This post is part of the monthly How Writers Revise series, where I talk with successful authors about their editing and revision processes, as well as the challenges and setbacks they’ve faced in their careers and how they overcame them. If you’d like to receive these and my weekly writing craft posts in your in-box you can sign up here.

There is much about author Sherry Thomas that I have always found fascinating.

While she is a USA Today-bestselling author of 22 books that regularly receive starred reviews and best-of-the-year honors from trade publications, including such outlets as the New York Times and National Public Radio; a two-time winner of Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA Award; and is often touted for her lush, rich prose, English is Sherry’s second language, as she was born and spent her early years in China.

“There’s no need to be too impressed, because I came here when I was thirteen,” she downplays that fact. “English may not be my native tongue, but it’s now my primary language, it’s my working language…. My Chinese is not as good.”

While she made a name for herself as a popular author of historical romance, Sherry is equally renowned as the author of the popular Lady Sherlock historical mystery series, and she’s also written fantasy, contemporary romance, and even wuxia novels.

Full disclosure, I’ve known Sherry almost since I came to Austin 15 years ago, and she has become a friend. But I’ve also been a fan of hers for nearly that long, from the moment I read her writing.

But I’ve also always admired her steadfastness, practicality, and dedication she brings to her writing craft and career, and have long wanted to be able to interview her for this feature and share her story with you.

Although always an avid reader, Sherry gave up on her earliest writing attempts after “not getting past two pages” in her youthful efforts, and never entertained any notion of being a professional author.

“If you’re an immigrant kid, with no connections or anything, and your family’s all like scientists and engineers, you don’t, you don’t do anything in the literary arts related fields,” she explains. Instead she majored in international trade and finance, thinking that with that and her two languages she might work in diplomatic services.

Instead she got married and had a baby, and she didn’t revisit writing until her son was 1½ years old—inspired to try again by reading a new book by an author she’d once loved in her teenage years and realizing, “This new book sucked for me, like it sucked really hard for me. I mean it sucked so hard that I, who had given up any thoughts of writing ten years before that, decided on the spot, ‘Hey, you know, if this book could be on the New York Times bestselling list, I probably should have a go at it.”

She started writing in the snippets of time her son was sleeping or in nursery school for a year and a half, until she had a finished manuscript—150K words that came easily. “I just wrote the beginning and went to the end,” she recalls. “Don’t you remember this lovely time when you didn’t know how to criticize?”

But when she started querying, one agent suggested she’d started her epic story—it spanned nearly a decade—much too soon and should begin when the hero and heroine met. “Do you mean to cut out 150 pages of this book?” she remembers asking incredulously. “What the heck am I gonna do with it?”

She didn’t know how to revise it, so instead she recycled the printed pages and used them to print recipes. “In my recipe folder, you can still see bits and pieces of this old story. And it would be weird because on the front you have a curry recipe. On the back, there’s some drama going on.”

Five years passed, during which she wrote four more manuscripts and found an agent, who submitted two of her stories that hadn’t sold. And then one day Sherry flipped over a recipe and started rereading that first story.

“I was like, wow, I can really see why nobody in their right mind offered to publish this, because it was not executed well.” But she still liked the idea and now she had a clearer idea how to fix it.

She took the advice of her first agent–who had dropped her in the intervening years–and made it a dual-timeline story that started closer to when the main characters met and submitted it to her current agent, who sold Private Arrangements to a Big Five house (Bantam, then an imprint of Random House) in a preempt the week Sherry went back to graduate school to pursue an accounting degree.

She wrote four novels with Bantam, but each had progressively smaller print runs based on past sales, until her publisher told her that while they still believed in her, they couldn’t get her books into Walmart anymore (a major influencer in a romance novel’s success at the time) and wanted her to change her name so they could release her next title as a “debut author.”

Sherry and her agent both felt that was a premature request, and decided to switch publishers in 2010, “one of the worst times to be losing your contract with your publisher”—but eventually Sherry landed at Berkley. “But basically, I had to settle for a contract with less money per book and a shorter timeline.”

“As a writer…basically, all you can do is produce the best books you can. And partner with the best people you can. And so that’s what I decided to concentrate on.”

