month to the timeline? Well, not only did I have the reassurance that the contributor was happy with their ‘episode’, but several of them gave me invaluable feedback on other aspects of their chapter. And I’ve heard from many of them that they plan to promote the book too.

A couple of months after the draft had been sent to the the publisher, Claire the commissioning editor sent me back a set of high level comments which I then used to amend the text. I also commissioned a ‘bird editor’ and ‘plant editor’ to check the technical aspects of the text relating to these two groups. I also revisited all the references to check they were up to date and consistently formatted. The updated draft was passed to the project team for the next phase of editing.

Three months later I received feedback from the copy editor, with just 3 small things they thought I should work on, and some feedback on how much they’d enjoyed reading it, which was great to hear. I was particularly pleased to hear the draft described as “very clean”, which is high praise from an editor. I turned these comments around in a couple of weeks and resubmitted a draft.

A month on again, I was sent a digital proof, for proof editing. This was the first time I’d seen how the text would appear on the page. By this point, I’d read the draft chapters so many times, it was tempting to think there wouldn’t be many proofing errors to find. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. I spent a month working through it line by line, and found a surprisingly large number of minor corrections. Far too many of them were commas in the wrong place. I read the whole thing aloud one more time before I sent back my requests for changes.

The very final stage of the editing process is a quick check of the very final proof before it goes to print. The document will be arriving at some point this week.