10x easier principle. Case Study.

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What was the 10x principle here?

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Laurence, who is based out of Washington DC, approached me with his manuscript, From Grief to Love.?

The set-up is in the title. Four years after the death of his wife of 30+ years, the mother of his children and the love of his life, Laurence set out on a 4,314-mile coastal walk around England and Wales to raise awareness of cervical cancer screenings. Along the way, he experienced a ‘healing' journey and ended up meeting his new love. That's no spoiler, as the clue was already in the title.

?Laurence arrived at my door with several competing agendas.

1.???He was already reverse engineering an exclusive deal with CRUK (Cancer Research UK) with all the proceeds of his book - as yet unfinished - going to the charity. Consequently, he was placing a lot of emphasis on the charity for them to take up the deal.

2.? Meanwhile, he was weaving in flashbacks of Mellita (his wife) while sharing moving vignettes of friends and strangers who rose to meet him along the way. That, plus the details of promoting his walk, raising funds, and becoming something of a personality on the British media circuit.

3. I was also aware that Laurence was looking to see this project through on a schedule while fully honouring his dead wife’s memory. Part of that timeline was his intention of proposing to his new lady love. Over the two months we worked together, these two events (the editing and the proposal) did indeed overlap.

Speaking as Laurence's editor, you never know what key will unlock the revisions process - turning it from a cerebral exercise into a resetting of an internal dial within the writer. The light-switch moment with Laurence came when I asked him to visualise his reader. Where were they? What were they doing? He was quick to sketch the picture of a woman alone, curled up on her sofa in wintertime, with a glass of wine in one hand and his book in the other. He wanted so much to impart his message to this reader of how important it was she get herself checked out for cervical cancer. That her well-being concerned him.

Okay, now the wheels were turning. For this reader to believe in this man’s genuine concern, she would need to be convinced of certain things to feel safe in his hands and go with him and act on his message.

?First, she'd need to be convinced of how much he loved his first wife. A torch that he would have to carry all the way through.

Two, feel his genuine connection with the other women he encountered along his way. Women, like her, who shared with him how his journey connected with their own cancer tales or dramas around finding love again.

Three. An accompanying narrative arc that showed how it was the companionship of strangers and friends showing up for Laurence that became the bridge from grief to love. And not another woman.

But what Laurence hadn't fully factored in was a byproduct of his premise. It raised a narrative question, ‘Who is this new love? And when will he meet her?’ A question that didn't need to dominate proceedings but, when mishandled or not consciously owned, was doing exactly that. Unfortunately for Laurence, the question was lighting up synapses way too many times throughout the piece. Every time, he complemented a woman’s looks or expressed the hint of an attraction or mentioned that he and a certain woman would meet again.

So, the 10x measure became about reducing this emphasis. By taking these out, other elements of backstory and present-time narrative could then land in the right way. Laurence could now lean more into his loss. Somewhere he hadn't allowed himself to fully go while he was positioning so much ahead of himself.

This is the work we do together. We come to understand the optimal organising principle. But not on the page necessarily, where writers typically edit themselves out of the magic of their own creative writing. Sure, I attend to every page of my client's manuscripts, but the most illuminating work arrives when we seek to understand something ‘under the understood’. By no longer making editing such an ordeal, we achieve two things:

1. We stop making the writing bigger than you.
2. And find the meeting ground for your authentic intelligence to rise and do the work 10x more effectively.

The 10x principle versus the 2x principle, remember!