Sprinting with Sophistication: Writing With Care And Editing with Precision

How should you approach editing your work? Harry shares practical novel-writing tips on editing through examples of reducing overwriting, avoiding cliche and conveying ideas simply but effectively.

This month we’re doing writing sprints: boosting that word count, in company, so you get support and accountability. (Info on those sprints here.)

Speed is great, of course, except there’s not much use in sprinting, if you just have to rewrite everything afterwards.

In particular, it’s easy, when writing fast, to grab for off-the-shelf descriptors of character and emotion. It’s also easy to just shove in words because we need to say something.

Anything picked off the shelf in that way is just bound to be bad:

Hand shaking, she reached for the doorbell, her chest rising heavily as she tried to control her breathing. Was she turning red? She felt sure she was.

She was just reaching for her phone, wondering if she should cancel, when the big red-painted door swung open from the inside revealing an elderly man with grey hair and a wizened face and small gold glasses teetering atop his high forehead.

‘Is it – is it Mr Stanway?’ she stuttered.

‘One and the same,’ said the man with an awkward bow and he waved her inside with his wrinkled hand.

Trying desperately to calm her breathing, she forced herself to cross the threshold.

Now, OK, I wrote that to be bad, but the injuries to good writing are almost too many to count. What’s more, a lot of these injuries are quite common in first draft text – especially when written under a kind of self-imposed time pressure.

So let’s identify some of those uglicious brutes in order that we can MURDER THEM when we notice them during our springs.

Uglicious Brute the First:
Body part description substituting for normal description of feelings.

The first para of our little text contains these beauties:

Hand shaking, she reached for the doorbell, her chest rising heavily as she tried to control her breathing. Was she turning red? She felt sure she was.

We have a shaky hand, a heaving chest, a comment about an inner attempt to control that chest and then a Q&A about the possibility of blushing.

That seems like overkill. What are we trying to convey? That this woman is nervous? Or that she is having a complete mental & physical collapse and will probably end up in heart surgery – or a psychiatric hospital – or both?

The normal solution is simple. Just say what you mean.

She felt suddenly, unaccountably nervous. If it wasn’t too late, if she wasn’t already at the door, she’d have turned around, gone back to the station, returned to her family, forgotten the whole thing.

That’s much less telenovela than the first option, and the simplicity of approach yields instantly more texture too. In the first version, the source of the woman’s peculiar heaving and shaking just wasn’t that clear. Now we have a clear insight into what she’s feeling: she’s nervous; she thinks this is a mistake; she wants to go home. That’s an easy rational intro to what follows.

As a simple rule: if you ever find yourself grasping too much for those body-part descriptions, just tell yourself to explain the emotional landscape in simple, clear text. You’ll probably prefer it.

Uglicious Brute the Second:
Shoving in adjectives because you’re panicking.

Here, the issue is that you have in mind (correctly) that you need to establish some physical detail, but you don’t just want to halt the flow as you put in wodges of descriptive text. That kind of panic result in horrors like this:

when the big red-painted door swung open from the inside revealing an elderly man with grey hair and a wizened face and small gold glasses teetering atop his high forehead.

The main issue here is that you’re going too fast. Just slow it down. Figure out what each sentence wants to say, then say it.

Here, there are two things going on. First, the door opens. Then she sees a man. Let’s handle each of those two things in turn.

The red door swung slowly open.

We don’t need to say it’s painted. Readers know how paint works. We don’t need to say it’s large, unless the size of the door has some material function in the set up. It probably doesn’t.

Then we’ll deal with the man:

The door was held by an elderly man, smiling. He wore green tweed and had a friendly, open demeanour, almost amused.

Now, maybe this passage doesn’t want him amused or friendly. Maybe it wants to go in another direction. But you can see instantly that this descriptive approach brings together something physical (green tweed) and something emotional / character-led (friendly / amused.)

The first passage was almost embarrassingly cliched. The guy’s old, so we’ll give him a high forehead, white hair, a wizened face, and little round glasses. We might as well just dial someone up from central casting. And in that tsunami of cliché, we’ve quite forgotten to find anything particular to say about this man apart from “he looks old”.

Uglicious Brute the Third:
Dialogue that is basically pointless

In our chunk of Terrible Text, we suffered the following:

‘Is it – is it Mr Stanway?’ she stuttered.

‘One and the same,’ said the man with an awkward bow and he waved her inside with his wrinkled hand.

Apart from telling us that our female protagonist is only a step away from the loony bin (she can’t even ask a simple question without stuttering), and that the man is old, this tells us nothing.

So the recipe here is drop any fake drama (the stuttering, the awkward bow) and ditch the empty descriptive stuff (the wrinkled hand.)

Instead, either be brisk:

‘Mr Stanway?’

‘Yes, indeed. Do come on in.’

Or offer us some detail that gives purpose to this all:

‘Mr Stanway?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake. I’m George. And you’ll be Maddy? Come on in. We’re mid-marmalade, I’m afraid.’

The tone of voice and the ‘mid-marmalade’ comment is instantly starting to give character to this man, so the extra word count is amply justified. Indeed, because the reader doesn’t quite know what ‘mid-marmalade’ means, you’ve just created a (tiny, but real) reason to turn the page.

Either of these options is better than the one we just started with.

Uglicious Brute the Fourth:

Creating fake-drama where no drama is needed

Part of the whole heaving-chest, shaking-hand thing is the creation of fake drama where none is really needed.

So our original text had this:

Trying desperately to calm her breathing, she forced herself to cross the threshold.

Now, OK, if she’s crossing into the KGB’s old Lubyanka prison, I’d get this level of anxiety. But shoving that kind of thing into much more ordinary situations just makes us think worse of the protagonist. Yes, some anxiety might be appropriate (in which case say so), but keep that anxiety proportionate to the situation. In effect, you have a book-long budget for emotional drama: don’t end up spending that on nonsense.

So, much better would be simply:

‘Thank you,’ she said, and stepped inside.

There you go. All done. Avoid those uglies, but sprint like hell. Feedback Friday is simple-dimple, my beauties. It’s this:

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / All sprint, no uglies

Write a bit of text (in or out of our sprint rooms) as fast as you can. 250 words or so please.

You’re allowed one fast edit, but don’t spend an age on it.

Then post it please (with title, genre and any context) without any uglies! You don’t have to write anything of extreme loveliness to win at this challenge. Just an absence of horrors will do nicely.

When you are ready, post in the Townhouse forum.