Editing: Corrections taking the life out of the story?

Makes total sense to me. I see it happen all too often.

I avoid it by choosing the story's voice over grammatic perfection.

I agree, it makes sense. I think that "tight" writing can apply to two things, the first is very broad, in that everything that is written in your piece has meaning, nothing is in there without a reason.

The second is tightness at a sentence level, and here I don't always agree with the writing police. Sometimes you do need a little leeway to allow for "voice." Unless your narrator is an extremely laconic individual, you often can sacrifice his or her voice by writing too tightly.

I would go back to your original manuscript and examine what you cut or changed, and why you did so. You may need to put back some of what you cut, possibly in a different way, to regain the "essence" you lost.

Well, there's a couple of different issues here. The first is the editing issue, but the second is the critiques. In this case, you're editing because the critiques told you the story needed tightening up.

What if that wasn't what they meant? Critiques are tricky things because sometimes people will find a problem but identify the wrong problem. They could have said the story needed tightening, but that could have meant anything from pacing not being right to personal taste. That's where you need to step back from the manuscript and analyze all the critiques to see if they're pointing to something else.

For the editing, I ran into the same problem--also with critiques. My book is omniscient viewpoint, and I pretty much imitated books I'd read that were in omniscient viewpoint. One of the pluses about the viewpoint is that, with a complicated story where it would be tedious to "show," omni works well with telling. Critiquers trotted out their rule book and told me I was telling too much. Since it would have been extremely tedious to show, my only choice was to take those parts out. Then that part of the story lost what I was trying to do with it. I'll admit though that I did have to try it on the one chapter to see if what they were saying was a valid comment or not. I ended up putting most of it back in again.

How to avoid it? Always go with what's best for the story. Just because someone disagrees with it or doesn't like it doesn't necessarily mean it's right.

I think sometimes folks critiquing are happy that they found a broken rule, like Easter egg hunting

But sometimes what is wrong feels very wrong yet involves less editing than you'd think. I swear I had a passage where 1 stranger and 1 trusted beta both were very lukewarm. I changed maybe 6-8 words and moved around one sentence. When they read it later, they both talked about how I must have really worked on it because it was eons better!

Good editing is invisible. If you're editing your story and killing it, you're not editing well.

That said, I agree with Linda, and I'll add this.

Whenever you get a critique, even if its from a professional, they're going to say things that just aren't right for you. If your beta readers are into Romance, and they're reading a horror story you wrote... they're going to key in on "problems" that aren't capable of existing in your genre, while not being able to tell you whether you've gotten the aspects important to your genre down well enough.

bsolah said:

Do people find that editing to make it 'technically well written' takes the life and edge out of your stories?

Does that make sense? How do you avoid it?

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Yes, and yes.

In addition to the excellent points that Linda and others made, I've heard and discovered for myself that you really can edit the life out of a story. It's not even because you're trying to please all your first readers, it's sometimes just a process of editing, tweaking, poking, and revising too much.

Things that have worked for me: cut back on the number of edits, rewrite sections from scratch instead of revising existing text, and wait a while in between edits, then read the piece on paper instead of on the screen.

I see it happen about nine times out of ten. How do you stop it from happening? Trust your own judgement, and stop letting others read it unless they can write you a check.

I have two trusted betas read my stuff and most times, they point out actual problems. But if, after I think about the comment(s) a while and still feel "uneasy", I go with my original or may only tweak it a bit.

Much as was mentioned earlier about the romance vs horror, different writers have different styles, different preferences. You may admire their work and respect their opinion, but they look at writing from their POV. I do the same thing when I beta for them. I may see where they're coming from, but it's not precisely where I come from.

You have to learn to trust yourself as much your betas.

So after I've accepted suggestions from people, the feedback I'm now getting is it doesn't feel like the same story. The writing is now tight but it seems like I've edited all the raw feeling out of it.

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Well, I can’t dispute what you say happened, but it’s not supposed to. Editing is supposed to fix problems, not introduce them. If you’re changing your story because someone suggested it, and you don’t, yourself like the result, you shouldn’t keep it as it was. A camel, they say, is a horse designed by a committee. And, you’re trying to bridle and ride Pegasus, remember, not Alice the Camel.

