On January 24, 2014, Eliza asked this important question: Anyone have tips on editing? Whenever I read over my stories, all I can pick out are the things I did wrong. Paragraphs that I can delete, plot holes that need to be stitched up, scenes that just don’t make sense. But once you remove the awful parts, how do you shine it up and make it pretty?<\/i><\/p>\n
E.S. Ivy wrote this in response: Maybe the following suggestions would help:<\/i>
\n– check the dialogue, is it entertaining? Do the characters\u2019 personalities show? Can you add humor in them?<\/i>
\n– check a scene with your mind\u2019s eye. Can you really “see” it? Can you add touches of description here and there?<\/i>
\n– the important parts, the ending and climax etc.: are there places where you could foreshadow them?<\/i><\/p>\n
I agree, except that I\u2019m not always on board with foreshadowing. You can read my posts on the subject.<\/p>\n
Negativity is built into revision by definition. We\u2019re hunting for problems so we can fix them. Still, revision is my favorite part of writing, the most positive as far as I\u2019m concerned. Once my plot is set, then all I have to do is make it better, make it shine.<\/p>\n
For this post I\u2019ll be writing about the polish, which involves the little adjustments we make after the major flaws have been cleaned up. If you’re interested in other aspects, check my earlier posts on the subject.<\/p>\n
What I do the most is cut. The process is like sculpting in marble: We chop away at the stone blocking our image, and, as the chips fall, the beauty is revealed.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a sneak preview of the first paragraph of Stolen Magic<\/i>. I don’t know how to indent, so I’m italicizing, but it isn’t italicized in the manuscript. First is the paragraph I sent my editor after her intial round of edits:<\/p>\n
As if she were narrating a mansioner\u2019s play, Elodie spoke across the strait, \u201cAnd so our heroine–\u201d she blushed at calling herself heroine \u201c–young mistress Elodie, returned to Lahnt, the island of her birth. Five weeks earlier, she\u2019d departed, a humble farmer\u2019s daughter, but now, unexpected by all, least expected by herself, she\u2019d become\u2013\u201c As the deck of the cog groaned behind her and the sour odor of rotten eggs reached her nose, she continued in her thoughts: Our heroine had become traveling companion to a noble ogre and assistant to a detecting dragon.<\/i><\/p>\n
Below is the paragraph I sent her after the second round. My editor didn\u2019t ask for these cuts. Read it and then I\u2019ll say why I made them.<\/p>\n
As if she were narrating a mansioner\u2019s play, Elodie spoke across the strait, \u201cAnd so our heroine–\u201d she blushed at calling herself heroine \u201c–young mistress Elodie, returned to Lahnt, the island of her birth. Five weeks earlier, she\u2019d departed, a humble farmer\u2019s daughter, but now, unexpected by all, least expected by herself, she\u2019d become\u2013\u201c She broke off as the deck of the cog groaned behind her and the sour odor of rotten eggs reached her nose.<\/i><\/p>\n
In the first version I reassured the reader so that when the ogre and dragon appear, she isn\u2019t worried. But I want her to worry! Why is the deck groaning? What\u2019s causing the stink? These aren\u2019t big anxieties, and they\u2019re quickly put to rest, but still I\u2019m eager to offer that tiny thrill.<\/p>\n
Also, as I cut, the pace picks up. As long as I\u2019m not deleting anything crucial to the story or to the development of my characters, a faster pace is an improvement.<\/p>\n
Yesterday I received the copy editor\u2019s response to the manuscript, and without prompting I made another slight change. See if you catch it. Here\u2019s the paragraph again:<\/p>\n
As if she were narrating a mansioner\u2019s play, Elodie spoke across the strait, \u201cAnd so our heroine–\u201d she blushed at calling herself heroine \u201c–young mistress Elodie, returns to Lahnt, the island of her birth. Five weeks earlier, she departed, a humble farmer\u2019s daughter, but now, unexpected by all, least expected by herself, she has become\u2013\u201c She broke off as the deck of the cog groaned behind her and the sour odor of rotten eggs reached her nose.<\/i><\/p>\n
Do you see? I changed to present tense in the narration, which seems more natural, more like the narrator of a play. If the copy editor or my editor disagree, I\u2019ll be informed, and then I\u2019ll decide.<\/p>\n
