If you NaNo’d and are now in a post-NaNo writing coma, you may not be ready to face the harsh realities of the raw novel landscape. The world changed while you slept. You grew a beard. Sandra Bullock visited you and told your parents you were engaged to be married with hilariously unexpected results.
When you finally wake up, you’re going to have to edit. A lot. And not like, fix a couple grammatical mistakes or missed commas, but full-blown, angry, word-drunk edit in which you destroy your own art without impunity, in some weird backwards attempt to build it back up again, better, stronger.
I took a cursory glance at my “manuscript” and before I processed what I was doing, I had deleted massive swaths of content, rewritten several sections almost entirely, and realized that I still didn’t have enough distance from my writing to objectively make any meaningful comments. 4 hours later, I stopped.
Just kidding. I didn’t really stop, I just ran out of “being awake.”
Editing is when you move your armies in to occupy the territory you won during your word conquests. It’s where you can use your left brain to clear the battlefield of all the dead metaphors and corpses of analogies that your right brain abandoned to rot. It’s your chance to hone your paragraphs to razor-perfection like blades on a whetstone. A chance to make those descriptions shine like a suit of full plate mail.
I love editing. It’s fun to find things that you just nailed the first time around, and equal amounts of fun to beat yourself up over the border-line brain damage you had when you wrote that scene about the army of ninja wolves who could fly (because they had jetpacks).
But you need to be careful when you edit; it’s too big a time investment with too much on the line to undertake unprepared. To see you through this harrowing journey, I offer the following boon(s):
1. Train yourself to be offended by mistakes
This ties loosely into proofreading, but involves a lot more than just looking for passive constructs or dangling modifiers. This is about really noticing when something is wrong, and being actively disgusted by it. You need to learn the difference between “less” and “fewer” and have a visceral gut reaction when you see something like, “he needed less calories, due to his access to the liquid chocolate larder.”
Learn what pisses you off about bad writing and internalize it. Swallow it, eat it, live off of it as your only means of sustenance until those mistakes burn inside your body like the sputtering carbon of a dying star. If you’re emotionally connected to the writing (especially to the negative) you’re more likely to catch and correct errors that a less invested editor might overlook.
Get mad at your writing. Demand more of it and more of yourself.
2. Remove context
Your mind naturally fills in blanks and establishes patterns of things it thinks it already knows. If you read your own work, in order, knowing exactly who does/says/kills what next, you’re likely to gloss over weak writing and glaring mistakes. To avoid this, pull the context blanket off of your scene. He’s been too warm and cozy, snuggled up in your plot line like a lazy teenager. Make him get up and go outside, look at him in other context, and see that he’s been under that blanket for so long that he’s thin and pasty and probably smells pretty bad.
Objectivity regarding your own work is really challenging, but viewing your work outside of itself can help you get that much needed distance. It’s easier to break apart a single scene or exchange and edit that, than it is to try and edit the entire work at once.
This has the added bonus of allowing you to analyze your tone and voice to see if it is strong enough to stand alone in a short example. If it is, chances are you’ve got a pretty decent manuscript on your hands. If it’s not, keep on editin’.
3. Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em
This is a personal editing weakness of mine. My editing kryptonite, if you’ll allow the cliche. Sometimes, you’re really, really, really committed to that scene where your protagonist has a steamy threesome with a sexy anthropomorphized grasshopper and a giant jar of honey, but it just doesn’t seem to fit in with your realistic romantic comedy set in modern day Chicago. You can’t find the resolve to delete the scene, because you put a lot of thought and craft into it, and it seems wrong to just delete it.
I used to say, “Suck it up, cowboy. It’s for the sake of the story! Delete that shit!”
Now I say, “Hey, that could work with other context, or if you made the grasshopper into an actual woman. Save that shit!”
When I edit, I leave a second document open. If I find a scene or piece of dialogue that I really like but just doesn’t seem to fit the theme or plot, I cut and paste it into this “holding document.” The writing isn’t lost, but it’s not cluttering up the main story, either. It’s a way to psychologically distance yourself from what you’ve fallen in love with.
After a while, you can go back and read the stuff you cut out. Out of context, you might hate it and realize that it really wasn’t very good in the first place. Or you might find inspiration in some random aside to start a whole new story. You can’t lose!
4. Alpha and Omega
Writers spend a lot of creative energy on beginnings and endings. The middle seems inconsequential; just a means to get from origin to exit. It makes sense to really make sure your beginnings and endings work, as they are the delicious 9-grain bread to your literature sammich.
