How I actually edit (III)

Over the last couple of weeks, in celebration of our new Introduction to Self-Editing video course, I’ve spoken about how I (repeatedly and compulsively) correct my manuscript before I ever get to the holy words, THE END. 

Once I do hit those words, I’ll do multiple edits thereafter – some of them with a single, targeted purpose. Other times driven by a much more general hunt for dissatisfaction. On those hunts, I’m always looking for something I don’t love. That’s it. Anything that offends me, or niggles at me. Sand in the shoe: that kind of annoyance, both minor and impossible to ignore. 

Every writer knows that, yes, yes, you have to delete surplus words. Stephen King (a former journalist) once tossed out the idea that the final draft needs to be first draft minus 10%. 

And, OK, that’s not a horrible rule, so SK’s first drafts were probably leaner than most, because he was a professional writer before he ever became a novelist. But SK clearly doesn’t follow his own rule these days, because his work has become quite baggy. And in any case, it makes no sense to set a target for deletions. You have to let your manuscript tell you how long it wants to be. I’d guess that a majority of you need to cut more than just 10%. Cuts of 20-30% are often, often essential. We once made a bestseller by doing a hands-on edit of a manuscript that took it from 180,000+ words to about 90,000. 

There are two reasons why this whole economy drive matters. 

The first is simply that the force of a novel comes down to this equation: 

Force = Emotional power divided by the number of words. 

If the first term remains constant, then just cutting the second one will always, always improve things. 

That sounds dully mechanical, but I’m repeatedly struck by how relentless cutting delivers a kind of magic. Sticky mid-book patches in a novel can throw a somewhat glum, depressed feel over the whole damn thing. Brutal, hard cutting can just relieve that at (almost) a stroke. Two to three days spent on deletions make more of a reliable impact than any other editing intervention I can think of. The novel lifts in the water. Feels harder. Sails faster. The whole craft has more purpose. 

Cutting does that every time. Wow. 

But the other big reason I love cutting is that it exposes the gaps. If your writing is flabby and unconcentrated, you can easily fail to notice that there may be huge things you aren’t saying. You have this background sense of “this writing is possibly a little baggy,” so maybe you make some cuts to address that issue, but you don’t go far enough, so the issue nags anyway. 

But –  

Because you’ve used one paragraph instead of one sentence to get your characters out of the gym and into the taxi, and because you’ve used two sentences to describe clothing, and one to describe a coffee spillage, you think (correctly) that it’s high time you got your character to meet her partner for the Big Argument. So you rush her off to her Big Argument, but never realise all the stuff you haven’t done. Have you properly described the setting where the Big Argument takes place? Did you depict her emotions in the taxi? Did you add a hint of that past infideility which is colouring her perspective?

The best way to find gaps in your manuscript is to cut so hard that there’s no excess verbiage to cover them. Once you strip back the word count, you start to feel where the novel feels empty – lacking. So you add those things back (but rich text, not duplicative, pointless text) and your novel stays lean – but takes on whole layers of new meaning. 

This is a beautiful discipline, because the stuff you cut is always tedious – unnecessarily long ways of saying things that are often quite boring in themselves. Needless dialogue. Statements about settings that really add nothing in terms of atmosphere or feel. 

And then – you see the gaps. Kayleigh is meant to be worried about her upcoming meeting with Jon, but she’s hardly given him a thought – all that clothes description and coffee spillage got in the way. And how could she be going through all this and not be thinking about what happened to her mother under the exact same circumstances 25 years earlier? And what was it like to enter a completely empty house, its front door swinging open and water everywhere? 

The gaps you find are always more interesting than the text you removed, so the whole passage (and the whole book) just gets more layered and dense and powerful. 

If you want more on this, I talk about it in my How To Write a Novel course and, in even more depth, in our Take Your Novel From Good To Great course. Both those courses are free to Premium Members, and if you haven’t yet caught up with the relevant bits, then I’d strongly recommend that you do. If you’re not yet a PM, you can get a taster lesson for free here. Or, why not become a PM today? It’s like wearing a rainbow in your hair, but not as damp. 

That’s it from me. Last Sunday, my girls had a football tournament. And look, I love my kids, and it’s great that girls are into football now, and there’s everything to be said for community endeavour, and there was a pizza van there and almost-adequate coffee. 

But – oh sweet Lord – we started before 8.00 am. And didn’t finish until after 5.00. And I had to watch every damn game. Every damn one, both girls. And now whenever I close my eyes, I see yards and yards of blue nylon, and sunshine, and kids air-kicking balls as they rolled gently along an empty goalmouth.

I earned beer that night, and plenty of it. 

Til soon. 

Harry

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FEEDBACK FRIDAY

This week, it’s Assignment Three from Debi Alper’s Introduction to Self-Editing course. (It’s FREE to Premium Members! And if you’re not a Premium Member, you know what to do: join us here,or buy the course as a one-off for £99 here.)

So, Debi wants you to:

• Find a paragraph from your novel that has a strong voice, check for the points mentioned in the lesson, and post it in the forum.