[Book Review] Self-Editing for Fiction Writers

Tweet The word 'editing' often strikes fear into the heart of a writer - we just want to get the words down, we don't want to start rearranging them afterwards. Unfortunately you won't get far in the writing world if you never edit your work. With publishing houses overstretched, there is less money available to sink into a book, meaning much of the editing will be done initially by the writer themselves. Indeed, if you're planning on going down the self publishing route, then you'll need to invest a heck of a lot of time editing your manuscript before you unleash it on the unsuspecting public.

Think of it this way - filmmakers make their films, 'writing' the story on celluloid. Along comes an editor and suddenly what they've 'written' has been altered. A good editor can turn a mediocre film into something exceptional - and the same goes for your writing. However, some directors have such an authorial vision that they do as much they can during shooting to ensure that as little editing happens as possible. Take Sir Alfred Hitchcock. He used a technique known as "cutting in the camera" where he only filmed what he absolutely needed in order to tell the story as it happened in his head. He gave the editors very little to work with as their job was essentially done, and his vision remained in tact. Editing your work yourself before you send it out to query or release it as a self-publishing endeavour works in the same way. See how it's not so bad after all?

Now, it is strongly advised that you get feedback from people who know what they're talking about - other writers (especially if they've been published themselves) are a good place to start, as is anyone who has to string words together for a living. Unless your mother, spouse or flatmate have experience editing, it's probably best not to ask them. So unless you can afford a professional editor, where do you start? Well, a book like this one can certainly help. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King won't teach you the mechanics of writing, but it will teach you what editors look out for, and how to avoid making the mistakes in the first place.

The book is broken into sections to help you target particular aspects of your work. Dialogue, pacing, point of view, voice and crafting scenes are all covered, along with other tricky spots you might feel you need help with. 'Before and after' examples are given to help you see how a passage can be reworked to say the same thing but in a much clearer way, and they even cite authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald to show how writing styles have changed over time. Each chapter ends with a checklist of things to do/not do, and a series of exercises designed to get you thinking like an editor.

It's not intended as a textbook for the craft of writing, and there are plenty of excellent books available for almost every aspect of writing that you can think of, but if you practice the techniques and pay attention to the red flags raised by the authors of this book, you'll probably find yourself writing better material from scratch, and requiring less editing at a later stage.

Highly recommended, both for new writers and experienced writers who may wish to review their approach.

Four blunt pencils out of five!

Unplugged

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I can often be a somewhat contrary young miss. One minute I'm posting an entry bemoaning the reliance on technology, and the next I'm posting an entry on how my Netbook has boosted my productivity. Having said that, I'm not necessarily changing my mind as I'm fully capable of believing both of those things simultaneously. I believe that both traditional methods and technological advances have their uses, and their place, when it comes to writing. I stand by my statement that I love my Netbook for allowing me to work pretty much anywhere, and for allowing me to increase my output by utilising previously wasted time on tube journeys or at lunchtime. However, I also acknowledge that when I'm at home, I have a horrid tendency to get distracted by Facebook, Twitter, or my ever-expanding blog list. I end up spending hours reading the fiction of others, which is immensely enjoyable, but I really should be working on my own.

As well as writing a weekly Friday flash and revising my first novel, I have two other major projects on the go. One is the Tales from Vertigo City e-book that I've talked about previously, while the other is a collection of my fantasy/horror related flash fictions. This collection will feature expanded versions of nine stories submitted to the #FridayFlash collector, a flash inspired by a Writer's Digest prompt, another random flash written after a night out in London, and two completely exclusive flashes that you won't find anywhere else. If you really want to read them, you'll have to get the e-book!

I've already written one of these exclusive flashes. I had the idea late on Friday, inspired by an anecdote I found in a book on London history. Yet by Sunday evening, I still hadn't written anything. The idea kept going around and around in my head, and I wanted to write it down, it's just I kept getting distracted by the Internet. I would start to plan the first line and oh! Would you look at that? I'd find another Friday Flash I wanted to read. I'm not one of these people who can have my laptop on and NOT have Tweetdeck running (unless, obviously, I have no wi-fi connection) so I did the only thing I could.

I unplugged.

