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I’ve been working as a freelance editor for twenty years and have run the Jericho Self-Edit Your Novel course since April 2011, together with Emma Darwin. In that time, I’ve spotted some general trends when people come to self-edit - though sometimes people don’t realise just how messy their draft is, and how much work they need to do before they have a sparkly final draft, ready to pitch to agents and publishers or to self-publish.

But listen: don’t feel bad about murdering darlings. Nothing is wasted when it comes to creative writing. But do please be open to making radical changes if it means the story will work better for readers. That might mean accepting third person works better than first, for example, or changing the tenses.

Here, I’m going to take you through the top six most common mistakes that authors need to correct when they come to self-edit.

1. Starting in the wrong place

Some people start their novels too early. They write their way into the story, which doesn’t actually get going until chapter three or four. Other authors start too late. They want their story to begin with an attention-grabbing bang, but then realise that the reader has no idea who these people are or what’s going on. That means the following chapters move into back story, and the promise made in the first chapter hasn’t been upheld.

2. Scenes lack narrative drive

Everything in your draft needs to have an identifiable function in moving the story forwards in some way. If both plot and character are in the same place at the end of a scene as they were at the beginning, that’s probably a sign that the pace has slumped. On the Self-Edit Your Novel course, we share techniques and tools for ensuring that everything in your draft earns its keep.

3. It's not clear which character (or characters) have ownership of the story

Characters are the reader’s representatives in your fictional world, but there’s a limit to the number of people they can fully identify with. There should be a minimum of one person whose journey readers follow from beginning to end, and all your charactersneed to be distinct from each other.You’d be surprised at how many manuscripts I see that have multiple characters whose names start with the same initial, for example.

We’ve talked about editing for five weeks now. Those of you following Debi Alper’s superb online Introduction to Self-Editing Your Novel course are reaching its end. (The course is free to members. Interested? Learn more.) And there’s one big topic we haven’t yet broached.

What about third-party help? Do you need it? And when do you need it? And what does an external editor do that a keen self-editor cannot? Today we’ll crack open that can of worms – or rather, we’ll use the handy little ring-pull which enables easy no-crack access.

And let me start by saying two things.

Number one, you don’t get better than a Jericho Writers editor. We use absolutely first class people and we scrutinise their work and if they don’t meet our standards – consistently – they will stop being a Jericho Writers editor.

The quality of editing is not something you can easily tell from a resumé. We have some spectacular editors who have not written bestsellers, or commissioned Hilary Mantel and Dan Brown and the entire Where’s Wally series. But those people are spectacularly good at editing, which is why we use them. So: if you do choose to get third-party editing, you’re in very safe hands with us.

Number two: you don’t need third-party editing. You may want it. You would certainly draw value from it. But you don’t need it. My first book never got third-party editing before I went out to agents. (I wanted it, but couldn’t afford it). But I secured an agent without too much fuss, then had a multi-publisher bidding war for the book, and it became a bestseller. So: good results can happen with no early third-party involvement.

And yes, it’s true that more and more writers are using external editors early on in their journey, and yes, it’s true that that does somewhat alter an agent’s perceptions of what to expect. But that doesn’t amount to me saying that you need an editor. You may not. I got an agent because I wrote a 180,000 word manuscript and I got an agent sitting up till 2.00 in the morning because she couldn’t go to bed until she’d finished it. That’s the basic outcome that you need to achieve. There is no single way to achieve it.

So – I’ve plugged our services (honestly) and I’ve told you (also honestly) that you may not need them. But now let’s dig into the ins and outs of all this. Here are some guidelines to hold onto.

Know the craft

You probably won’t get a novel to a truly publishable standard unless you know your craft. I don’t care how you acquire that knowledge – books and blogs, festivals and feedback groups, courses and classes: they’re all good. But know your craft. You won’t be properly attuned to the countless errors you can make until you’ve done that groundwork.

Edit hard – harder than you think

My first novel was 180,000 words long. When I got to the end of it, I realised I’d got better as I’d gone on. So I deleted the first 60,000 words and rewrote them.