Pay attention to how you start things. Is the beginning of each section engaging? Does it transition well from the previous section? Is your reader going to want to keep reading, or did you leave them alone in the West-Virginian woods with nothing more than a pointed stick to fend for themselves? As you begin a section, be sure to set the hook in your readers mind, don’t just dangle it out there hoping they’ll nibble at it.
As you near the end (or an end) make sure things seem to be organically coming together. Make your endings have meaning, insight, purpose. Readers tend to like resolution to conflict, when and where possible, even if it isn’t a happy resolution.
Don’t pull a Lost. Don’t leave me wanting to kill you after I’ve invested SIX FREAKING SEASONS of time by writing some cop-out, bull-shit, “they were dead the whole time but don’t worry because they’re in pseudo-heaven now, and please forget about all those other loose ends to really intriguing shit we left out” ending.
That shit is weak.
But whatever you do, make sure you actually get back to your manuscript and edit it. It’s great practice that will ultimately improve your writing, and there’s always the possibility that you can (after many hours of revision) turn it into something that a publisher may want to read without barfing! We can all dream, right?
“Editing is like walking through an old overgrown railway tunnel. You may have a lot of weeds and vines to hack through, but when you emerge on the other side you have a whole new view of the world.” -Oliver Gray, circa right now
Tagged: advice, craft and draft, Editing, humor, post-nanowrimo, so you want to be a novelist, the ending to lost really pissed me off, writing
Literature and Libation 
I love this! I do the same thing with the beloved passages that need to be cut. I call that document “orphans.”
Those poor word orphans! Won’t someone give them a home!?
You know what? I love the way you write. Funny, insightful and plain old smart. The first point about learning to be disgusted by bad writing? Loved it. Cutting bits that don’t work but you love anyway and putting them in a second document? Gold.
Thanks Sara! And thanks for being a consistent reader. It’s nice to know that my writing doesn’t just disappear into the void after I post it 🙂
…but the jetpack-clad ninja wolves were SOOOOO super cool! Bummer. 😉
As a full-time freelance writer/editor, I am in love with this post. Seriously, I’d marry it if I could. I particularly relate to your suggestion about learning what pisses you off about bad writing. Less/fewer is a great example: Every time I pass by the “10 items or less” check-out line at the grocery store, my editor eye weeps a tear or two…
You can totally marry this post if you want. I’ll give you parental consent.
Great job on this. I see a lot of indie writers mention in their blogs that they pay for editors. I see the wisdom of that (and wonder if I should go into that line of business), but at the same time I think anyone can learn to be a good editor of his/her work. Maybe I have to say that because I’m also an English professor, but whatever. At any rate, your post goes a long way toward helping writers get a handle on how to proceed. I suppose there are editors out there gnashing their teeth over your post, screaming NO!!!
Thanks! I agree that a professional review of your work is a great idea, but I also think a writer should try his or her best to personally polish a piece. It’s just another way to practice your writing skills, which is something we should all be doing as often as we can!
I have to admit that as a freelance editor, I wanted to scream “no!” when I first started reading. However, as a writer, I completely agree that editing your work is a hugely valuable skill. Before turning something over to a professional editor, or a friend or colleague or someone, you need to edit it first. It truly works toward you putting your best work out there.
I do have to say though, that editing your own work cannot be where it ends. Whether it be your best friend who is a stickler for punctuation and grammar, or a professional getting it ready for print, you cannot be the best editor of your own final work. Sometimes, you are just blind to your own flaws.
That said, excellent post! I loved it! It was useful and entertaining.
You’re okay with split infinitives then?
I’m OK with playing with any grammatical rules as long as the writer does it deliberately and for specific effect. Intentional misuse (like comedic passive language) can work really well, and even help define a writer’s voice. If it’s just a mistake because the writer doesn’t know better, that’s when I have a problem 🙂
My understanding is that 19th-century grammarians outlawed splitting infinities because it couldn’t be done in Latin, but that most modern grammarians don’t see it as wrong. It’s not always the best choice, but sometimes moving the adverb to avoid splitting the infinitive can cause unnecessary confusion.
That’s a cool fact; I never knew about the Latin aspect. I’m with you that you can mostly avoid using them, but without them, you can lose some great meter and cadence that comes from an abrupt breaking of the expected. I try to use the most famous split infinitive to prove that point and serve as an example: “to boldly go.”
