My Editing Journey
After recovering from performing in one of my most intense and fun roles in a recent play, I have been slowly shifting back into my regular hobbies, including but not limited to editing my novel. This has always been a tedious side to the writing journey, but one that is crucial to refining your work.
Here are some of the key things I focus on when advancing through each edit of my writing projects, once continuity and story have been thoroughly attended to.
Each scene that I look at nowadays, I look at through a lens of how it stands on its own and how it fits into the narrative as a whole. Most importantly, it should serve great importance to the story whether it be advancing the plot, revealing key parts of a character and their relationships/backstory, expanding the setting the story takes place in, etc.
There are other ways that a scene can serve the story, and at my experience, I aspire to have a scene serve at least two purposes. I’ll scan each scene, and if it serves no purpose to the story, or it’s purpose is weak and doesn’t hurt the story if it were removed, then I must kill my darlings and perform an amputation, make the incision and cauterize the wound.
Next, I avoid redundancies or repetition. Should I have two or three decent sentences describing how hard the rain is pelting today? Or put in the extra effort to make one, strong, effective sentence and move swiftly along? I often find that with the restriction, I end up making a better and more memorable sentence as a result. If I coughed and wheezed and spluttered, it may be better to simply pick the strongest word that matches what I want to describe best.
It ties in to another part of my process. As much as I may stretch out certain scenes for the sake of pacing and maintaining atmosphere Tolkien-style, it’s good to have an eye for scenes and lines that overstay their welcome and spend too much time clearing their throats to get their point across.
As such, tighten and tighten your prose when you can, and don’t fluff too much unless to want to establish tone, pacing or atmosphere.
I also check my balance between Action, Description and Dialogue. This can always vary and is subjective to reader and writer alike. A scene can have a lot of Dialogue and Action, and very little Description, and that’s fine.
A scene could have a great deal of Description and Dialogue, with little Action, and I believe that’s fine too. However, your characters are often the cornerstone if not the foundation of your story and unless a scene has no characters involved, I sometimes find it hard to have Description and Action in a scene while having little to no Dialogue. The words of your characters can be quite important. So I make a note to have at least two if not all three of these writing forms present in any one scene or chapter.
There are many other movements I go through, but hopefully this paints a picture of my editing process and how it may help other writers as well.
Thank you for reading and have a beautiful day!
Daniel