I edited so many times that (going slightly crazy and getting close to the finish line) I went through the whole damn book just to delete surplus commas. (A copy-editor later put them all back, but she put a nice curl on them and settled them just so.)

As a very rough rule of thumb, half your time should be spent writing and another half editing. If one half is going to be bigger, I’d make it the editing half.

I stress this, because you will get vastly more value from a JW editor if you’ve done the work yourself first. Sometimes we get people who send us their manuscripts, and we come back with a report that says Character X is missing this, and Plot Point Y is awry because of that and so on. And the writer tells us, in effect, “Yes, I know all that, but if I fix those things, then what?”

And … well, we’re not magicians. We can only read what’s on the page. Ideally, you would only come to us for editing help if (i) you find yourself going round in circles or (ii) you just don’t know what to do next. But put in the hard yards yourself first. We can be much more productive if you do.

Nothing wrong with testing the water first

Approaching agents is free. Getting editing help from us costs. So a perfectly sensible strategy is this:

1. Write a book
2. Edit the heck out of it
3. Send it to around 10 agents; see what they say
4. If they take you on, then yippedee-doo-dah. Happy days. If they don’t, then …
5. Either:
   1. Re-edit the work if something an agent has said gives you a flash of insight. You can send it out again if you genuinely feel that flash has been transformative. or
   1. Come to us for a manuscript assessment.

I wouldn’t go crazy with the agent submissions. I think it’s just disrespectful to bombard agents. But sending out material to 10-12 agents? Nowt wrong with that.

How to use advice

Because I’ve just spoken about agents and any feedback you may get from them, let me just say now that editorial advice is only ever advice. It’s not a command. It’s not a stone tablet, ablaze with light, brought wonderingly down the slopes of Mount Sinai.

If a particular comment gives you a moment of insight, of recognition, of YES, then work with it. If a comment just doesn’t quite make sense to you, then leave it. Or, to be more accurate: consider it. Very often, an editor may feel a discomfort around X, but their practical suggestion as to what to do doesn’t feel right. In which case, figure out if you feel the editor was right to have that discomfort (they usually are), then consider what you want to do about it.

You are the boss of your own words, always. You should never write text at someone else’s bidding if it doesn’t feel right to you. As a very rough guide, about 60% of the time, you’ll feel that an editor is spot on. A further 20% of the time, you’ll think, “right issue, wrong solution” and go your own way on the topic. And there’s a good chunk of the time where (especially if you’re a stubborn sod, like me) you just think, “No, I like what I wrote” and take no action at all.

When you really, really should come to us for help

Mostly, I think it’s totally up to you when and whether you want to use our editorial help. There’s just one category, where I think you’re pretty much nuts if you don’t use us. I’m thinking here of writers who have had a lot of “almost but not quite” type rejections from agents. If you keep coming close to the prize, then – sweet Lord – get yourself over the line. There’s nothing more powerful than third-party editorial advice in improving a manuscript. It won’t always work to get you over that line, but there ain’t nothing better.

What help to get when?

The default for almost everyone should be a full manuscript assessment. With that, you get a pro editor to read every darn page of your work and give you a detailed, detailed report on what’s working and (especially) what isn’t working and how to fix it. This, in effect, is the backbone of any big publisher’s editorial process. Every manuscript I’ve ever written has gone through that process. Every single one has been improved (except maybe for one, where I had a terrible editor who butchered the book, then published it badly, and lost a ton of money on it. But that really is a rare exception.)

If you’ve already had a manuscript assessment and you think you’re close to the finish line, then you could think about getting a development edit. With that, you get the detailed report AND on-page text commentary and correction. I don’t really like that as a starter service though for anyone. If your book has some fundamental issues (and most books that come to us do), then the on-page correction is effectively swatted aside by some of the more structural edits that are needed. It makes no sense to wallpaper a room, if some of the walls are in the wrong place. But if your manuscript is close to the finish line, then, for sure, a development edit has its place. Our office team won’t let you do a dev edit before you’re ready, so feel free to have an open discussion with them about options.