A suggestion: When someone tells you such and such a change needs to be made, unless you find yourself saying, “That makes sense,” look at their work to see if you like the result, and if they follow their own advice. You might also ask them which teacher, or book on writing made the biggest difference in their writing technique. If you hear, “Book? Teacher? I don’t need no damn books or teachers. I’m a natural writer,” you might want to edge away.

I belong to a beta group over on a blog site, and we generally try to take it easy on new writers. I think we tend to ask as many questions as we give comments. Like "This sounds like X; is that what you were going for?" types of things. So there's a lot of give and take. After the rough spots are worked on, then we get a little more nit-picky

One of the biggest problems and decisions for new writers (and maybe experienced ones as well) is finding the right beta. Someone who won't try to write their story through you, and yet won't be afraid to say, "This isn't making sense." Sometimes you have to work your way through a few of them to find the right match.

I'm having a problem with the term "corrections". I don't see how "corrections" can ever be bad. You got something wrong, you fix it, right?

caw

JayG said:

A suggestion: When someone tells you such and such a change needs to be made, unless you find yourself saying, “That makes sense,” look at their work to see if you like the result, and if they follow their own advice.

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Heh, good point. And, dare I say, a good reason to get involved in the critique process, giving as well as receiving, so you have a better idea of who you're dealing with in advance.

-Derek

bsolah said:

I just feel like newer writers tend to be over-corrected to make their writing formally correct. But unless we do, we're not going to get published.

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Weelll, that's not necessarily true. There's a difference between something that legitimately needs work and just following the rules because they're rules and the writer fears he won't get published if he don't. You always have to think of what's best for the story and what you intend for the story.

To give you an idea of how destructive not paying attention to yourself can be: I used to have a cowriter a few years back. He was a marketer, so he had some of his own rules. He wanted the story to be marketable, so he was always questioning, "Will the women readers like this?" Enter The Critique. He found a friend who was a published romance writer and asked her to do a critique of our Thriller, which was set during the Civil War. She got to page 70, wrote four pages of comments, and sent it back. I read them and knew instantly that she had hated--utterly hated--the book. Instead of saying, "This isn't for me" and passing on it, she tried to justify why she didn't like the book by nitpicking it to death.

We just set it aside and forgot about until a few months later. Cowriter discovers that romance writer is vehemently anti-gun. The book was set in the middle of the Civil War. It was pretty hard to avoid guns! The place where she had stopped had involved the hero pulling a gun on someone else.

We finish the book and start submitting it to agents. We get one full request right away and the usual bunch of rejections. Cowriter is convinced that if we didn't sell it in the five submissions, we didn't do the book right. So he starts looking for things wrong. Things that are making it not marketable. And he goes back to that nasty critique and decides that having guns in the book must be the issue because she was offended by them. He wants to do a rewrite to remove the guns from an action-adventure thriller. From a book set in the Civil War, which was his idea for a setting. And he was a historical firearms expert who carefully picked all of the guns in the story.

And granted, there was a reason the agents were likely rejecting the story. I've had a huge problem developing subplots--I start them, then forget they are there and never develop them further. I believe there was close to 30 of them in the story like that. It shows up as a structural issue. Our critique group went over that entire book, and not one of them even noticed that problem. Guess who found it? Me, the writer, while I was doing a synopsis for a different project.

Critiquers can be an invaluable tool, but they cannot be relied on to tell you what you need to fix. As the writer of the story, you are the only one who gets that call.

The best guideline I heard about evaluating critiques was from Uncle Jim at Viable Paradise. If more than one person points out a problem, then, yes, you have a problem in your story. If they tell you how to fix it, however, they are probably wrong.

Very true. All a critiquer should do is point out the problem. Now, I've often suggested what might be an easy fix based on the story. I do a lot of critiques. Some of them are donated to charity and the author has paid BIG bucks (in the four figures.) So they want results. Not just random comments or reading to page 70. They want pages and pages of indepth commentary and pointing to specific examples.

One I did just this week was a western. Since my first published book was in that genre, I felt I might be able to help. I found his writing was quite good---excellent scenery descriptions and good action. But there was a depth of character missing that made me, as a reader, not care whether the protognist succeeded in the quest.

But how to fix it?

