The Space Between Drafts

It’s been a while. A long while, actually, since I’ve blogged. This hiatus came from a sharp bit of wisdom that really resonated with me in Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech to the University of the Arts several years ago. He mentioned considering a goal to be a mountain and asking yourself with each new task if it was carrying you towards or away from the mountain. As I worked through the first draft of a novel, my blog entries felt like they were diversions dragging me from the task at hand. So, I filed them away and told myself only after I’d reached my own personal mountain, that first draft, would I return.|

Now that a full one hundred and forty pages sit in front of me, each chapter carefully printed and labeled, it feels appropriate to blog in the face of the daunting editing process. This is my first round of edits for this novel, a second round will absolutely follow, and then I intend to submit to agents after a final polish. This all sounds so easy, but the reality is the process is exhausting.

Editing reminds me of visiting the grocery shopping with an economical and underwhelming list. The further you wade into the store, the more you realize you’ve forgotten to include everything your kitchen really needs and what started as milk, bread, and eggs now grows to dozens of details and new plot ideas that should have been included in the first run through. And with each change, the world shifts. I’m writing a children’s fantasy where there is a world being constructed, but even in a good old-fashioned literary novel, new details are earthquakes that cause seismic shifts in the fictional reality.

In order to keep myself vaguely sane and always moving towards my mountain, I’ve devised editing tips and tricks that might be of help as you tackle your own revisions whether they be for a short story, a novel, or anything in between.

1. Keep track of your edits. Use track changes or list them, but don’t lose anything that you might find useful moving forward. You’ll never know what the draft will look like in a week, month, or year, and you might suddenly, desperately need a word you nixed on day one.

 

1. Question the usefulness of each character. I just dropped a girl off of the editing precipice because she literally brought nothing to the landscape of the novel. Especially in a shorter piece, each character ought to mean something, even if it’s comic relief.
   
   
2. Watch transitions. Do you cleverly move from point A to B? Are there walks and car rides that add nothing other than transportation? Transitions are a lovely place to pare things down.
   
   
3. Catch repetition. We’ve all got words that we defer to and often overstuff our manuscript with, which is why the find feature in Word is a revelation. Another clever realization is often those words don’t need to be replaced. They can be deleted altogether.
   
   
4. Accept the unthinkable. Sometimes a major change or shuffle is needed. Those revisions can require days or months of rethinking and rewriting but consider this. You’ve already devoted an inordinate amount of time to your work. Don’t sell it short in the editing process.
   
   
5. Dialogue is your friend. More often than not if I’m telling instead of showing, it’s due to a lack of dialogue. And because writing dialogue is so tricky, it’s easy to skip over with a summary. But dialogue is also a wonderful way to show who your character really is and differentiate between characters that in summary appear too similar.
   
   
6. Know it will all change and you’ve done your best. I hope your edits turn out beautifully, but the next editor or publisher who looks at them may have a thousand changes in mind, so acknowledge when it’s time to type The End and carry forward. Until something is in print, is it ever really done?
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Good luck writing!