And finally, there’s the whole area of copy-editing with lighter (proofreading) and heavier (line-editing) flavours available.

Most writers won’t need those services at all. If you get traditionally published, your publisher will pay for all that stuff. You can just sit back and admire those handsomely placed commas.

The group that will certainly need copy-editing is anyone heading for self-publishing: these days, you just can’t hope to win with a shoddily presented manuscript. A scattered group that may think copy-editing is wise includes anyone with sensible reason to doubt their presentation (eg: English as a second language, or dyslexia.)

Either way though. The “edit hard yourself” rule still applies. Sometimes we get a really poorly presented manuscript and the writer is assuming that our copy-editor will just work a kind of magic with it. Not so, old buddy, not so. Your job here is the same: bring the editor the cleanest manuscript you possibly can. I guess a copy-editor picks up 95% or maybe even 99% of issues, but if you have hundreds and thousands of errors and problems scattered through the text, no editor will pick them all up.

The sorrow and the joy

Don’t expect editorial feedback to be an all-joyous thing. It isn’t. You bring us your precious baby hoping for us to dart her off to some Festival of Glorious Infants … but instead, we’re much more likely to tell you that your lovely babe has some terrible problems and will need immediate surgery.

I honestly want to tell our editorial clients to wait 48 hours before emailing us after an MS assessment. You’re likely to have some shock and/or upset, before that gives way to a kind of relieved euphoria. The euphoria, were it to speak, would say (in ancient Greek of course, but I’ll translate), “Wise editor, you have found what is worthy in my book and what is to be cast out. I venerate all that you have done and know that my feet are now set on the path of Righteous Endeavour.”

You will feel relieved (to have the issues made clear to you) and energised (because you know just what to do and how to do it.) You should also feel the book rebuilding itself as you work on it. You should feel it becoming steadily and predictably better as you go through your to do list.

For some writers, this is a one-off process. For others, it isn’t. There’s no right or wrong; only what’s right for you.

If you want to know more, contact our office team (you can just hit reply). They won’t try to sell you anything that’s not right for you. Our only real instruction to them is “honesty, always.”

That’s it from me. Debi’s Last Assignment follows …

Til soon, 

Harry 

FEEDBACK FRIDAY:

This week, it’s Assignment Six from Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course.

Revise a scene from your novel, applying the techniques you’ve learned from this course. Share in the forum. Make sure to add feedback on others.

(This fantastic, self-directed video course is FREE to Premium Members. If you’re not one yet, you know what to do: join us here!Alternatively, you can buy the course as a one-off for £99.)

When you're ready, log in to the forum and share your work. Make sure to add feedback on other people's work, too!

Til soon.

Harry

For the past four weeks, I’ve talked in detail about how I personally edit a book. Today, I’m still talking about editing, but I want to focus in on the two lode-stars by which I steer. 

The first, always, is pedantry. If you’ve done one of my Live Edit webinars (open to all Premium Members) you’ll know that I’m very, very picky. I always urge those listening to offer their reflections in the chat, but I think it’s safe to say that no one has ever out-pedanted me. 

I care about: 

• Surplus words 

• Irritating commas, or their irritating lack 

• Slightly poor word choices 

• Slightly over-familiar imagery 

• Use of body-part type sentences that are a lazy way to denote feelings 

• Settings that lack real atmosphere 

• Hurrying the delivery of information that could safely be delayed 

• And of course, hunger and world peace, obviously. But I was focusing more on the editorial stuff. 

And that’s not – not even remotely – a complete list of my nitpicks. And yes: any nitpick improves a sentence, but it also, nearly always, points to something a bit bigger. Here’s a tiny example: 

“His words sprayed out incessantly, like water gushing from a broken hose.” 

That’s the kind of thing that would reliably bother me. A hose can’t really be broken, can it? It can be kinked, or punctured, or it can be sliced through, but none of those things are really quite the same as ‘broken’. 

