Bettering Your Editing (Writing Workshop)

Creating imaginary worlds filled with whatever weirdness your thinking noodle cooks up is, at it’s root (if you’re doing it correctly) fun. Sure, sometimes it’s hard forcing yourself into the chair to put words to paper, but once you’re in the flow and ideas start plopping out of your word-hole, the act of writing becomes a fairly fun activity.

Some people write because they have a syphilitic story-burn in their nether regions. They have a story chewing at their insides, begging to be loosed upon the world. If they don’t somehow manage to expel said story, it will literally consume them. Or so that’s how they feel.

Personally, I’m not one of those writers. I don’t have a Magnum Opus roiling about inside me. Nothing clamoring to crawl out of me. I just love stories. Whether it’s telling my own, or losing myself in somebody else’s, there is nothing in this world I enjoy more than a good story.

So when it comes to writing, sitting down and churning out a first draft ain’t no thang but a chicken wang (<– obligatory peculiar phrase for the day). Unfortunately, first draft’s are rarely any good. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that 99% of first drafts are abominations which is why most are thrown into a hyena pit and left for dead.

Which is too bad. Who knows how many great stories the world has been denied simply because the author didn’t sit down and do that most painful of steps: Edits.

I can’t remember who said it, but this gets to the gist of it:

Great Writers Are Great Rewriters.

Editing sucks, not least because it means descending into the literary depths of our current Masterpiece of shi—and absolutely eviscerating it, but because most of people simply don’t know where to begin in the editing process.

You’ve spent days, weeks, months, years, perhaps even decades, getting that first draft out. The words are one jumbled mess sprawled across hundreds of pages and you simply don’t know where to begin. Figuring out where to begin can be so difficult that most people simply give up. Of those people who stick it out, I’m afraid that a vast majority of them go about the editing process in the least efficient way conceivable.

What I see most often are writers diving back into their first drafts without any clear path or course of action. They read the story from beginning to end correcting commas and unruly apostrophes, minor word changes and occasionally editing a sentence for clarity. By the time they reach the end they’ll have done a significant amount of work, but none of it productive.

This is important, so it bares (bears? Someone help, homonyms are hard) repeating: They are doing a significant amount of work, but none of it productive.

Let’s use an analogy:

You’re driving along Highway 1 in your Miata. The top is down and your flowing mane of hair is blowing along with the ocean breeze. It’s a beautiful day: the sun is shining, birds are chirping, you have a little Jason Mraz blaring through the speakers. But then the unthinkable happens, the engine starts sputtering. The chassis shakes uncontrollably and now smoke is billowing out through the hood.

You pull over, because while you don’t know much about cars, you know smoke is bad. Besides, it totally smells bad and is stinging your eyeballs.

Now you’re on the side of the road, poor Miata refuses to go any further. You pop the hood and take a look inside, but your car know-how ends somewhere between “put gas in gas hole when Empty light comes on” and “smoke is bad”. You’re looking at the overheated engine, but you don’t have a clue what’s wrong or where to begin.

So what do you do?

*shrug*

Depends on what sort of person you are. Maybe you grab a chamois and Armor-All and start buffing your car’s paint. Maybe you pour some oil in the oil-hole while pretending to be Zorro with the dipstick. Hell, maybe you get the car jack out and change one of the tires.

Now, perhaps your tires are bald and it really is time to change them. But has your engine suddenly picked up a smoking addiction on account of a flat tire? Probably not.

But this is what I see writers doing with their manuscripts all the time. They start fixing random things that probably do need to be fixed, but aren’t the main priority.

Case in point: there is little to be gained by giving your Miata a car wash if you never manage to get it running again.

I’ve dragged this analogy out too long, let’s get concrete.

How To Be More Effective With Your Edits

Before you can engage in any sort of meaningful edits, you have to diagnose your stories problems. After finishing your first draft, put it aside for a couple weeks to gain time, distance, independence, a modicum of sanity and perspective.

After a suitable cooling down period, return to the manuscript and read that sucker from beginning to end as quickly as possible. On this read through you’re trying to cram the whole story into your brain at the same time and see if it actually makes sense, noting the really big changes it’s going to need along the way.

For instance, by the end of this read through you might have taken a handful of notes that look like this:

-Billy Jean needs more characterization

-Suzy’s sex change isn’t foreshadowed enough

-Joey chapters make me want to gouge my eyeballs out with dull pencils

-Archibald’s stripper-for-hire subplot doesn’t really fit with this Young Adult book

Notice these are pretty big/general changes. You can’t just go to page 134 and fix the problem. For most of these you’ll have to sprinkle new scenes and details across the entirety of the book like the Fairy Godmother of Diabetes with powdered sugar.

