How Do You Go About Editing?

As viciously and cold-heartedly as possible, questioning everything.

Is is necessary?

Does it make sense when I read it aloud?

Do people really talk/act like THAT??

Removing every verb that's next to "had been ___ing" "was ___ing" as a start on killing passive voice.

Killing any character who "tucked a strand of ____ colored hair behind her ears", smooths her ___ skirt, or shops for wardrobe at any point in the story.

Also for the chop: anyone whose eyes roll, dart across rooms, or perform other unlikely acrobatics.

Guys who groan when they're climaxing. I prefer men who are enjoying the act of love, not making the same noise you get when you ask them to change a poopy diaper. "You're a goddess!" is a preferable outcry to "Urrrgh!" or "UUUUUGH!"

What Gillhoughly said.

I'd add to watch for 'that' many can be eliminated. And two of the four editors I've worked with have smacked me repeatedly for 'ly' abuse.

Running a search and highlight can...highlight a lot of repetition you may not see just by reading through. Start with 'was' and 'that'. I'll bet you'll be amazed at how many you find!

The environmentally conscious would hate me, but I've always find that I can edit more efficiently and catch more mistakes by doing it the old fashion way: red pen and paper.

I go through it, crossing out all the excessive words (way too many of these), making some corrections, circling the parts that I'm not sure I should keep or delete.

Then I put it aside for a while, work on something else before coming back to it again. I take a blue pen to it this time, reading the story as a stranger would. That's when I find the loopholes in the plots most of the time. So yeah, I write notes on the margin in blue pen.

First I make sure my story is sound before tinkering with any language issues. To do that, I reread through the whole thing, making notes as I go. I put down structure issues--"pacing is too slow through chapter 3"--character issues--"would she REALLY say/do/think X?"--and any other thing I can think of that strikes me as being off--"need to up the conflict in scene Z."

While I'm making these notes, I'm also outlining. I write a one sentence description of the scene, mark whose POV it's in, and put down anything important that I need to keep in mind. My outlines look like this:

CHAPTER ONE

-Kelly goes to the post office. (Kelly's POV)
-Has an unhappy meeting with Gabe
-Gets letter from mother telling her that X happened
-Decides to do Y

And so on and so forth. This way I can see at a glance if my POVs are evenly distributed and if there's enough conflict. You can often spot plot holes this way, too, along with all sorts of things you might not have noticed otherwise. In my last WIP, I noticed that an inordinate amount of scenes took place in cars. I was able to take the basics of those scenes and put them in a more interesting environment.

It's also easy to see if each scene is doing its job. I go through and ask myself if each one is necessary. Maybe scene A and scene B can be combined. Maybe scene C isn't needed at all. Each one should pull its weight and push the story forward.

I write notes all over my outline. Once I'm happy with my new ideas, I go through and rewrite whatever needs rewritten. Sometimes it means moving scenes around, which means I need to look at my outline and see if that necessitates adding or subtracting info from other scenes. This is also when I incorporate any notes I made during my read-through.

Then I do another read-through, make some more notes and let it sit for a while. I'll repeat this until I've gotten the story as good as I can make it.

Only after I'm happy with the actual story do I go through and check for language issues, like repetitive words, actions and sentence structures. And I pare down the text as much as possible.

Gillhoughly said:

As viciously and cold-heartedly as possible, questioning everything.

Is is necessary?

Does it make sense when I read it aloud?

Do people really talk/act like THAT??

Removing every verb that's next to "had been ___ing" "was ___ing" as a start on killing passive voice.

Killing any character who "tucked a strand of ____ colored hair behind her ears", smooths her ___ skirt, or shops for wardrobe at any point in the story.

Also for the chop: anyone whose eyes roll, dart across rooms, or perform other unlikely acrobatics.

Guys who groan when they're climaxing. I prefer men who are enjoying the act of love, not making the same noise you get when you ask them to change a poopy diaper. "You're a goddess!" is a preferable outcry to "Urrrgh!" or "UUUUUGH!"

Click to expand...

Once again, I bow to the utter master.

Heh--here's more:

"___ watched as..."

"___ turned and looked and saw..."

"___ looked and watched and saw..."

"___ looked and watched as..."

"___ eyes rose to the ceiling." (Ew!)

Any sentence that requires a second intake of breath when read aloud will be broken up.

Viewpoint shifts without a break.

No exclamation points in narrative sentences! If your writing isn't exciting, exciting punctuation won't fix it!

No more than one head toss, head shake, nod, or shrug per chapter. It's a visual physical action that's great in movies, but not so good on a page. In a book you can get inside a person's head and tell us what they're feeling. Work with that.

Detailed descriptions and bios for spear carriers will be cut. If they turn out to be important, you can always go back and fix it.

I'm doing a first-pass edit of chapter three of my current story today. First thing I did was chop up all the long paragraphs, since I had someone point out on a previous chapter that one of my paragraphs was longer than the average page of a paperback book. Now I'm reading it veeerrry sloooowly, fixing typos and punctuation and just generally tinkering with everything that doesn't sound good or interferes with my immersion in the story. When I'm happy with it I'll ship it off to a beta reader for red-penning (about half of which I'll use and the other half I'll discard).

My biggest sin used to be gaping logic gaps. The worst one was the reality of eating and sleeping. In our first book for Tor, Anna decided it would be best to illustrate the problem. She listed every individual thing that the characters did before they went to sleep. Apparently was quite the action packed day, because the time it would take to actually DO these things was 37 hours. They didn't eat, they didn't sleep, and yet they were still bright eyed and bushy tailed enough to have a terrific romp.

She demanded we insert at least one extra day and recommended two.

So now that's what I do. I'll read the book and write down, from waking to sleeping, what happens. Could it really happen in that time? Can they really drive from one end of town to the other for the crisis, during rush hour, in ten minutes? If the couple sits down for a long chat and meal to get to know each other, it probably takes an hour at LEAST. Probably 2-3. Maybe they close down the restaurant and only notice when the wait staff is putting the chairs up on the table to clean the floor.

Sometimes I have to add a day (or more) and fill in the gaps of that day. A quick extra chapter can cover a lot of sins, whether just doing boring things like laundry (when there's time to read those sensitive documents) or feed the pets or whatever. Just normal stuff.

That's the majority of my editing.

Great question! I'm in the agonies of editing myself.

For me, editing on screen works best. I print out crit notes from others so I can make notes, but all my writing is done on screen. Just seems to work best.

Right now I am ruthlessly hunting down every instance of 'that' and slashing adverbs like crazy. I am also having a grand time smashing overly complex sentences and rewriting them. Reading aloud, while awkward at first, really does help!

A good critique partner is worth their weight in gold. Has to be someone who will be brutally honest with you (but stay in your brutality comfort zone). Dump anyone who makes you feel like your work is shit. Must also be someone willing to accept that you will not always take their advice (it's your book, your voice).

Even putting work aside for a few weeks, I have trouble getting enough distance to spot flaws. A fresh pair of eyes helps. She goes through once for major problems (I hate them both here; too stupid to live; this isn't physically possible; I thought they were in CA, why are they at the Sears Tower?). After I fix those, there's another pass for nipickier stuff and spiffing up the prose. I try to do as much as possible on screen, but at some point it must be printed out for a read. For some reason, I see things on paper that I don't on-screen.

I'm not writing High Literature by any stretch, so one thing I look for is long paragraphs. What's happening here? Is it info dump? Will the reader start scanning? Yawning? Thow book across room? Usually I can thin words or break up for better pacing.

Take this for what it is worth - un-pubbed writer here!