How I Edit

The one month for a Works-In-Progress project is working fairly well, even if February update the BookWorm’s Library bled into March. March is dedicated to Star Wars, so while I was finishing the last of the coding changes, I opened up the Scrivener project holding all the Star Wars fanfics.

Me: “Okay. Sororal Lineality: Miha is with my beta. Have to remind her I need that edited this month. Sororal Lineality: Plans and High Command needs to go through ProWriting Aid and then sent to my beta. And last but the largest, I finished the first draft of Rescue the Farmboy: Mission on Mimban and it’s ready for me to edit. What do I need to do first?”

Brain: “…”

Me: “Look, I have done novels. I even remember editing those. What was done? What are the steps?”

Brain: “…”

Me: “The hell?”

Brain whispers: “I think I deleted that.”

Basically I have been so caught up in first draft creation and brain-dumping outlining, I couldn’t remember any of the steps I had used to go to a second draft. And when that happens, I go to others for advice. Namely, the craft books I have collected over the years. And getting my own process for this ironed out will help me with another WIP project that needs rewriting and I have no idea at what stage I left it in.

First book I consulted was 2,000 to 10,000: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love by Rachel Aaron. What is largely a book on plotting and increasing your daily word count, she does have a whole chapter titled “Editing for People Who Hate Editing.”

Editing is writing. If you like writing, you like editing. Editing is just the part of writing that comes at the end when you’re weary and things are hardest, which earns it a lot of bad press. However, what most people fail to realize is that editing, like writing is a skill. … The same skills that make you a good storyteller make you a good story perfecter, you just have to stop hating the process and start treating your editing like you treat your writing—something you strive to be good at, something you do every day, and something you want to make a career out of.

Necessary pep talk because my editing skills haven’t completely withered away to dust but have grown weak from not using them enough.

Rachel Aaron breaks her process down into multiple steps.

• Step 1: Change the Way You Think about Editing
  • “What is the point of all this work? … Answer: Reader experience. … You’re asking ‘How can I prepare the reader for what happens next?’ and ‘How can I make them love it?’”
• Step 2: Editing Tools
  • The Scene Map = a very quick jot down of what happens in the book broken up by scene and chapter. Make a new list (don’t depend on something made in the outlining stage) to reflect what you actually wrote
  • The Time Line = a list of all the relevant events that happen in the novel and what characters were doing off screen too
  • The To-Do List = a list of things that need to be addressed organized by how hard the problems will be to fix.
• Step 3: Actually Editing
  • Fixing the big stuff = “I edit from biggest problem to smallest, not from first page to last.” This keeps you from burning out going over the manuscript multiple times because you jump to the spots where the problem is in the manuscript and focus on only that.
  • The Read-Through = “Now I go back to page one and start reading, putting things in order as I go. This is my line edit.”
• Step 4: Activating the Reader Brain = Aaron moves her manuscript to her Kindle device to create separation to enjoy the story as a reader with a notebook nearby just in case she catches a new problem. Only when there are no more problems does she send the manuscript off to a beta reader or hired editor.

Once I started rereading this chapter, I had a memory jolt. This is technique I used to edit Rescue the Farmboy: Liberation. It worked extremely well since I had multiple POV characters and I needed to take note of what they all were doing when not on stage and account for time using different hyperspace traveling speeds. (Time is spent in hyperspace was a thing, granted glossed over by the Original Trilogy and the Prequels, but everything being done by Disney has forgotten it exists and hyperspace must act just like a Stargate wormhole only with spaceships. And yes, I am digressing because it is MATH and I made it work and you are WELCOME.) Looking back at my files for that novel, I used Scrivener’s index cards and compiled an outline from them to create the Scene Map, the Time Line format that made sense was a table: columns for the different POV characters and the rows were what was done at what time and date, and the To-Do List, which was so useful keeping the changes I needed present while editing.

Novelist’s Boot Camp: 101 Ways to Take Your Book From Boring to Bestseller by Todd A. Stone is another craft book of the entire process that I have incorporated into my process before. The Comprehensive Concept (page 41) helps me write online summaries as well as giving a focus for the whole novel. A Character Matrix (page 112 – 114) has helped me tame a sprawling cast and how they relate to each other and how they function in the novel. (That I then proceeded to make every scene they are in isolated from the other characters and made that novel excruciating to write is a different problem.) And up to my last outline that became a sprawling rough draft to get all the dialogue and character actions out of my head, the Master Story Summary was how I focused my outlines.

So surely his editing technique has transferred over to mine since I use so much already. Not so much. I don’t think I have used any of “Battle Plan Echo” since 2008 (Discipline Under Fire: BMFM: Evil Jack 20, Discipline Under Fire: BMFM: Evil Jack 21, Discipline Under Fire: BMFM: Evil Jack 22).