But in any case, the first half of the sentence says ‘sprayed’, the second part says ‘gushing’. A gush is not the same as a spray. Which is it? One implies wide distribution, the other implies narrow-but-abundant distribution. Which way we go here indicates what we’re trying to say about the voluble fellow in the sentence. Is he talking to a large audience or just to one person? We need to fit the image to the situation. 

Whatever the final set of choices here, the image will improve. 

That’s a tiny example. But the picky observation very often widens out into something bigger. 

For example, if you find yourself making a lot of deletions in a particular chapter, simply as part of your “murder all unnecessary words” programme, you may end up realising that this particular chapter has a lot of dead-feeling material. And that may cause you to rethink whether you need the chapter at all. And you may find ways of take the necessary new information / developments from that chapter and deploying them elsewhere. And you may end up reshaping your book in a way that makes a really significant improvement to the flow and feel of that awkward middle section. 

Another common phenomenon: you notice a lot of body-part language. “Her lower lip trembled and she felt the sting of salt tears rising in her eye.” That kind of thing. 

Now there’s a lot that I don’t love there, but the worst bit is that we’re trying to describe a person’s emotions via lip-movements and eye-salt-levels, instead of (duh!) just describing the person’s emotions. “She felt shocked, an almost physical buffet, but following close behind was a kind of horrified sadness, a sense of loss. Could it be that she had lost everything she had fought so hard to keep? And lost everything, in a single minute, through this almost trivial moment of ill-luck?” 

And again, that minor-seeming insight into a dodgy sentence can end up making a difference to the entire book. 

So much for pedantry. But there is also a kind of poetry, or should be, that grows the more you edit. I don’t mean you’re about to win sing-writing festivals or get shelved next to Beowulf… but, there’s a way that you write, that sounds right for you. You want to keep that.  

When it comes to your agent and your editor and your copy-editor, you’ll find there are times that they want to snip away at things that make you you. Walk amongst them unsnipped. These days, I tend to issue a (perfectly polite) note to copyeditors, explaining the aspects of my writing that are non-standard (e.g.: lots of sentence fragments, sentences starting with a conjunction, and so on) that I wish to keep. 

Equally, I’ve had instructions from an editor, that I’ve just ignored – sometimes, but not always, with a word of explanation. That doesn’t make me a crotchety writer; I’m not that. It just makes me a writerly writer: ones who chooses, with care, the words he wants to appear in print. 

Do likewise. 

Til soon, 

Harry

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

This week, it’s Assignment Five from Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course.

(This fantastic, self-directed video course is FREE to Premium Members. If you’re not one yet, you know what to do: join us here! Alternatively, you can buy the course as a one-off for £99.)

Debi would like you to:

• Pick a short paragraph from your novel that includes prose, description, and dialogue, then check for the points mentioned in lesson five of the course.
• When you're ready, log in to the forum and share your work. Make sure to add feedback on other people's work, too!

University creative writing courses absolutely have their place. Plenty of people get a huge amount out of them. If that’s you, I’m genuinely pleased. Writing should be joyful, and if a university course lit that fire for you, brilliant. 

But they’re not for everyone — and they’re not for me. 

Here’s why I’ve always struggled with the university model (with all due respect to the exceptions out there): 

• They often overlook genre fiction, which is where the vast majority of readers (and many writers) live 

• They’re often run by people with slender commercial track records 

• They don’t tend to focus on the business side of writing — things like agents, submission, and marketing 

• Self-publishing is often ignored entirely 

• It’s rare to get feedback on an entire manuscript, start to finish 

• They don’t properly grapple with plot (because that’s not something you can do by workshopping a couple of chapters) 

• The focus leans more toward earning a degree than getting a damn book published 

Now, none of that makes university courses bad — it just means they have different goals. I care far more about getting a book published than I do about getting a degree. Your preferences may vary and it’s perfectly OK if they do. 