Sherry THomas

I asked Sherry how she dealt with what might have seemed like a come-down, after such a promising start to her career.

“Basically, there’s not much I can do. Books’ success are a confluence of things, right? Everybody who’s in business for any amount of time knows that it’s a confluence of things. And so I realized early on what they said is true: As a writer–again this was before self-publishing–basically, all you can do is produce the best books you can. And partner with the best people you can. And so that’s what I decided to concentrate on. I decided to concentrate on the work early on. And when all this came, my thought was the same: People were losing contracts left and right. And some people did not get a new contract. And so you know, mine was a step down, but it was not a fall straight into the pits.”

In fact, it would be hard to call it a “fall” at all, when Sherry has gone on to pen several successful popular series and standalones in a variety of genres—young adult fantasy, romance, mystery, and a wuxia-inspired duology—including the Lady Sherlock Series, the Marsdens, the London Trilogy, Heart of Blade Duology, and the Fitzhughs.

“Everybody needs to understand that sometimes the marketplace is just unforgiving,” she says. “You know, whoever it was that said, ‘The successful ones deserve the success’? But the less successful ones, it’s not like they don’t deserve the success or they didn’t have the quality. Just for whatever reason, they didn’t get popular. They didn’t get enough people to want them who hit the zeitgeist at the same time…. All you can do, seriously, is to concentrate on the work.”

Her most recent title, A Tempest at Sea, book 7 of the Lady Sherlock series, releases March 14. You can see our full interview on my YouTube channel here.

I know Sherry to be a passionate devotee of editing and revision, and I asked her to share her thoughts about her own processes in those areas.

How Sherry Thomas Revises

TYM: How do you edit—meaning how do you initially evaluate your manuscript and assess what may need developing or changing?

I evaluate my manuscript as I go. For all that I’ve grown more skilled as a writer in the years since I first started, I never developed into someone capable of outlining a story ahead of its actual writing. This is where my biggest challenge is, to be writing in an exploratory manner, and gauging, at the same time, against my own internal story meter, whether I am building toward a properly structured story. Or whether what I’ve produced so far needs to be scrapped for a different direction or a different execution.

Very occasionally I get the story right in the first go, i.e., getting the overall structure correct without going down the wrong path. Most often what happens these days is that I might write ten thousand words on a first draft, and decide that it’s all wrong. I stop, let the story percolate for some time while I do other things, and then say to myself, okay, how about instead of this, I do that. If my new direction is correct, I should usually be able to take the story to about 25 thousand words, at which point I often need to again stop and reevaluate. It might be that by that point I finally decide who is the murderer in my murder mystery. It might be that I see I should have done something different with a b-plot. It might be that I realize I have been writing so much plot that I have no idea what my characters are thinking and feeling anymore.

So I revise what I have in order to have what I need to move forward again.

This process might repeat itself anywhere from 3 to 5 times. But usually, if I can make it past 60k words, I might have a list of things as long as Broadway that still need to be added to the manuscript, but I can be comforted by the knowledge that the story by now has more or less the correct structure.

Or as good a structure as I can give it.

From that point on it’s just writing what’s needed.

Once I have the structure right and have written as much of the story as time allows, it goes to my critique partner, who is very good at pointing out scene- and paragraph-level shortcomings. She would have hundreds of notes for me. I get completely overwhelmed sometimes with the amount of work her comments generate, but at the same time I know that that by this point whatever imperfections in terms of prose and scene execution can all be fixed and none of it is fatal.

TYM: How do you process editorial feedback, and how do you decide what feels right for your story and what to disregard?

Editorial feedback will typically strike me immediately as yes, of course. Very few people read my books before they are published, and those who do are extremely good at what they do and I take their comments seriously.

However, from time to time opinions simply diverge and I will read a comment and go, no, absolutely not. Even rarer would be the occasional comment I can’t make up my mind on. In which case I let it percolate. Sometimes after a few days I would go, aha, so that’s what I should do. Sometimes after a few days I still have no idea how I would fix this particular thing or whether I even agree with it—in which case I let it go. And happily I’ve never been haunted by any comments I’ve let go—I’ve simply forgotten them!