“Battle Plan Echo” is the overall name for the editing process in Novelist’s Boot Camp, a multiple pass system.

Stage 1. Perform scene triage. Conduct a scene-level evaluation of your work, placing each scene into one of three categories:

1. cut
2. rework
3. improve

Stage 2. Execute seven revision passes. Read through your manuscript seven times, focusing on a different story element with each pass. You’ll look at:

1. character
2. objectives
3. dialogue
4. narration and description
5. action
6. logic
7. miscellaneous items.

Stage 3. Rewrite. In this final stage of revision, you’ll follow your notes from the triage and revision passes and make the necessary changes by rewriting your work line by line, scene by scene.

I think why didn’t carry this process forward into things I had written after that novella is that it is so many passes. The questions to consider are very good, I don’t want to lose them. But how can I keep them?

The next book I consulted was Stein on Writing by Sol Stein. He also called his method of revision ‘triage.’ He wants to avoid working from first page to last and “working on trivial corrections and next coming up against a major problem.” So his guide “gives priority to those matters that are the principal causes of rejections by editors.” (Stein 278)

That sounded promising until he started detailing his steps for the triage part and the general revision part. After coming from Stone’s neatly formatted questions to apply to your manuscript, I was annoyed by Stein’s meandering antecedents about his novels and the questions taking multiple paragraphs to get the point across. There was no clear delineation between the triage part and the general revision part, which I suppose does support Stein’s assertion that you can check for these things in any order as long as you start fixing the big problems first.

Moving on for what I can use now, Self-Editing For Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King is probably the first book I bought on how to edit and I have highlighted and flagged something on almost every page of it. But it is designed to teach you what the common problems are and how to fix them with exercises to practice on. So I put this book aside from this project.

The Complete Guide to Editing Your Fiction by Michael Seidman is set up like Self-Editing For Fiction Writers explaining the common problems and showing examples of revisions. But he at least consolidated everything you should examine your manuscript into a checklist. See this post for the questions: Discipline Under Fire: Editing Your Fiction Checklist by Michael Seidman.

Last book consulted because eventually this has to come to an end and I get to work on editing, the Story Grid by Shawn Coyne. If your novel doesn’t make sense or feels flat, this method will identify the problem. But once your analysis leaves the Foolscap Global Story Grid, the breakdown becomes large and mathy to make the spreadsheet and graph. Not every story needs this level of breakdown, so I’m not going beyond the Foolscap Global Story Grid for what I’m making here. I’ll save it for when the novel is completely broken.

The Foolscap Global Story Grid is a one-page diagnostic tool that answers the Editor’s Six Core Questions.

Global Story	External Genre:
	External Value at Stake:
	Internal Genre:
	Internal Value at Stake:
	Obligatory Scenes and Conventions:
	Point of View:
	Objects of Desire:
	Controlling Idea/Theme:
Beginning Hook		External Charge	Internal Charge
	Inciting Incident:
	Complication:
	Crisis:
	Climax:
	Resolution:
Middle Build		External Charge	Internal Charge
	Inciting Incident:
	Complication:
	Crisis:
	Climax:
	Resolution:
Ending Payoff		External Charge	Internal Charge
	Inciting Incident:
	Complication:
	Crisis:
	Climax:
	Resolution:

Now for some definitions. Coyne divides genre into five types that tells the reader what to expect: Time Genre answers how long the story will, Reality Genre answers how far the audience will have to suspend their disbelief, Style Genre answers how the audience will experience the story, Structure Genre answers how the global telling of the story will be, and Content Genre answers what the theme/controlling idea of the story is. It is this last one that everyone thinks of when they think of genre.

Coyne further divides Content Genre into External (stories driven by a global external value) and Internal (stories drive by the nature of the protagonists’ inner conflict). Each of these have subgenres to further drill down. In order to deepen your story, you should have both working. Each has a Value at Stake that is a convention for the larger genre. For example, the core value of the Crime Genre is justice/injustice and that would be the Value at Stake.

Obligatory Scenes and Conventions are what readers expect from the genre you have chosen. For example, a romance needs

1. Lovers found.
2. Lovers split.
3. Lovers reunited.

You still have to innovate what happens to your characters and how they react to it but if you leave out one of these necessary scenes, the readers will be disappointed in how your book doesn’t work.

Point of View is the point of view that the story is told from and how it is structured (first, second, or third person, free indirect style, etc.).

