{"id":164713,"date":"2025-05-16T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-16T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/?p=164713"},"modified":"2025-05-16T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T09:00:00","slug":"how-i-actually-edit-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/how-i-actually-edit-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"How I actually edit (II)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Last week, I talked about my micro-editing habit. This week, we expand a bit. The kind of editing I\u2019m going to talk about here is something I also do in the course of writing the first draft, but it operates at a less micro-level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I told you that I find it hard to make forward progress if I know that parts of the manuscript behind me are messy \u2013 and I write detective novels, whose construction is intricate. I don\u2019t plot out my books in huge advance detail. (I might do, if I thought I could do it, but I can\u2019t, so I don\u2019t.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Oh yes, and this email is all about editing, because Assignment Two of Debi Alper’s Introduction to Self-Editing<\/strong><\/a> course is live and online right now.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The kind of things that might send me scurrying backwards are things like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Character change<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one of my books, something wasn\u2019t working \u2013 and I realised that by making a key character male, and in very male surroundings, I had lost something that I wanted. So I jumped back, and made that person a woman: a commanding, powerful, unsettling presence. That shift unlocked something for me; it opened narratives that wouldn\u2019t have existed with a man in that same role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s an example of why I think that in-draft edits can be almost essential at times. Why charge on with writing your draft if you know that you made a misstep early on? Correct that misstep and then see what you have? Yes, you lose time in making the correction, but you\u2019re going to have to make it anyway \u2013 and by making it early, you avoid compounding your error.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Plot complications<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The architecture of a complex mystery novel is at the outer end of fictional complexity. For me, a good detective novel should make perfect sense as you read it \u2013 and does, in fact, make a kind of mathematically complete sense if properly analysed \u2013 but readers should also be a bit challenged by it. Ask someone to summarise who-did-what-to-whom-and-why in, say, a Raymond Chandler novel and most readers would turn a little white.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a sweet, enjoyable challenge for the reader, but for me as author, it\u2019s kind of head-wrenching. \u201cOh hold on, I need a way for X to have escaped from secure confinement, but he also needs to have chosen to go back in, but he needs to have done so in a way that Y couldn\u2019t have known about, so \u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those thoughts are crucial to good fiction-making and, for me, they\u2019re ones I always deal with as they arise. Again, getting these things right are (for me) key to forward motion. If I just try to plough on knowing that there are tweaks to make behind me, it just complicates my whole onward plotting process. Solving the niggles when I see them basically removes them from my mental to-do list and makes it easier to focus on what lies ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Settings<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Settings are like a character in my books. If a key setting is awry, that also feels like a block to forward progress, so I\u2019ll go and scratch away at the issue until it feels sorted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boring bits<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And look, no first draft is ever perfect. My first drafts are pretty decent \u2026 but that\u2019s only because they\u2019ve been heavily revised before I even hit the final full stop. But, as I work, I\u2019m also generally on the lookout for any material that just seems heavy, long-winded, dull, repetitive, undramatic \u2013 anything along those lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason is partly my messy-room aversion. But it\u2019s also because a boring bit definitely<\/strong> tells you that there\u2019s a problem which needs addressing \u2013 but it also often<\/strong> indicates a fundamental plot problem that needs sorting out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, let\u2019s take the sort of example that I often run up against. We might have a situation like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n