It’s always suspect to me when I read someone tweet they love editing.
Maybe there’s people who love the process more than I do. There’s nothing more like some kind of water torture than editing my writing. Maybe it’s because I know what editing really is. I suspect most people who love editing are not editing, but something they think is editing.
What most writers think is editing is not editing
Editing is a multi-stage process. I know I stretch it out to unrecognizable processes, but it’s because editing involves deleting my own work, which seems illogical and counter-productive. This, of course, assumes that you wrote the correct words the first time, and no word in your novel is extraneous.
Tape a conversation between you and someone else. Tell me again you don’t use needless words. Ever use the word “Really”, “Very”, or start sentences with “so….”?
I do all the time.
What most writers think is editing is actually celebrating and procrastinating wrapped into one. We read through our novel, smiling, laughing, nodding, visualizing scenes as if on a movie screen, and eating too many Jelly Bellies.
That’s a very small part of editing, and it’s usually one of the last steps.
What Editing is
Editing is the process of searching for extraneous words and phrases and removing them. It’s the process of making sure your novel does not exceed the limits of Parts I, II and III. It’s the process of making sure the inciting incident is in the appropriate place (somewhere between word 100 and word 8,000). It’s the process of removing repeated words, ensuring sentences do not start with the same word more than twice per paragraph, and enough space between them. It’s the process of making sure you’ve identified your characters by the same name consistently. It’s making sure you’ve used “said” instead of other dialog tags, or “Asked” or “Shouted”. It’s checking for spelling, punctuation or grammatical errors. It’s ensuing you’re using enough interest words and not “glue words”. It’s ensuring you’ve avoided sensory words (see, hear, feel, taste, smell).
Sounds like work, doesn’t it?
It’s just easier to assume you wrote everything perfectly the first time.
But if you listen to that horrible recording of your conversation, did you employ all those rules automatically as you spoke? I guarantee you did not.
Edit you must.
I know I tend to repeat myself. It’s a tell you think the scene is not strong enough. Or a part of the story is so crucial you’ve written it and re-written it, and re-written it. Like “Bottom of the Ocean”, where Blake asks Dr. Senger a crucial question: “What kind of shark am I?”
What started as a simple gotcha element of the plot turned into something that solves story difficulties and becomes the turning point of the entire plot.
I literally have that conversation in my rough draft four times. Two of those are superfluous. The reveal, which I found FIVE TIMES in my novel, can be reduced to one.
Doing all of these steps OVER and OVER again for each chapter is enough to melt your brain.
Do them you must.
It’s so important I’m going to write a “How to edit your novel” book to get people through the terrible process. Complete with prompts to pity yourself, have a good cry, and go eat something you probably shouldn’t.
Conclusion
Editing is a multi-step process. Take it one step at a time, one chapter at a time. It’s not reading through your novel and changing a word here or there. it’s a systematic, logical process. It’s annoying, but you can and must get through this.
Once your done, then you have to write the query letter and send your book off. But that’s a subject of another article.