Yes, that's right. I switched off my laptop, I put a CD of classical movie scores in the stereo, I picked up my A4 notebook, and I started writing. By hand. With a bright blue Pilot fineliner. Thirty three minutes later, I had my flash. It underwent some revisions during the transition from handwritten page to Word document, but by and large, it was done. I felt incredibly productive, and pleased that such a simple, and obvious, solution had worked. Making the switch from typing my work to writing it longhand also helped to break the miniature block I felt, a block that stood between the idea in my head, and the process of writing it down. Writing longhand took my brain by surprise, and it vaulted over the block with ease. Hurrah!

So if you're having a similar problem breaking through writer's block, or actually getting the work done, here are my three top tips.

1. Disconnect from the Internet. It'll still be there when you're finished. If you can't stand being disconnected, switch off your computer altogether. Hey, you can be creative AND environmentally friendly.
2. Make changes to your longhand methods. If you normally write in black biro, try purple fineliner, or pencil. The novelty will appeal to your creative side, and the divergence from habit will trick your brain out of its rut. (For more on how to use this technique when editing your work, check out this post on Writer's Block NZ)
3. Don't worry too much about what you're writing while you're happily scrawling away. You'll get to edit it later when you type it up. For now, your job is simply to get what's in your head onto the page. If it helps, doodle in the margins. You can't do THAT in Word.

Say, what are you doing still reading this? Don't you have some writing to do?

Waging War on the Editing Demon

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Back in November 2008, I finished writing my first novel. I already had two unfinished novels to my name, but I have to give some credit to NaNoWriMo for impelling me to actually get to 'The End' - without the daily 'deadlines' required to make the minimum 50,000 words by the beginning of December, I doubt I would have been able to maintain the impetus to get the story of Fowlis Westerby out of my head and onto the page.

The intervening time has seen me flirting with short stories, flash fiction and now a web serial, as I procrastinate like hell so I can avoid the dreaded 'rewrite' process. All of the writing manuals advise you to leave a manuscript to 'breathe' before you return to it, so as to develop some kind of distance from your own work and revise with a more objective eye, though I think eighteen months might be pushing it! Eisley Jacobs kindly wrote a guest post about her own editing process back in March but today I'm going to discuss my own process, and how it relates to my first novel.

Step one is easy - it involves printing out a hard copy of the whole manuscript. For the environmentally conscious among you, I did this using single spacing, a size 10 font and printing on both sides. (Helvetica was designed to be readable as small as 6pt, simply so that the writing in the New York phone book could be small enough to read, and thus stop the book being about a foot thick). I simply read through the manuscript, making comments and notes as I go. So far, it looks like I've scrawled 'expand' across most of it - NaNoWriMo is great for motivating you to get the words out, but in a lot of cases that's all I was doing; a general brain dump of ideas. Many scenes require expansion, or explanation. Even during this initial step, no matter how much I am tempted, I do no actual rewriting - not until I've read the original manuscript in full.

It is very tempting to rewrite as you go, but you can only get a 'bird's eye view' of the story as a whole when you read it 'as is'. You may fix what you think is a problem in the opening chapters only to discover you've created another one later on - by re-reading the whole thing, you may realise that what you think is a problem on page 10 is actually necessary for the events of page 98 to make sense.

This is the point at which I now find myself, with a hard copy covered in multi-coloured notes, comments and even doodles. The next step is go back through the work and actually do an initial rewrite to incorporate the comments I've made, including those dreaded expansions. I'm expecting the word count to shoot up, although the addition of new material will probably end up simply balancing out the elimination of the frequent adverbs I've found (I try hard not to use adverbs in my fiction these days, but apparently I still thought they were a good idea in 2008).

The thing that strikes me the most is that although there are passages that make me cringe, or sections where I can tell what I was getting at but now find the writing clunky or uninspired, I still enjoy what I've written. It's clear the point at which I really got into the story as the flow improves about a third of the way in, and the number of comments drastically reduces. I've even re-read these sections twice, to make sure I'm not just skipping the 'bad' parts in my desire to get it out of the way.

The writing is quite clearly 'mine', even though it has obviously both improved and matured in the course of almost two years. This does raise the question of whether or not my writing will change again by the time I've rewritten this draft! Could I get stuck in a cycle of always rewriting a draft, only to put it away, and come back to it to rewrite it again? This raises my final question, that I throw open to all writers (or even editors)...

Would it be possible to endlessly revisit the same manuscript and never declare it 'finished'? Furthermore, how many existing books could have been improved by just one more editing pass?