The easiest solution seemed to be when the MC was shot in the thigh. Tending the wound took a paragraph and it was seldom mentioned again. Yikes! That was a golden opportunity missed, and very early on in the book. Expanding that one scene could make all the difference and coming back to it with pain, or infection or wincing every time a horse was dismounted would absolutely grab the reader. How the author does it and the actual text written doesn't really matter to me, the critiquer.

So, yes. I do make recommendations of how to fix things. I don't expect the reader to take them if they don't choose, of course, but much of what I've found with aspiring authors is that not only do they not know fundamentally what's wrong with the book after bucketloads of rejections, but they also don't know how to fix it once they do. It's usually pretty simple and once a single suggestion is made, even if it doesn't gel in the writer's head, something else will. Sometimes it's just pointing out the obvious (like the wound). Occasionally, it's more subtle and I'll have to think on it for days or weeks to figure out what's bugging me before I can respond.

But it is easy for a bad critique to take the life out of the story because, as others have said, it causes the writer to second guess himself. Never second guess, even as you learn the process of writing and publishing. That's been a hard lesson for me and for many other authors I know.

When someone tells me they've edited the life out of a story, the first place I look is the dialog. Did you "Fix" the dialog, correcting all sentence fragments, making each response clear, answering each question?
That's not how dialog works. Even in tight third person, your exposition should use grammatically correct sentences, but your dialog should reflect actual speech. My guess is, that's where you lost the voice of the story.

In the Guthrie tips for writers he does say, "dirty up your prose". I'd say the rule is, if you do make mistakes, make sure you put them there on purpose. Breaking rules is fine if it has a purpose, and if it gets you a better result than following them. I'd say that's what makes writing an art. Simply following rules is what a craft is about.

Editing can definitely become over-editing. I just went through that with my own MS and blogged about it today. My original mistake was that I was looking for words I could omit and scrapped every one of them, but this sucked the sparkle right out of my prose. Voice should always be retained. However, sometimes a voice can be too wordy. So examine yours with honesty.

Once I started to look for ways I could say the same thing in a rearranged or different way, but more concisely, I was able to retain my voice and even add some fresh, cool wit.

Some newer writers tend to go the round about way of saying everything. I did once upon a time. Thank goodness for my critters and the many books on craft. As long as you're not doing this or being draggy or over your needed word count, I wouldn't worry too much. Just look at everything with a critical eye. Be real and brutal.

After some distance, read it as a reader not as the writer. Many darlings can be slain. Dialogue can often be tightened. Thoughts can be more fragmented. Paragraphs of internal thought that isn't a bit broken just isn't organic, so strip those down to the basic essence. Sometimes a flat scene where nothing much happens can be summed up instead. Exposition should only include the most important things. And so on.

Sometimes your first way of saying something IS right. It's often the most passionate because it emerged during the creative process. Weigh every sentence accordingly. Don't fear the red pen but don't overuse it either.

Overall, remember it's your story, and you innately know the best way to tell it. Rock on.

bsolah said:

Do people find that editing to make it 'technically well written' takes the life and edge out of your stories?

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What do you mean by technically well written?

bsolah said:

I've been editing this story for a bit. It's been rejected and critiqued a few times and I've edited it again.

People said the story was good and the emotions were good, but the writing needed tightening up.

So after I've accepted suggestions from people, the feedback I'm now getting is it doesn't feel like the same story. The writing is now tight but it seems like I've edited all the raw feeling out of it.

I've had this happen to a few stories.

Do people find that editing to make it 'technically well written' takes the life and edge out of your stories?

Does that make sense? How do you avoid it?

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Being technically well written is such a subjective thing.

The hard part about editing your writing based on the feedback from others is the thin line between pleasing them yet still remaining in charge as the puppet master who is pulling all the strings.

You must fully understand every question you pose to the reader and the answer you want to it.

If they give you a different answer than the one you expected, then you have asked the question the wrong way.

So when you edit don't think of it as stripping the feeling from it, think of it as creating different ways of getting the reaction you want from your readers.

But you can only do this if you know all the answers to the questions. Otherwise you could edit your work forever trying to please everyone.

Jamesaritchie said:

I see it happen about nine times out of ten. How do you stop it from happening? Trust your own judgement, and stop letting others read it unless they can write you a check.

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Outstanding advice.