Though I was long reluctant, I’ve recently begun reading my “finished” work aloud. Amazing how many new mistakes reveal themselves. Something about being removed from the security of the page that exposes their true rottenness.
Reading stuff aloud is GREAT. I do it at work all the time when I really need to scrutinize something that is particularly dry. It sounds weird, but if I walk around with a pen in my hand while also reading the piece out loud, I catch a lot more mistakes.
Congratulations of being Fresh Pressed.
Everything you say here is true. Writing is easy compared to what comes after. It took me two years and a lot of effort to turn a NanOwRIMo 50k piece into a novel. It ended up a dark book (orginally planned as ‘humerous) and runs to 106k words. But worth every second of my time and every twist in my brain.
For me the softest part of any book is the middle (see The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo middle book for a good example) it’s easy enough to keep a reader’s attention while you build the plot, characters and scene and relatively easy to keep them reading as the book goes into it’s ending – but the middle? Has anyone really pulled off a ‘taut’ middle of a book? All tips on how to do it will be warmly received.
I agree, middle is tough. It’s a place for the author to play around as it doesn’t really have the same urgency as the intro or ending. You have to keep the narrative tension going, but there is more room to waffle, for sure. Nice work on 106k words by the way; that’s quite impressive. My longest piece so far is around ~85k and it feels MASSIVE.
Oh BTW, I paid for a professional edit after having three critiques done. All worth the cost and the pain of reading what they said.
On grammar, etc – my book is more CSI:Miami than The Great Gatsby.
Having a pro review your work is definitely smart, especially if you really want to seriously pitch it. I still think the writer should take the first crack at it though. I see far too much stuff that is “raw” and could have been so much better with just a little cuddling and TLC 🙂
Yes indeed, I had a couple of edits and sample critiques before I sent it off. Then I changed a lot and had one of the first critiquers look at it again (he savaged it). I did a rewrite and hopefully it all worked out, I’m happy with it anyway.
Love it. You had me at stinky, pasty teenager.
Thanks! Gotta love those crazy non-showering teens.
I am going to print off this post and staple it to my chest while I edit my crippled, diseased and smelly NaNoWriMo creation…. as soon as I get the guts to actually read it.
Hahaha, best of luck! And I think tape might be a little more user friendly than staples, but that’s your call.
Reblogged this on Anastasia's Journal and commented:
This blog post hits close to home with what I’ve been going through for the past few months editing my novel. I find it so hard to get rid of special scenes that I’m in love with, but at the same time, it makes the story more condensed and fluid rather than random and choppy with scenes that don’t really fit in. The idea of moving the “deleted” scenes to a blank page is one that I’m certainly going to use in the future. It makes me regret losing those pieces of my book forever.
This post is very educational to me. I’ve always hated editing for the very reason you mentioned: I hate getting rid of those scenes I spent so much time on. I reblogged this on mine because I think it’s good advice. Thank you!
Thanks for the reblog. You have to be confident AND self critical. It’s one of the trickiest parts of being an artist (of any kind). You have to combine your taste and knowledge of what is good in a weird magical soup of subjective judgment. It’s not easy 🙂
The only thing that gets you used to being edited is journalism. That’ll make it a whole lot easier to hit the delete button when you see how much shit your editors — with nary a tear — can trim from your Magnum Opus.
Completely agree. Professional editors are harsh, but often for good reason. Really digesting changes from external editors can dramatically improve your own edits, too.
As both an editor and a writer, I try to be diplomatic about things that need work. The truth is, a writer will be more responsive if he doesn’t feel like he’s being attacked. Leave the attacking to the critics, be honest but kind, and make suggestions. I personally hate that feeling in my gut when editors wreck my work.
We will always have editors and more editors if we want to continue writing! Advise is something one can use or not use, don’t you think?
Yea, editors are obviously necessary. Otherwise, writing would be raw and riddled with issues. You wouldn’t serve a meal without tasting it, so you should publish writing without reviewing it 🙂
Thanks for your reply. I hope you are having a nice week. http://www.segmation.com
Reblogged this on doodlejuice.
Love this. I often find that my weakness is definitely cutting my material. I always think but this is so damn good! Not to fluff my own feathers or anything…haha.
Congrats on being FPed by the way! “Just kidding. I didn’t really stop, I just ran out of “being awake.”” <- definitely my favorite part 🙂
Go on and fluff your own feathers! You have to have confidence in what you write; leave it to an external editor revising your stuff for publication to make harsh judgments 🙂
Very true. Thanks 🙂
Great thoughts on editing – all the best with the manuscript you’re working on 🙂
Thanks, I appreciate it!