Why Editing Need Not Be A Chore - Guest Post

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This is a guest post by Eisley Jacobs! Eisley Jacobs has been writing, since preschool, tentative strokes on paper that made her parents smile with pride. In high school, Jacobs discovered what would become a lifelong love for the written word. It was not until fifteen years later that she began to pursue that love in earnest. Jacobs now writes YA Fantasy, New Adult Fantasy, and Religious Paranormal Fiction. In her free time she enjoys spending time with her children, photography, drawing, singing, American Sign Language, Scrapbooking, BUNCO and much... much more.

What’s playing on my Zune? Worlds Collide by Christine Glass. I don’t usually announce what music is playing because usually people say, “Who?” However, I found it funny this specific song was playing, because it fits my post very awkwardly.

Worlds Collide, “Dark and night entwined a million ways…” Wow! Isn’t that the truth when it comes to writing and editing? You take all this time in this beautifully enchanted world filled with words that please you and make you float away on the clouds… You’re in this happy, peaceful place when you finish, feeling the joy of accomplishment… *happy sigh*

Then it happens. The darkness creeps in to overtake you! Run away! Run away! The editing darkness is coming! The dark and light will collide… and you better be ready -- armed with whiteout and a red pen (or the backspace key, whichever) and armed with understanding that though words will perish, you will emerge the victor.

Scream like Mel Gibson in Braveheart, and then ATTACK!

Insert: *Clash of swords, metal, armor and horse neighing*

Ahem, sorry. Maybe it’s me, but when the process collides with the dark, all these things rocket through my head. No, I am not crazy, why do you ask? In fact, I am sane, usually. I merely see the writing/editing process differently than most.

When you work with certain elements, you must allow them to rest and recapture their identity before picking them up again. They will be stronger and more manageable. This concept also applies to your manuscript. No, really, bear with me here.

You have sacrificed your time and poured out your heart shaping and forming this beautiful manuscript, only to exclaim to the world, “It is done!” It’s perfect in your eyes… right? Well, the elements of perfect are there, but it’s going to take some time in the fire to extract the imperfections and lift the true beauty to the forefront.

However, before you can stick this bad boy (your precious manuscript) into the fire, you must allow it to rest. Let it rediscover its identity, so when you later open it, you will fall in love all over again. Then those imperfections will present themselves to you as you hold it over the fire.

The editing process involves growing and stretching … not only for your manuscript, but for you! If you have distributed beta reads, be prepared for the feedback. Every writer has a differing opinion. If you receive comments from way out in left field, thank the person, but don’t write them off completely. While their opinion may differ, their words have some merit. You still may not agree, but you should at least consider their comments. You might even be wise to incorporate their suggestions as a test. You may be surprised by the results. If nothing else, you will be able to tell your beta, “I tried; it didn’t work.” The point is, even if you think they are completely off their rocker, you will be a magnificent writer if you can appreciate every comment you receive.

Now that you have let the manuscript rest, it’s time to edit. How do you start? Some suggest you read the entire story without touching a single sentence. I would love to challenge that and say NO WAY! Once your manuscript has rested, it’s ready for the delete key; it can totally take it! Don’t waste time rereading while your trigger finger sits there twitching. I don’t recommend you edit your original; always save a copy (“Save as…”, name it using the month and year) and start editing.

As you read, be sure to respond to anything your word processor underlines. But remember, occasionally you are smarter than the software, so don’t accept all suggestions as God’s honest truth. When in doubt, confirm with internet resources – Google, message boards, bookmarked references, etc. While you read, watch carefully for passive phrases and the words just, that, and things. Seldom do these words belong in your manuscript; they slow down the pace and muck up your writing. Usually, you can delete just and that, and the sentence will still make perfect sense. Why is that? Those words are fillers. With things it’s a little more complicated. Usually we use things because the reader already knows what we are referring to. However, like just and that, things to me screams “Blah blah blah.” There is almost always a better word than things.

Adverbs are another story, or maybe I should say they belong in another story, not yours. Adverbs tend to scream TELLING rather than SHOWING. Have you ever received the comment, “Can you show me instead of tell me?” This probably had an –ly adverb in it. You can say a lot with an –ly word, but sometimes we, the reader, want to experience it. She walked down the hall carefully. That doesn’t show me anything. Did she dart around the hall missing the creaky floorboards? Did she pause at the doors of each room, peeking around or under them? Use sights, sounds, and smells to SHOW us instead of adverb us.

Editing can be a long, laborious process, but it can be beautiful. Imagine what awaits you on the other side of the fire… beauty.