You have these really big issues you need to work out, right? Good, before working them out. Read the book again, this time slowly and critically. Note the places where you could squeeze more characterization in. Circle the places to cut out Archi’s stripping career.

The goal of this second read is not to add new material. It’s to refine your plan of attack so that your editing on the third read through can be as surgical as possible.

Identify the BIG/GENERAL problems your story faces before worrying about the little things like sentence structure, language, and grammar.

Why?

Because it’s a waste of time to make sentences sparkle if they are only going to be cut later on (as is the case with Archibald for example). Save yourself time and energy by locating your stories big problems first and then whittle them down.

In my own writing I keep track of all the editing I need to do in a journal with three columns. One for big changes, medium changes, and small changes. Always tackle the big changes first. Here’s an example from my journal to give you an idea:

All that, by the way, is for a 30,000 word Novella. Which goes to show that your work is only just beginning after you’ve completed the first draft.

Once you’ve diagnosed your story problems, pick them off one by one, starting at the top and moving your way down. The nice thing about this method is that as you get deeper into the edits, the easier the fixes become. It adds a sense of progress and direction that might otherwise be lacking.

After crossing everything off your list, go for another read thru and create ANOTHER list. This time paying attention to whether or not your original fixes actually work. Sometimes by trying to fix a problem you make it worse, sometimes you don’t go quite far enough and you need to slap a little more duct tape on there.

Whatever the case may be, you need to keep repeating this process until YOU as the author can no longer find any glaringly obvious problems. Then comes the painful part: Send it to your beta readers and editor. Get as many sets of eyeballs on your story as possible.

You’ll be surprised by just how much you missed. Don’t feel bad about that, it’s part of the process. We all do it. Take the feedback from your readers/editor, ignore the stuff you don’t agree with, and dive back in for another round of edits.

This is your structural edit and it is, by far, the most difficult part of the editing process. But once you get all the cogs in place and the engine turning over, it’s smooth sailing. All that’s left is a nice little polish.

For this, I go through, reading each and every sentence very, very carefully, paying attention for word usage, clarity, and originality.

Clarity is obvious, right? Make sure the sentence is saying what you intend for it to say.

Originality is obvious, too, but it’s hard to be… objective and honest with yourself. We all know to avoid cliches, right? Of course. But what’s even more insidious are personal turns of phrases that we subconsciously fall back on. For me, I love using the phrase “Hugged him like a baby koala.”

You’d be surprised how often I find an opportunity to throw that sentence into my works. Problem is I’ve used it in one of my stories and it’s a memorable enough line that if I ever use it again the astute reader will call foul.

I know this because my beta reader caught me trying to sneak my baby koala sentence into Mind Breach. Whoops.

Word usage is tricky and comes down to personal preference. In my fiction I hate using the same word multiple times in the same paragraph. In fact, I go so far as to avoid using the same word multiple times on the same page.

Why? Because it draws attention to itself and pulls the reader out of the story.

By the way, I’m not just talking about big show-offy words like indubitably or inexorably, which we all know to avoid overusing. I’m talking about really simple shit like:

“Bob walked over to the table where Kate sat reading her newspaper. She looked up from her newspaper and scowled. Bob circled the table before taking a seat. A bowl sitting on top of the table jangled as he sat spilling milk onto the newspaper in front of Bob.”

I’m being really obvious with the words I’m trying to overuse here, but the thing is, I’m not really exaggerating. This type of paragraph crops up all the time in new writer’s fiction. I hate it and you should hate it.

Avoid it like the plague.

Use your word processors Find Keyword function and whenever you notice certain words cropping up more than seems natural, search it out and annihilate it.

If you could only do one exercise before releasing your Kraken’esque manuscript into the world, it would be this: Read it Out Loud.

Everybody should do this at least once with their draft, perhaps even twice if you’re anal like me. Reading the words out loud lets our ears pick up on things that our mind would have otherwise glossed over. Stilted dialog stands out like a sore thumb and wandering exposition slaps you in the face like a wet towel.

Doesn’t that sound like a hoot? Sure does, now go do it.

At the very end of my editing process, I go through and use that Find Keyword functionality to search out this list of commonly overused words. I look at each instance of the word and decide on an individual basis whether or not the word actually needs to be there. If so, fine. If not?

Here’s the list I use:

OVERUSED WORDS

Cause, As, Was, However, Though, Actually, Really, Likely, Of Course, As Well, Perhaps, Probably, There is, Always, Almost, Entire, Very, Quite, Already, Surely, Certainly, Obviously, Just, Maybe, Stuff, Things, Got, Seemed, But, Like

Cutting out the majority of these words will make your prose tighter. Tight prose = good prose.

A’ight, Folks. That’s all I got for you. Before you leave, waddle on over to the comments and tell me about your own editing process. I love contrasting and comparing different styles!