Quickfire Fiction Editing

Don't waste a word

Having just finished editing Mahrie (the crowd goes wild), I thought I'd record some of the mistakes and lessons I once more learned, so next time I start editing, I can read this through and maybe save myself a few weeks and a bucket load of angst.

1. Don't look at the first draft for a month

Once you've finished the first draft don't look at it again for at least a month. Not at all. This may seem like a hard ask because of timings and schedule. Trust me, factor the month into your schedule. Twice now I've turned around and started editing soon after finishing the first draft and it's painful, mostly it's not time efficient. Why?

The problem is the wonderful organ you call a brain. To properly see your writing flaws you need to remove your intricate familiarity with the words. Reading the manuscript while your brain is still keyed into the line by line is comparable to a concert pianist working through a masterpiece - the sheet music is there only for reference. Likewise reading a text you know intimately plays largely from memory - or how you believe it reads.

2. A consistent prologue (or opening chapter)

A prologue or opening chapter is going to set-up the whole book and often inform the ending. So it has to be clinical and on mission.

The problem is we often write the prologue first, as we ease into the story. We write it having no idea how the book will eventually read, the story's scale or who our characters will become. The first draft prologue can often contain themes or back story important for building our characters, for us. The art is to put that characterisation on the page without burdening the reader with the back story.

Do not assume the prologue you wrote in the beginning still works at the end. It might work within the context it was written, but the chances are, taking a step back will benefit the story and the reading experience. Try a prologue re-write from an entirely different angle. What have you got to lose? What might you gain?

3. Dialogue isn't just about speech

I never find writing dialogue hard, at all. I picture the characters and off we go. No punctuation, speech marks or any She said or He said. Just dialogue.

The hard part for me is then taking the dialogue and making it play like proper conversation in the reader's mind. The absolute hardest thing is giving the reader a sense of physical interaction between characters while they're talking. Especially as these physical interactions are key to pacing the speech. Coming up with viable ways to explain physicality without each character repeatedly leaning in or sitting back, can be a problem, for me at least.

I get around this by finding a movie with a comparable scene and using their movements. What seems like great dialogue as you're writing the first draft will likely change drastically in editing. So being prepared with a reference can be a huge time saver. I'm mentioning this here because I did it for Chasing Innocence but forgot I had while editing Mahrie and struggled until I remembered.

4. Action is only frenetic in the readers mind

There are two key lessons I've learned in writing action sequences. The first and most important is staging.

In real life a car crash will have a lot of different things happening at the same time, resulting in the car crash. If you try and describe all these things at the same time you're going to confuse the hell out of the reader. Action in prose needs to be staged very carefully. The reader has to create the image from what you tell them. It has to be built block by block.

The second rule of creating action is to keep it simple. Not specifically the action itself but in terms of description. If you layer too much detail the reader will disengage while skipping to the words or passage they believe resolves or progresses the tension. They will miss important detail which may be confusing later in the narrative. Which makes you look bad.

5. Every word counts

The hardest thing to do when editing is to delete the bits we love and have often struggled the longest writing. If every word isn't building every sentence of your manuscript to inform character and story, or even if the character beat doesn't then progress the story, it probably doesn't have any place in the book.

One of the most valuable lessons I've learned is to know who you're writing for. There is no problem at all writing for yourself, many do. But if you have any commercial aspirations you need to realise you're editing for everyone other than you.

Where will your audience be reading your book? The circumstance? How much time will they have and very importantly, how many other books are vying for their time? Once you've got that set, realising what matters in your story and what doesn't, becomes a lot clearer. I believe.

Accept you're an entertainer. If you have something you want to get off your chest then blog about it. We can weave morals into a story but they need to be functional parts of it. If you are here to preach your reader isn't being entertained. You will likely be limited to a narrow audience, lose readers in the process, repeat sales and word of mouth. Every word counts.

6. The difference between the reader and writer

Everyone reading your book will on average have been reading since they were five. Statistics state the majority of people reading fiction are over twenty-five. Which means your youngest reader will have twenty years reading experience, probably upwards of thirty.

Much has evolved the last half-century, in what fiction says but very little in how it is told. The English dictionary is constantly expanding but the rules for grammar have barely changed.

Even if your reader, when tasked with sitting a grammar test, subsequently fails, their unconscious programming from all these years of reading will know good, or more to the point, bad grammar when they read it.