“ran out of ‘being awake’ ” — if this phrase isn’t under copyright, I’d like to use it one day. It’s perfect.
Only poor-man’s copyright. Use it with relative freedom and relatively little guilt!
Excellent. Feel free to do the same with anything you find on my site Call of the Siren!
I like this. Way to instruct others to avoid cliches while quoting Kenny Rogers. The sign of a good editor is that he or she knows when to break the rules and does so with the skills of a magician, right? Best of luck on refining your draft.
Gotta love Kenny Rogers! But I’m with you, I think a good editor can and should break the rules, if they serve the story.
This is such great advice and timely for me even though I am not a NaNoWriMo person. I rewrote my first novel and now need to go though it with a fine tooth comb to find all the nits and snags. I am a flash fiction writer so getting to 80,000 words took some time since I found myself editing all the way through. I am looking forward to really fleshing it out while cutting more of the crap out of it. I’ve kept a separate file and have cut and pasted like you suggested and love the idea of proofing it out of order.
Excellent post! Congrats on being Freshly Pressed!
I write a lot of short form stuff (most nonfiction is ~2000 words or below) so I know the pain of trying to do something much, much longer. I used to be an “edit as I write” guy, but I broke myself of that habit a while back, just for the sake of content generation.
Many great pieces of advice. I especially like the one about filling in the blanks properly, because no one but me knows the context.
Yea! Our brains work in strange ways.
None but I knows the context?
“No one but me” is colloquial, but generally accepted 🙂
This is a great post. It’s oddly adorable to hear someone say they “love editing.”
Also, Wayne Biddle totally talked about the necessity of training oneself to be offended by mistakes today. So basically, you are the future Wayne Biddle. Only funnier.
Whoa, that is a lot of praise. I am humbled. If I can even come close to the success of Biddle, I’ll be one happy writer 🙂
Thanks for the tips. Not that I would ever do NaNo month; I don’t have the discipline or focus. And to be honest, I’ve never known anyone who actually revised their whole manuscript and did anything with it. That’s tough revision, when you’ve been writing like a crazy person for 30 days w/out going back over it.
I often find the most important revision I can make is to simply cut the beginning and/or the end! I usually over-write these sections, and they can be cumbersome and unnecessary. Thanks again – congrats on the FP!
There have been a few notable examples of NaNo work becoming real, publishable work (like Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants) but I don’t think it’s even kind of the norm. For me, it’s just a matter of practice and testing my limits.
I’m a content writer; and, I’m happy to share this post with my colleagues.
Great post! Congratulations on FP!
Congrats on the Freshly Pressed!! You have lots of great advice that I look forward to using. Well, I’m still kind of waiting to get some distance. I completed the NaNo, but haven’t read a word of what I’ve written. This post gives me courage.
That’s a good idea. Distance almost never hurts (as long as you don’t wait years and years to edit!). I’m really glad I could inspire some courage in you and your writing!
Good Evening: Excellent advice, and congrats on the FP! Vonn Scott Bair
Thank you for reading!
The holding document is an excellent idea! It’s always hard to say goodbye to something that I think sounds great but isn’t really necessary.
Story of my life right there. I have a whole note book full of random thoughts that I think are great, but just don’t fit anywhere.
For a wannabe writer, the timing of this post couldn’t be more perfect. I have been writing for over a month (my secret NaNoWriMo and reached only 33k) but the thought of reading what I have written is giving me nightmares. Bookmarked this to come over and over again. Congratulations on being freshly pressed!
Thanks for reading. I think the best thing you can do is put the piece away for a while before you come back to review it. Trying to go straight for writing to reading can be pretty painful, and may discourage you from all the good you’ve done!
Wonderful, insightful writing and truly deserving of being FP! Kudos!
Thank you!
Well written writing about editing! So helpful. Thanks.
Great insights.
Good advice. My skin is so thick from editorial scrubbing, the nurse can’t find a vein to draw my blood.
Hahaha, I know that feeling. It’s all for the best…I think.
Fantastic post! Loved every word!
I always try to pick the most lovable words, so I’m glad someone noticed 🙂
Great advice. Thanks for the tips. Congrats on being Freshly Pressed!
You’re very welcome. Thanks for stopping by!
