Editing is Writing

“What I write is smarter than I am because I can re-write it.” Susan Sontag

We’re not always trying to be smarter,  be we are trying to be better. For some the words just flow and little editing is needed. These are the best storytellers! But for many of us writers, we need to edit, especially beginning writers, at least I did. I keep hoping it gets easier in time. I keep reading more about how to write and all the techniques and things to remember get stuck in my head and I hope one day they just become part of me. We’ll see as I start on my second novel. 

[Aside: I actually wrote this blog about a month ago, as part of my turn to impart some wisdom at our monthly writers’ group. Our blog was having technical difficulties, so this sat about a month. I’ve now had a great epiphany, where at least some of the ideas of writing have synthesized in my brain, that I can look and see the difficulties, find the rhythm. I think I may have found my voice. Of course, editing is still required, but I’ve made some progress. It’s only taken 15 or twenty years.]

First drafts are usually bad, but not all bad. This is where our first ideas come from, the skeleton of our story, a few ideas to hang our hats on. But they usually lack depth, specificity and can be full of clichés. It’s important to turn off your editor when writing those discovery drafts. Leave the editing to the second draft, and third draft, and fourth, and so on….

It’s not fair to say it’s all editing. Part of editing is writing, re-writing, drilling down.

Here’s my process:

1. Write the first draft, just get it out, don’t change a word. I wrote my first novel by hand, in ink.
2. Edit.

How much editing you have to do usually depends on both experience and talent. I hope I’ve gained some of both since the writing of my first novel.  I’ve decided to write the first draft of my second novel on the computer. I think I’ll be able to write for longer and I’ve found Scrivener, but more about that later.

The first edit is a “story” edit. Because I wrote my first novel by hand, my first read was as I typed it in. Being a typist at heart, I type without editing, just recording. And then I had to map out what I had. What was my story line? What was weak and needed work? Were there holes in the story?

This is what I’d call a macro edit. I had a scene list and a large notebook, then I got white boards so I could see the whole story. And I had to learn things like what a chapter was, really. Again, I hope it all goes a bit smoother this time.

Scrivener. It allows you to “see” your whole novel on the computer. There are index cards, scene lists, you can pick up and move them around, colour code. It’s a great tool and at a reasonable price, and there’s a trial version. There’s a link at the bottom of this blog. (I have no ties with Scrivener, just really like it.)

I’ve read a lot and taken a lot of workshops and the Humber correspondence program, so I’ve garnered ideas from everywhere and distilled them down into my own process. No matter what we are doing as writers, we’re always perfecting our craft, whether it’s to delve further into our creative minds, or to learn how to turn a phrase just so.

But two of the books I get most of my editing ideas from are: The Weekend Novelist Re-Writes the Novel, by Robert J. Ray; and Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, by Renni Browne and Dave King.

This section is summarized from Robert J. Ray’s, The Weekend Novelist Re-Writes the Novel.

He breaks it down into 4 major steps.

1. Reading your novel, do not line edit. He advise us to make notes and lists. This is the thinking phase of the rewrite, he advises.
2. Rewrite subplots
3. Rewrite key scenes
4. Work on style

Some advice I’ve read suggests this is a good time to do your outline if you haven’t already, or revise the one you have. If you work on your pitch and synopsis here, before more detailed edits, you will get a clear and focused picture of your story. Make sure each scene in your story has a purpose. Does it advance plot, reveal character? Do you have too much action with no breather, no reaction? Or do you have large blocks of text that ramble on “telling” the story instead of showing?

Micro-edits

Once you feel that your story structure is strong, you’ve deleted unnecessary scenes, or written scenes to fill holes, then it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty, the micro-edit. This is where you look at the paragraphs and sentences, word choice and grammar.

Here I relied heavily on, Self-editing for Fiction Writers, by Renni Browne and Dave King. This is a list of the chapters they detail in their book:

1. Show and Tell
2. Character and Exposition
3. Point of View
4. Proportion
5. Dialogue Mechanics
6. See How it Sounds
7. Interior Monologue
8. Easy Beats
9. Breaking up is Easy to Do
10. Once is Usually Enough
11. Sophistication
12. Voice

It’s well worth the read to go through, or even read the sections that you feel you need to work on. Proportion is one of my sticky points!

Other ideas:

• A critique group where you read your work out loud can be very effective. You are more likely to hear what’s wrong with your own work, even.
• If you have a phrase you saying you overuse in your writing, do a search on it and delete every one that isn’t necessary.
• Do a search for every time you say feel, or felt? Are you telling instead of showing?
• PRINT it out. Although you can edit on screen, reading from the page uses a different part of the brain and you will see things you never saw on the screen.
• Beta readers.

Novel writing is a long processes that involves many steps: creating, editing, synopsis and pitch, dealing with agents or publishers, and hopefully reading to audiences. They all are part of the craft of writing so it’s best if you can enjoy each one. For many of us, editing will be one of the longest steps on this journey!

Link for a free trial of Scrivener:

https://www.literatureandlatte.com/trial.php