Your writing therefore needs to conform to known grammatical standards, even if you think these standards are arcane, outdated and possessed by too many apostrophes. If you don't conform you might have the best idea ever but it'll be hard to read. There are too many well written books available to struggle trying to read a bad one.

Key areas easily overcome are:

• Plural and Possessives - the differences between rats and rat's. Google grammar plural possessives
• Contractions - the difference between do not and don't. Google grammar contractions
• Dialogue in fiction - speech is only part of the sentence. Check your favourite books
• Punctuation - building sentence structure. Don't read a grammar guide, check your fav. books
• Paragraphs - when you do and don't. See how they are paced. Check your favourite books

7. Be creative in what you say, not how you say it

I already mentioned your youngest reader has been reading for upwards of twenty years. They expect the reading experience to be presented in a specific way. If you think you've invented a brilliantly original, pulse-pounding idea for playing action in the reader's mind or presenting dialogue, creating a reality never before seen, the chances are you're wrong. Like I said, how fiction is told has evolved this last fifty years but not by much. What people write about has drastically changed.

If you're going to be a ground breaker, make it part of what you say and not how you say it.

8. Listen to the voices

Guess what? You're a reader too. You've been reading for at least twenty years. Your brain has been programmed over all these years just like everyone else, by everything you ever read, everything you did and didn't like. When you're writing and more importantly when you're editing, you might have a nagging feeling something doesn't work. Hoping the proof readers don't pick you up on it is not a pathway to creating enthralling fiction.

Listen to the voices. You're an expert reader, you've been doing it for decades. You know the difference between a good read and what isn't. If there's a doubt in your mind, pay attention to the doubt, look at it from the reader's perspective, not the writer's.

If I close my eyes, can you see me?

I'll do something about it if several people mention it.

I hear that a lot from writers. Usually after they have received critical feedback on their finished manuscript. Usually they're talking about something someone said they don't agree with. Usually it's something they don't want to change.

Let's look first at how we get critical feedback for our writing. If you're very lucky you might get ten people to read your manuscript. If you're well connected maybe you'll get a few more. Let's say fifteen.

The first cut will be the five or six returned manuscripts that come back with a ten word or less eulogy. Most people are nice. Telling you something you put so much effort into doesn't work or that they didn't finish it, is beyond them. You're their friend. They will grasp hold of the bit that reminds them of a book they read and tell you: It was great. Really enjoyed it. You will struggle to get more from them. Maybe a few typos.

The second cut is the majority, the seven or eight who give you feedback on high level story points. This will be valuable. It will tell you generally what doesn't work in the flow of the story. Once more they are probably being nice. They are being polite about how badly the failures impacted the story. They will wrap what didn't work in a long list of good points that may undermine how bad the bad is.

The third cut is the anomaly. Usually just one, sometimes none. There are a bunch of reasons why they didn't get your story but they are very worth listening to. Probably they are genuinely being helpful. They probably read your book despite never reading your kind of book. Amongst the static there will be some key issues you should address. You will probably discount everything they say because they don't read your kind of books.

The fourth and final cut is the one, maybe two that dissect the good from the bad to the mediocre. This feedback is analytical. It will hurt the hardest because it is the most truthful. The most detailed. It may echo feedback from cut two and three. But half of the important feedback on your manuscript will come from just these one or two. If you're lucky they will come from different perspectives and they will have picked different things that didn't work. You will almost certainly ignore most of what they uniquely say too, because they don't agree.

You've had fifteen people read your manuscript and you know it's not perfect. A cross section agree on some of what doesn't work, you're preparing to address this. But half the critical issues have been told to you by one or two people, they are probably different issues. You're going to ignore these because nobody else has mentioned them?

It is not easy. I have said more than once, there comes a point when finishing the book has to stop being about you. It has to be about the characters, the writing and the relationship with the reader. If you give the reader reason to doubt or disbelieve or falter, think about this - you covet their attention. You now have it. Your readers are busy. They are investing their precious time in holding your book in their hand. There are a quite literally a million other books they can be reading. Many of these books are just two clicks of a button or a swipe of the screen away. You think there's something special about you, something extra special, that will hold their attention?

You need to take every piece of critical feedback and distil it, filter it through who your characters are, their goals and context to the world around them, to the people around them. You need to do this for every single piece of feedback. If you're honest to yourself, the story, the characters and the reader, you will know which ones to ignore and which will benefit your book. You should not need to be told more than once. Not if you're as good as you think you are.