(If I were changing the tense in the whole manuscript, that would be an important change, but here the story continues to be told in the past tense.)<\/p>\n
These are the kinds of itty-bitty adjustments I\u2019m thinking about at this point. Another one is word repetition, which my editor and copy editor are good at noticing. I\u2019m getting better at it, too, and studying poetry has helped. The reader may not notice the repeated words, but she will probably glide along more smoothly without them. Going the other way, however, sometimes we want to repeat, for emphasis or rhythm. We may even create a repetition as we revise, for those reasons.<\/p>\n
Obviously, the repetition of some building-block words–like the<\/i>, he<\/i>, she<\/i>, it<\/i>, and<\/i>, and or<\/i>–can\u2019t be avoided and don\u2019t need to be. But I do check to make sure I haven\u2019t started sentence after sentence or paragraph after paragraph with the same one of any of them.<\/p>\n
Name repetition is another kind of repetition that I look out for. For example, have I repeated my MC\u2019s name three times in four paragraphs and it\u2019s irritating? Can I replace one or two of those times with he<\/i> or she<\/i> without confusion?<\/p>\n
A mistake I often make is taking actions or ideas out of order\u2013in a small way. I just corrected an example of this in Stolen Magic<\/i>. In the narration I\u2019m revealing that Elodie and her friends are traveling by oxcart, and I explain who\u2019s in which cart, and then, boom!, there\u2019s a sentence that jumps ahead to camping for the night. It looked okay; they do camp. But it\u2019s bumpy, so I moved the camping to the end of the mode of transportation.<\/p>\n
We also need to look at word choice. Is this the right term to nail a feeling, a description, an action?<\/p>\n
Am I weakening my prose with hedging adjectives. For example, the dragon emits an unpleasant sulfurous odor, which Elodie gets used to and even comes to like. But I had her almost<\/i> like it, which doesn\u2019t take a stand, so I got rid of the almost<\/i>.<\/p>\n
And of course, we have to clean up any niggling grammar errors, anything that might confuse a reader.<\/p>\n
Here are three prompts:<\/p>\n
\u2022 When my editor at the time wanted me to write The Princess Tales<\/i>, she sent me several chapter books to read to familiarize myself with writing for that age group, which is younger than the full-length novel crowd. To really get inside the writing, I retyped one of the books in its entirety, absorbing vocabulary, style, sentence length. This exercise was more useful than simply reading the book, or even rereading it several times. So pick a book you love, one you think is well-written, and copy out, say, two pages by hand or on a computer. If you have time, do it twice. If you\u2019re having trouble picking a book, may I suggest Charlotte\u2019s Web, because the writing, in my opinion, is splendid? As you go along in whatever book you choose, ask yourself questions about why the author made the choices he did. You may find you disagree about some of them. That\u2019s fine. You\u2019re entering into a conversation with a book. Cool!<\/p>\n
\u2022 Using my suggestions and E. S. Ivy\u2019s, re-revise a page or two of a story of yours that you\u2019ve already gone over. Is it \u201cshinier\u201d when you\u2019re done than it was before?<\/p>\n
\u2022 Your MC is in her room, suffering from the results of a very bad day caused by her own actions. She\u2019s antagonized her friends and her family; someone is in the hospital because of her; and whatever else you come up with to increase her misery. A being (elf, fairy, alien, mad scientist, whatever) enters her room and offers her a do-over. She accepts, of course. Write the day as it played out originally and the do-over, and make it come out worse the second time, but not entirely because of her this time.<\/p>\n
Have fun, and save what you write!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On January 24, 2014, Eliza asked this important question: Anyone have tips on editing? Whenever I read over my stories, all I can pick out are the things I did wrong. Paragraphs that I can delete, plot holes that need to be stitched up, scenes that just don’t make sense. But once you remove the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,26],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions\/310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}