This month, our newsletter theme is "editing". If you missed the last installment or two, don't worry! You can catch up on previous newsletters here:
Last week, I explained the importance of distinguishing between the three different stages of editing:
revising, close editing, and proofreading.
Revising can be tricky, especially if you've written your first book-length work. You might feel overwhelmed, and you might struggle to know where best to begin.
Here's what I'd recommend:
#1: Get Some Distance From Your Work
Take a few days (or a few weeks) away from your project. This makes it much easier to go back and “re-see” it:
you’ll have a clearer idea of what’s working really well, plus what needs changing. You might want to work on something short in the meantime ... or just have a well-earned break!
#2: Read Through Your Work on Paper, or on Your Kindle or Tablet
If it's at all possible, I'd definitely advise reading that you
don't read through your manuscript on the screen. If it's a short story or blog post, print it out: if
it's a novel or non-fiction book, transfer it to your Kindle. (You can find out how to do that on the Aliventures blog:
www.aliventures.com/manuscript-onto-kindle.)
Read through the whole thing, and keep a notebook handy to jot down major things you want to change. Personally, with my novels, I almost always end up cutting a good bit of material from the first third of the book ... when I draft, it takes me a bit too long to get the story going!
#3: Don’t Be Afraid to Cut Large
Chunks
I’ve cut whole chapters – even whole characters – out of novel drafts, and I took out a large section of one chapter of Publishing E-Books For Dummies when it was clear it wasn’t working.
It’s always painful to delete a big chunk of your work, whether it’s two paragraphs of a blog post or two chapters of a book. But if the work as a whole is stronger for it, then it needs to be done. Don’t think
about wasted words or wasted time – you needed those words and that time in order to get to a finished draft.
#4: Try Moving Chapters or Sections Around
Even if you had a clear plan before you started work, you’ll probably still find that some elements will work better in a different order.
In fiction, simply moving an argument or revelation to an earlier or later point can make a huge
difference to the shape and pacing of the whole story. With a blog post, reordering a couple of sections may make for a much better flow.
You might find it's hard to see how things could work differently: some authors like to write out brief scene (or chapter) summaries on index cards and physically shuffle them around. If you use Scrivener on your computer, you can use the "corkboard" view to do this virtually.
Even if your first
draft is a mess, with tangents that don't work, lots of scrappy chapters full of exposition or notes-to-self, wonky characters arcs or one-dimensional characters -- that's okay! (You should see my drafts...) The revision stage is a chance to put much of this right: you're shaping the raw material of your first draft into something that looks much more like a finished novel.
Of course, there'll still be some work to do ... and next week, we'll take a look at how to close
edit your own writing.