Found this on Freshly Pressed and enjoyed every bit of this piece. Great tips! Thanks.
Thanks for reading!
Awesome post! 😀
Thank you!
Love this post to pieces. Wonderful writing and great advice. I NaNo’d – kind of. I have around 4,000 words, but I’m working on it. Can’t wait to get to the actual editing and use your advice!
Also, dang, why’d you have bring up the old, bitter, angry me that WAS SO FRIKKIN UPSET ABOUT LOST?!! I was happy not remembering that pain that that caused me. *sigh*
Sorry for bringing up Lost. It’s just too good an example of a weak ending to not use!
4,000 is a good start. Keep it up!
*the* pain.
I totally agree, I love and hate editing, because I get to stay in the story longer but also I worry that bleed the passion out….then I try reading something I didn’t edit a few weeks later and I get over that pretension quickly. 😀
I think that love/hate relationship with editing is very natural. You got to love it enough to actually do it, but hate it enough to not spend all of your time editing and none writing 🙂
That’s pretty much how I feel about it.
Funny and informative. Great tips for a newbie like me. I’m also pleased to find that I am developing some of those editing strategies.
The more you edit, the less you’ll make the mistakes you had to edit out in your future work. Glad you liked it!
I totally agree. Sometimes the work is to close and you have to step away for a while. I go back and edit my writing many times over. Thank you for your wise words. Jen
This post seems incredibly relevant to me today, since I’ve started redrafting my novel after three months of “letting it stew.” It’s so incredibly hard to try and see things from a new pair of eyes, to understand what others might think when reading your book – which parts will bore them, which will confuse them, which will make them smile. A lot of the time it is about killing your children, so to speak. The trick is to not fall in love with your own writing, and this is why your third point is so brilliant, and you’ve offered a great solution. Hallelujah to copy and paste!
What I often find difficult is pace, whether the story ends abruptly, drags on for too long, whether the middle section is going fast enough. It’s impossible to tell sometimes, or at least it seems to me that way tonight.
Golden rule is to allow others to read your writing, whether that’s a friend or an online community. Livejournal is so good for getting feedback. Other writing networking sites haven’t proved so good (cough: writers-cafe). Do you use any online forum to display your work and get feedback? I’m really looking to find a decent online space that can be truly critical and help me to improve.
Brilliant post and congrats on getting Freshly Pressed! 🙂
Thanks so much for reading! I’m glad you could find something that helps your writing in my post; that’s one of the main reasons I started the Craft and Draft series 🙂
Fantastic post. You have a strong voice.
Thank you, that means a lot to me. I’ve been working hard on my voice for several years now, so it is nice to know it is paying off.
Reblogged this on hothotthings.
Reblogged this on T. Michelle.
I really enjoyed reading your post. Off to check out the rest of your blog.
I particularly liked your writing style and the holding document tip. I am grinding my way through my workplace’s policies and planning documents at the moment; editing and making long-overdue updates. Sometimes the writing is so bad that I have to scrap a whole section and start from scratch, but then after I’ve rewritten a paragraph, I have a moment of panic that I may have changed the original author’s intent and have to go back and compare the two. I have two monitors so having both the original document and my version open at the same time is a real time-saver.
I’m a technical writer vocationally, so I know about the challenge of rewriting without changing original meaning. It’s especially hard on large IT documents, as I’m often not aware of the context of a particular system, or the naming conventions used. I’m glad you could find some non-creative use for this as well! Hope you like the rest of the site )
Reblogged this on misentopop.
Indeed editing oneself is the hardest part, as some one said, we tent to fall in love with what we do, a poem, a novel a scene, an image, so to let it go it is really hard, to distance from it is even harder, and to be objective to what works and what does not … but who said creating art is an easy task?
I agree with alot of the points you have hilighted, especially about knowing what you hate about bad writing. I don’t think people spend enough time reading over what they write or really thinking about it in today’s society where being wired 24/7 seems to distract us from detail. A really well written post about editing and well worth the read, thankyou
Great article, Oliver, and you really nailed the self-editor’s angst. If every author followed your advice, we “outside” editors would have much less work to do! 😉
Congrats on being Freshly Pressed!
So true, what a love/hate relationship…but this truly made me laugh out loud!
“It’s fun to find things that you just nailed the first time around, and equal amounts of fun to beat yourself up over the border-line brain damage you had when you wrote that scene about the army of ninja wolves who could fly (because they had jetpacks).”