The necessary evil. The one that is almost always a little more evil than the villain of the story. It's called Editing.Editing can be fun at first. There's something exhilarating about brandishing the red pen at your story - something exhilarating about cleaning it up, or about the concept of it being cleaned up. But then you settle down for the long, hard haul and things don't look so fun anymore, especially when your novel is over two hundred thousand words long. (Just ask Jenny, although you might regret it afterward.) This is when editing becomes the necessary evil.
Now I know some people think that editing is fun, but I personally consider them to be in a state of hopeless denial. However, I am sure it is a blissful one, and if you happen to be in it I have no desire to shake you back to reality. I regard you with envy. I personally have not seen or tried a method of editing that is "fun," but, like just about all writers, I do have a process that I use and it helps me complete the task. So in case any of you are looking for ideas to make the editing process go more smoothly, I thought I would share mine.
the overwhelming heap of awful
Some people wait to edit their manuscript until they are done with the rough draft. Others swear by doing an edit every time they reach a fifty-page mark. Still others edit by chapter. I don't hold to any of these choices exclusively, as they all have merit and have been useful in editing one novel or another. In general, I do edit as I go, clipping sentences and taking out words here and there as I write each chapter. This makes the actual drawn-out process of editing somewhat easier. Apart from those minor edits, however, I can use either the complete-novel edit or the fifty-page edit. In the case of Wordcrafter, for instance, I waited almost exclusively to edit until I had finished the first draft. This worked because Wordcrafter flowed, and at the beginning I knew essentially where I was going. I knew the characters at the start; I didn't have to turn around at the half-way mark and realize that those fellows at the beginning were imposters. The things I changed when I was done with the rough draft were relatively minor - an added scene here, a tweak there, a change of voice in one scene or another, a bit of foreshadowing in this chapter or that.
With The White Sail's Shaking, it was - and is - a different story. Literally. I began writing it for NaNo last year, and the fact that I barely managed to squeak by at 52,000 words, as opposed to The Soldier's Cross' 62,000 the year before, will give a very slight indication of the troubles the novel caused me. On October 31 I had some vague ideas about the plot, no villain, an elusive main character, no supporting characters, and an outline that I had discarded several days before. It sounds like a typical NaNo novel, right? But that's not how I operate, so my little writing self was in shambles on November 1 when I plopped down at my computer and opened a new, white, terrifying Word document.
To cut a long story short, although I managed to get through NaNo without killing either myself or my novel, the first sixty or seventy pages were pretty much rubbish. I gamely ignored them, trudging on with the story in a valiant attempt to finish before I turned my attention to editing. But it was so awful that I finally had to stop and edit the first fifty pages - and I am very glad I did.
So complete-manuscript edit or fifty-page edit? It depends entirely on you and your story. If you're the kind of person who gets bogged down with edits and then never completes the story, wait to draw the red pen until you've hit that last page. If you need to keep your story flowing as you go, try for the fifty-page edit.
checking it twice (or thrice)
When I finally decided to edit White Sail's, I was overwhelmed by the feeling of disgust for those miserable pages written during November and by the impression that everything and its cousin needed to be changed. So I turned to what I had done on a much small scale for The Soldier's Cross, when I was thrown into a whirl of edits that had to be completed on a deadine: I made a list of the things that needed to be changed. I made the points broad so as not to overwhelm myself yet again and put check boxes beside each (because there is something immensely satisfying in checking off things on a list). In the end, I had only nine major points. Nine isn't too bad, right? Well, at the very least it doesn't seem so bad as the vague and unnumbered things that had been gathering over me, and it gave me a place to start.
the red pen of doom, death, and the like
If you go around our house, you will find a lot of notebooks. If you look inside those notebooks, the chances are high that you'll find one edition of Wordcrafter or another. A thoroughly red-blotted one, a copy full of colored tabs, a copy with miscellaneous notes in black ink - I was pretty thorough in printing out that one. For White Sail's, I had so much trouble printing out a single copy that I haven't dared trying to do another full one.
After printing out a copy, I go through the laborious process of punching holes in it, round up a ring-binder, and enclose the manuscript in it. Then I pull out the red pen that is, miraculously, still alive and get to work. For sections that must be thoroughly rewritten, I don't bother applying the red pen; I just put a note up at the top to say "Rewrite," plus some insult to the scene. Elsewhere, I will dash through sentences and rewrite them in red pen until whole pages seem to be bleeding. Occasionally I put notes for myself to keep in mind, such as "Add such-and-such scene" or a historical note that I did not know when I wrote the chapter the first time and need to incorporate. As the story progresses, the huge amounts of red ink begin to drop off (I'm pretty sure there's a dramatic change from November 30 to December 1).
After printing out a copy, I go through the laborious process of punching holes in it, round up a ring-binder, and enclose the manuscript in it. Then I pull out the red pen that is, miraculously, still alive and get to work. For sections that must be thoroughly rewritten, I don't bother applying the red pen; I just put a note up at the top to say "Rewrite," plus some insult to the scene. Elsewhere, I will dash through sentences and rewrite them in red pen until whole pages seem to be bleeding. Occasionally I put notes for myself to keep in mind, such as "Add such-and-such scene" or a historical note that I did not know when I wrote the chapter the first time and need to incorporate. As the story progresses, the huge amounts of red ink begin to drop off (I'm pretty sure there's a dramatic change from November 30 to December 1).
you mean I have to do this again?
At the end of the tiring business of blotting all over the printed pages, I get to work transferring the edits to the Word document. At this point I tackle the big issues that I could not easily address in pen, such as adding scenes and completely redoing whole chapters. Then, when everything is typed in and cleaned up, I go about something else. With Wordcrafter, I sent out queries; with White Sail's, I returned to the actual writing process. But then after awhile I will print out another copy and go through it again for things that I know I tend to do, like flogging semicolons to within an inch of their lives. This invariably results in a pretty thorough edit in itself, and so the process is repeated on a smaller scale.
A story is never done until it's published - that's the cold, hard truth. And writers should take advantage of the chance to make changes while they can, because even when the book is out and under the public eye, you'll probably still see things you wish you could alter. At some time, however, it is necessary to let it go, because even the agony of editing becomes strangely addictive after awhile. There comes a time to move on - but you shouldn't move on too soon.
A story is never done until it's published - that's the cold, hard truth. And writers should take advantage of the chance to make changes while they can, because even when the book is out and under the public eye, you'll probably still see things you wish you could alter. At some time, however, it is necessary to let it go, because even the agony of editing becomes strangely addictive after awhile. There comes a time to move on - but you shouldn't move on too soon.
