Rule H: treat line editing like Housekeeping not revision

Linda’s Rules of Writing

I admit it! This was an excuse to show a sail boat at sunset amidst palm trees!  In case you’re wondering, my book Miasma is set an alternate Hawaii.

We’re onto the letter H in Linda’s Rules of Writing of the A to Z Challenge, and treating line editing like Housekeeping, not revision.

One of the things that Holly Lisle mentioned in her course How to Revise Your Novel was that a lot of writers start revision by line editing, instead of focusing on the bigger issues that revision really entails.  It hit me that I’d been doing exactly that in my early “revisions” of my contemporary fantasy, and it also hit me how much of a waste of time it was actually was.

Because I’d line edited scenes, then discovered a major problem in the story that needed fixing.  I’d go through the manuscript and fix the problem, and three scenes that I’d labored over to do line editing came out.  Then I’d go back and start line editing again until I ran into a big problem and repeated the process.

I felt like I let the wind out of my sails. And all on my own, no wind required.  It made the revision process frustrating and time consuming — and a lot MORE work.

Time to write is hard enough to find without me making more work for myself!  Now I try to think of editing as a form of housekeeping.  Because it really is clean up work: Fixing grammar problems, word choices, getting rid of repetitions, fixing unclear sentences.  And all of these get done AFTER I’ve done all the major work, because there isn’t any point to line editing 24K of scenes and then dropping them.

What have you learned about your editing process?

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Writerly Adventures

Sand Dollar Wishes was a very short (under 250 words) flash fiction piece that I wrote for Writer Unboxed’s Flash Fiction Contest.  The story won an honorable mention.  I had to do a lot of editing to keep it at 250 words.

Caption: Banner for the A to Z Challenge

 

Things I Learned While Writing Miasma Part I

I’m finishing up the final draft of Miasma.  I learned a lot about my writing on this book.  Miasma was seriously messed up when I started on Holly Lisle’s How to Revise Your Novel one year ago Thanksgiving.  It was so bad that I was stumped through most of the class, trying to figure out what the problem was.

Some things I learned along the way:

Word Count Goals:  I’ve had a history of running too short, resulting in a bad relationship with word counts.  I spent so much time doing workarounds to get the word count up and focusing on the number that I lost the story.  I made the most progress with the revision once I decided to let the word count go — it’s going to be around 60K, which means I’ll be going indie.  Word count goals are out.  I’m still thinking about other options to show progress.  I’ve had great fears of being under contract for a book and running too short.  It’s a major fix that takes a lot of time. 

Details:  For years, I thought I was detail-oriented.  Turned out I was over compensating for my not being detail-oriented.  The details vomited themselves all over Miasma, so bad that it was hard figuring out what to revise.  It’s not a matter of me creating a spreadsheet and tracking the details; rather, I can’t tell when I’ve used too many, so the solution has been to let as few get in as possible.  A style sheet during the editing process will help make sure what’s in there is consistent.  I will likely trim more details in the editing.

Part II will be the vexing things that I learned during the course of the story.

What new discoveries have you made with your writing?

 

A Time Waster: Revise While Creating

This week, it’s been tough getting writing in–did 590 words yesterday and got an idea for a new, short scene.  We’ve had thunderstorms all week, so at the first sign, computer gets shut off.  We’re also starting to get early humidity, which is turning into tornado warnings.  Maryland’s had a few watches, but nothing has gotten close to me.  I’ve never seen a tornado, and that’s not an experience I want!

I used the time to print the entire first draft and the entire second draft.  The third draft was what I launched off this revision with.  Each one is quite a bit different, so I’m looking for anything I can reuse.  I thought the first draft was terrible — and there are places where it clearly doesn’t make any sense because I just plopped scenes in there — but I’m finding sentences I can reuse in the current revision.  My idea for the new short scene came from a paragraph I ran across while recycling.  It didn’t fit into any of the scenes, so I created a new one that will give the reader information but not the main character and play into theme of lying.  Will try to work on that one tonight if we don’t have more thunderstorms.

Never, never again will I revise as I write though.  At the time, I thought it was a huge time saver that would cut off time on the revision side.  Instead, I’m spending time hunting for material edited out along the way.  I have so many changes in the story that even printing the first and second drafts isn’t getting me all the material. I started on the hunt because I was looking something specific that I know was in the story.  But, while revising while I was creating, I took it out.  I’m now going to have to hunt through the backups to find it.  It’s very easy to revise good stuff out of the story!

I’m reading Life of Pi, which is not a book about math!

 

One-Pass Editing

First up, this is a different technique than Holly Lisle’s One-Pass Revision.  My method involves looking for only one thing on an editing pass.   Like when I realized I was using the word look too much, I made one pass and searched only for that one thing.  

I like this method because it shows me two things:

1.  If I’m overusing whatever I’m looking for.  If I’m making the changes with other revisions, the overuse isn’t that obvious.  But if I’m only looking for it, then the overuse becomes very apparent.

2.  I learn something from it that I wouldn’t get from burying it in other revisions.  When I first started searching for look, I often changed it to another look word instead of solving the original problem.  Then I ran into a page where I used look eight times.   I can’t just change the word–and it’s something I might very well have missed if I was doing other revision at the same time.  By the time I get to the end of the book, I’m so sick of seeing them that many of them are just coming out altogether, but I often had to do other fixes to accomodate some of the dialogue.

And then I got to the next book, and the things I corrected in one-pass editing were not a problem any more.  By focusing just on that task, I was able to take leaps and bounds with what I’d learned.

