How I actually edit (II)

Last week, I talked about my micro-editing habit. This week, we expand a bit. The kind of editing I’m 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.

I told you that I find it hard to make forward progress if I know that parts of the manuscript behind me are messy – and I write detective novels, whose construction is intricate. I don’t plot out my books in huge advance detail. (I might do, if I thought I could do it, but I can’t, so I don’t.)

(Oh yes, and this email is all about editing, because Assignment Two of Debi Alper’s Introduction to Self-Editing course is live and online right now.)

The kind of things that might send me scurrying backwards are things like:

Character change

In one of my books, something wasn’t working – 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’t have existed with a man in that same role.

That’s 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’re going to have to make it anyway – and by making it early, you avoid compounding your error.

Plot complications

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 – and does, in fact, make a kind of mathematically complete sense if properly analysed – 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.

That’s a sweet, enjoyable challenge for the reader, but for me as author, it’s kind of head-wrenching. “Oh 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’t have known about, so ….”

Those thoughts are crucial to good fiction-making and, for me, they’re 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.

Settings

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’ll go and scratch away at the issue until it feels sorted.

Boring bits

And look, no first draft is ever perfect. My first drafts are pretty decent … but that’s only because they’ve been heavily revised before I even hit the final full stop. But, as I work, I’m also generally on the lookout for any material that just seems heavy, long-winded, dull, repetitive, undramatic – anything along those lines.

The reason is partly my messy-room aversion. But it’s also because a boring bit definitely tells you that there’s a problem which needs addressing – but it also often indicates a fundamental plot problem that needs sorting out.

So, let’s take the sort of example that I often run up against. We might have a situation like this:

• There’s a murder and an investigation
• Things go well for a bit, then the regular police investigation starts running into problems and looks like it’s going nowhere. (This kind of issue is basically compulsory in my kind of fiction. The only alternative is that the police are busily chasing up the wrong set of leads.)
• So there often needs to be an “oh, no, this isn’t working” bit … which can often look a bit dull, because it is frustrating to those involved.

Now that’s all fine, except that what if the boring bit is too long? Quite often, the writer – me, for example – will create something dramatic in order to break the tedium. A man with a gun. An assault. A terrible revelation. And it’s easy to think, “Oh great, off we trot again. There was a dull bit, but it was only a few pages long, and now we’re on the road again.”

And OK, that approach may be just what your book needs … but maybe 50% of the time what it really needed was you to go back and delete the boring bit. The added drama now just locks in that boring bit and sets you off on the wrong path.

In the end, any bad bit in your book is telling you that there’s an issue and you may need to delete the last 5,000 words, say, to get back to the last bit where you felt truly settled. Plot is a sequence of stones laid one upon the other. If you sense a wobble, go back to the wobble. Sort it out. Then start building again.

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FEEDBACK FRIDAY

This week, it’s Assignment Two from Debi’s Introduction to Self-Editing course. (Free to Premium Members. And if you’re not a Premium Member, then don’t be a Hufflepuff – slither in to membership here or buy the course as a one-off for £99 here.)

So, Debi wants you to:

• Find a paragraph from your novel that focuses on one of your characters and post it in the forum.
• Check for the points mentioned in this lesson, and don’t forget to offer feedback to others.

Til soon.

Harry