Objects of Desire is plural because the major characters will have two objects of desire: the conscious one that spurs the external actions taken during the Story to achieve it and the subconscious one that spurs the internal actions during the story. It can be best figured out by asking:

• What does my character want? (External)
• What does my character need? (Internal)

Controlling Idea/Theme is the takeaway message the writer wants the reader to discover from reading their story. This is where I would slot in a Comprehensive Concept that I created when plotting the story.

The rest of the Foolscap Global Story Grid is filling out a distilled skeleton of your story. External Change and Internal Change is tracking if the scene is a positive or negative result for the protagonist to achieve their external and internal objects of desire.

My Editing Process Going Forward

So what am I going to do?

1. Open up a new Scrivener text document for the To-Do List.
2. Fill out the Foolscap Global Story Grid.
3. Tweak the Master Story Summary to a Scene Map.
4. Fill out the Time Line with who is doing what and when.
5. While going through the manuscript to create these tools, add any issues noticed to the To-Do List. Also keep in mind Seidman and Stone’s questions while doing this.
6. Work the To-Do List from largest problem to smallest.
7. Run manuscript through ProWriting Aid.
8. Send manuscript to my beta.
9. Edit according to those suggestions.
10. Publish.

Editing Your Fiction Checklist by Michael Seidman

Editing Your Fiction Checklist by Michael Seidman

• Is your novel right for the market to which you want to sell it?
• If you’re taking risks, have you maintained the form of the category, even if you’re ignoring the formula?
• Is the language appropriate to your market?
• Have you created minor characters and subplots?
• Do you spend too many time on them, distracting the reader from the main story?
• Do you spend too little time on them? If they’re not important to the story, should they be removed?
• Are you showing, and not telling?
• Do your characters express their feelings, or do you tell us what they are?
• Do you let your characters and their actions tell the story, or are you stopping to bring the reader up to speed?
• Are your characters as clear to the reader as they are to you? Have you maintained their character in dialogue and in actions?
• Are all the motivations clear to the reader, or are things happening because you need them to?
• Have you spent too much time giving the reader the characters’ biographies? At the same time, does the reader know enough about the characters?
• Are characters telling each other stories simply as a way of giving the reader information? (If a character says to another, “Well, you know Billy did this…,” the conversation shouldn’t be taking place.)
• Do character descriptions come naturally, in the course of dialogue or action?
• Are you describing people in terms of icons or idols? Will enough of your readers know what Michael Stipe looks like?
• Have you offered full descriptions (naturally) of your major players? There’s nothing more aggravating than have a series of characters through the novel introduced by one or two features. It might work once, but by the time we get to the third or fourth “he was a tall man with reddish hair and a brusque voice,” it becomes an annoying pattern.
• Speaking of iconic descriptions, does your manuscript read like the advertising pages of a magazine, with a product plug on every page? Does it matter than the stereo’s an Aiwa rather than a Sony? (It does matter if it’s one of the really high priced systems. It tells us something about the character.) Same with most cars, clothes and other products. Unless the brand is telling detail, leave it out.
• Is interior monologue realistic? Are they thoughts the character would actually have?
• What point of view have you chosen? Why?
• Have you maintained the point of view throughout each scene, or jumped into another character’s head in the middle of events?
• If you’re writing in first person, is this someone the reader will want to spend time with?
• Unless you’re writing in an omniscient point of view, have you made sure your first-person character does not learn things in the course of the story that the reader didn’t become aware of at the same time. (This refers to information; interpretation of the information does not have to be revealed until you’re ready.)
• Is your point-of-view character clear from the beginning? If there are shifts, do you make the new point of view obvious soon enough?
• Is narrative in each scene true to the character seeing it? A man and a woman won’t see the same room in the same way; they’ll describe people differently.
• Have you avoided editorializing, commenting or events in your voice rather than that of the characters?
• Does your dialogue say what you want it to say?
• Are your conversations serving any purpose at all? Are they serving more than one purpose: describing things, adding to character developing, expressing ideas important to the story?
• Does your dialogue stand on its own? If you cut explanations, dialogue tags, and anything else used as a crutch to support the words, does the conversation still hold up, saying what you want it to? If not, change the dialogue, not the tags.
• Do adverbs follow quotation marks? This means the dialogue or scene does not express what you said.
• Does your punctuation work as part of conversation? A dash represents an interruption; an ellipsis, a pause or gap.
• Is there any action interspersed through the conversations, or is the dialogue, unnaturally, only words?
• Are your characters giving speeches or actually talking to each other?
• Have you used dialogue to show off your research, allowing characters to give detailed explanations of things that do not make a difference to the story? (We don’t need the principles of rocketry to accept space flight.)
• Do the conversations sound natural? Read your work aloud; even better, have someone read it to you. Does the exposition flow easily or does the reader have to stop, either to catch her breath or figure out pronunciation?
• Have you used contractions, slang, idioms and regionalisms both to ease reading and to give a sense of character and place?
• Does your dialect disrupt the reading? Can you achieve the sense of place without “creative” spelling?
• What does your manuscript look like? Are there unrelieved blocks of text? Can any of your paragraphs be broken into shorter ones? Long paragraphs can also be broken up with dialogue. It helps the pace and also makes the manuscript (and the printed page in the book) easier to read. As in life, sometimes we’re judged by how we look; if a page appears intimidating, the reader is going to be intimidated.
• Does your dialogue look like long paragraphs? Can the talk be broken up by action?
• Are you repeating words, phrases, bits of business because you like them too much or because it was easier to just go with what you know rather than create something new?
• Have you looked at every word, making certain it is the only right word?
• Have you checked for anachronisms, words that weren’t in use at the time the novel is set, products and events that are out of time, if not out of place?
• Have you used adverbs and adjectives sparingly? Like italics and exclamation points, these modifiers are fine seasonings and have to be used delicately.
• Are you using trendy words for effect… or through habit?
• Have you used “which” incorrectly? Go on a “which” hunt. Nine times out of ten, the word should be “that.”
• Have you turned to the dictionary to check spelling and definitions, or simply trusted instinct and a computer program?
• Is your thesaurus near you as you work? Is it well thumbed?
• Did you chart your characters and story lines, to be certain that neither disappears inexplicably?
• Are details all the same at the end of the manuscript as they were at the beginning? Continuity counts, whether it concerns eye color, clothing or reaction to events. If you’re working on a series, continuity still counts. Has your character been injured, had an epiphany, taken a lover? Anything that’s happened has an effect on the character in the next adventure.
• Have you done your fact checking? If you’re writing with freedom, you’re going to have some details wrong: distances, historical facts, a multitude of problems. With the work finished, and research no longer something to be done to avoid writing, check. Get the details you may have missed. No one has to know how much research was done.
• Did you make notes as you read, marking the manuscript, so that when you begin to retype, you know what you have to do? Are you going to do it? When?