 

Types of Repetitions

A couple of years ago, I was reading an agent blog when I ran across an entry where she said she would reject a manuscript if she saw repetitions.  She saw it as a sign the writing wasn’t ready.

Repetitions?  I thought about it, then looked at mine.  Yup, I’d done it.  Specifically, troublesome areas were the phrases “It was cold” and “the bad guys are lurking.”  Also “look” and variations of it.  So I had to go through a 350-page manuscript, searching for anything that looked like a repetition.  Now I look for it when I crit and nearly always find it.  Here are the types:

1. No Story.  Sometimes a point or an incident gets discussed repeatedly because there isn’t anything else to keep the story moving forward.

2. Emphasis.  Repetition can become an issue if the writer wants to emphasize a point.  A couple of well-written sentences or even scene will emphasize the point far more than repeating the point seven times in two paragraphs (that, unfortunately, is a real example).

3. Sentence Structure.  Sometimes I’ll see a story where the structure of the sentence is repetitive.  Like every sentence is strung together with a coordinating conjuction (i.e., and) or starts with a gerund (i.e., Turning around, he went back inside).

4.  Character Actions.  This one comes from a weakness in narrative skills.  The characters are always looking at each other, sighing or shrugging. 

5. Forgetfulness.  Just plain forgetting you mentioned it earlier, and you mentioned it again.  I have to watch out for this one because I tend to do this a lot.

 

Editing Tips for Fiction

Every time I see an article on editing tips, I find the same five or so listed–and frankly, I think most of them are kind of dumb because they make it sound like:

Follow our tips, and the magic of publishing will happen.

And the tips are things like “Eliminate all adverbs.”

Well, yeah, okay.  It’s a lot more work that simply following a few steps.  I’ve seen writers post pieces on message boards stating that they have to meet a specific word count and that they’ve edited all they can out of the story but still can’t make the word count.  I look at it, and I see all kinds of places where words can be pruned here and there.  That’s because I used to write short stories.  In some respects it’s like being a film editor.  Those guys look for places that they can trim out to get a few seconds of film time, and it all adds up.

Most of my tips are for pruning words and general tightening.  They won’t work if you’ve got a 150K novel and have to take a machete to it to get it down to 90K.  That’s a complete rewrite, not just simple editing.  But these tips will work for general tightening up and probably bring a novel down 5K or so.

Story Comes First.  This is such an important point.  No matter what you edit, your story should always be in the back of your mind and taken into the process of editing.  There was a writer who used one of those programs that counts how many times you use words in a piece.  The program reported that he used a high percentage of ‘was,’ so he took ALL of them out because the program said so without questioning why.  It caused him to revise the sentences in bizarre ways.  What he should have done was review each one and see if it should and could be reasonably revised to edit the word out.

The 20% Edit.  With short stories, I’d do a word count and then figure out what twenty percent was.  Then I’d cut that much out.  With a novel, I might look at a chapter and decide that a page needs to come out.  Both have the same result: Sometimes I didn’t reach the goal, which was okay, but just deciding in advance how much I wanted to edit made me look at everything and think about how I might be able to shorten something.

Phrases to look for.  I see this a lot in work I crit.  The writer is usually writing in third (though it also turns up in first) and says something like this in the narrative: She saw the man get out of the car.  With it being in the character’s POV, the “she saw” isn’t necessary.  Removing it tightens up the sentence and makes it flow better.  Look for phrases like:

• She saw
• He noticed
• She knew 

Anything that can be shortened.  Watch out for sentences where you could trim excess words without having any impact on the meaning on the sentence.  Look for sentences that provide too much detail that could be simplified.  This article on Editing for Length gives some examples unnecessarily wordy sentences and how to shorten them.

Repetitions.  Yeah, well, we knew those had to get in here somewhere.  Anything where something gets repeated, especially in close proximity to the first reference.  It can be a word or a description of something or really anything.  For example, the story explains how a character does something and then shows the character doing the same thing.  That’s where a little editing magic combines the two together so it becomes only showing the character doing it.

Description.  Description often gets a bad rap because people do it badly.  They describe things for the same of describing and spend too much time describing it.  But it’s worthwhile reviewing any description and seeing if there’s a way to shorten it.  I was trying to describe a building and ended up spending about a page on it.  Way too long, especially since not a lot happened to keep the story moving forward.  Instead, I edited it into a short paragraph that was more focused.

Pet Rocks Words/Phrases.  Anything that you, personally use too much.  Two projects ago, I discovered that I tended to use qualifers like “a little,” “a little bit,” and a “a bit.”  In many cases, those don’t add anything except extra words.  (A Pet Rock, by the way, was a craze in the 1970′s where stores sold rocks as pets.  It didn’t last long, but Morro Bay, California boasted of their own Pet Rock, Morro Rock).  Search and replace works well to find these; just replace them with a highlighted version of the same word or phrase.  Then it’s easy to scan down and see if something got used too much.

Anything that would fit great in the dialogue, but not the narrative.  I’m thinking of words a character might use in their dialogue as part of their characterization.  He or she might use the words “really,” “actually,” “very,” or even “a little bit.”  Some might be weasel words, which usually get deleted because they’re empty words, but in dialogue they might be important.  But if they turn up in the narrative, they’re worth a look to see if they add anything or are just excess.

Of course, editing isn’t just an arbitrary whacking of a particular word because it’s perceived as bad or as a solution to getting published.  Use common sense.  The story always needs to come first.