Novelist’s Boot Camp Editing Checklist by Todd A. Stone

Novelist’s Boot Camp Editing Checklist by Todd A. Stone

• Scene Triage Questions
  • Is the main character present (Present can mean the character is being discussed)?
  • Is the window character present?
  • Is the villain present?
  • Are the minions/other opposition present?
  • Four no answers, mark the scene as a cut.
  • Is the protagonist, opponent, window character, or minion taking action?
  • Is the protagonist, opponent, window character, or minion having an external conflict?
  • Two no answers, mark the scene as a cut.
  • Is one or more characters pursuing his/their story objectives?
  • Is one of more character pursuing his/their personal objectives?
  • Two no answers, mark the scene as a cut.
• Character Pass Questions
  • Does everyone get on stage quickly?
  • Is your protagonist in the scene?
  • Is each character pursuing her objectives?
  • Is each character consistent?
  • Is each character growing?
  • Where can you trim your cast?
  • Are you characters rehearsing or playing their parts?
  • Are the bit players stealing the show?
  • Is the point of view consistent?
• Objective Pass
  • Are the objectives clearly visible in the beginning?
  • Are the objectives clearly visible in each scene?
  • Are the characters taking action to achieve those objectives?
  • Are objectives in conflict with each other?
  • Can you track the progress as you go along?
  • In what ways can you raise the stakes?
  • Do the objectives get resolved in the end?
• Dialogue Pass
  • Are your characters using words as weapons?
  • Is the dialogue only there to show something?
  • How could this dialogue more strongly reveal the character?
  • How could the dialogue work harder?
  • Is the speaker's identity clear?
  • Does the dialogue contain beats to punctuate it?
  • Is there a better arrangement?
  • Does the dialogue fit?
  • Does it feel real?
• Description and Narration Pass
  • What description can be cut?
  • Does the description do its job?
  • Does the description convey a mood?
  • How can more variety be introduced?
  • Is it part of the scene?
  • Is there a better arrangement?
  • Seek out excess summarizations.
  • Use word-level cues to help you identify extra narration.
• Action Pass
  • Is the amount and type of action appropriate for the genre?
  • Is there action on every page?
  • Does the action have the right purpose?
  • How well is the action recounted?
  • Does the action grow?
• Logic Pass
  • Is the first bang big enough?
  • Is there cause and effect?
  • Does logic work for the characters?
  • Do events follow each other logically in time?
  • What are the effects of changes?
  • Can you work backwards?
• Miscellaneous Pass
  • Are genre consideratons addressed?
  • Are the technical details correct?
  • Visually examine the pages for signs of weakness in your writing.
    • Too much black.
    • Too much white.
    • Too much of the same.