But the reason I raise this is the workshopping phenomenon. Here’s how it works: 

A university gathers together a bunch of people who care a lot about words and writing. They set a challenge: you’re going to write the kind of book that might get published by a cool literary imprint somewhere. Then, they ask Anna to read out 1– 2,000 words of her draft novel, so that Brian and Ciara and Dan and Ezzie and the rest of them can offer their thoughts. This whole process is overseen by an Author of a couple of works, often not even full novels, (whom two of the students secretly fancy) and it’s important to all of the students that they have the approbation of the Author of the two SLNs and so Brian and Ciara and all the rest of them get stuck in and try to show off how cool and literary they are as they give Anna her feedback. 

And look: there are worse things in the world. In fact, what I’ve just described is among life’s better things and loads of people who go through one of these courses will enjoy one of the most rewarding years of their life. So good. If that’s your thing, then go for it. (Though, uh, read the PSes below before you sign up for anything.) 

My reason for telling you all this? Because of the phenomenon that is the Universal Workshop Voice. It’s a thing. I’ve given classes in the past where someone reads me a snatch of their work and I can identify – immediately and accurately – that this has been through the university-style workshopping process. 

A paragraph might start out like this: 

A fly, a fat one, landed on his forearm. Ulf stared at it for a moment, then swatted it with his free hand, killing it. Leaving a fat purple stain, and nothing else. 

I don’t know if that paragraph has any merit. I just made it up now for the purpose of this email. Whether it would ever find a place in one of my books, I don’t know. Probably not. But if you ran that paragraph past Anna and Brian and the gang, it would turn into something like this: 

A fly, fat and freighted with the alien armaments of its kind, landed on his forearm. The blow, when it arrived, shocked even Ulf with its ferocity, a blow born of some dark ancestral killing field, a rapid-fire conversation between neurons that left Ulf himself a mere bystander. Where once there had been insect there was now only pulp, grapey and softly dripping. 

And I don’t even hate that. I mean: I can’t quite imagine wanting to read that book, but maybe someone would. 

Really, my concern here is that Anna’s piece, Brian’s, Ciara’s, Dan’s and Ezzie’s are all sounding pretty damn similar – and they’re sounding similar because the workshopping process exerts the same basic gravity on them all. 

And from my personal editing process, that’s not what I want at all. 

I want to sound like me. I uncover what my tastes are by just going at my manuscript, again and again, sentence by sentence, page by page. I don’t know if that produces the best book. It probably doesn't. I mean: if Hilary Mantel or Sally Rooney or Gillian Flynn were to edit one of my first draft manuscripts, presumably it would start to take on their particular genius-level shine. 

But sod em. I don’t care. This is my book not theirs, and I don’t want their tastes interfering – and I definitely don’t want the Author of two barely-novels to exert any weight at all. And Ezzie? Nice girl and all that, but she can shove off. I don’t want her tastes (or Anna-Brian-Ciara-Dan’s) anywhere near my word-choices. 

I suppose I could justify my attitude in commercial terms – agents and editors prioritise authors with a distinctive voice. Readers probably do too, if only in the sense that those books wind up more memorable. 

But that’s kind of fake. My motive isn’t really commercial; it’s just my personal version of bolshiness. I don’t want to write like Ezzie. I want to write like me. 

And the way I do it? Editing and editing and editing and editing. And yes, using my knowledge of craft to shape my decisions. But mostly working with my own taste. What sounds like me? What do I think is funny? What atmosphere feels right for this scene? Is this sentence better as 10 words or 8? Or lose it completely? 

And flies freighted with alien armaments? Yes gods. Spare me. I’m pleased the damn thing got splattered. 

Til soon, 

Harry 

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

This week, it’s Assignment Four 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 short paragraph from your novel and experiment with different POV’s. If you’re working with multiple characters, ensure each voice is clearly different. Post in the forum (remember to log in first) and share which POV you’ve decided on and why. See if others agree with you.

Continue here for How I actually edit (IV) here.

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

***

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.

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.

***

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

With the first lesson of our brand new Premium Member course Introduction to Self-Editing launching this week, I thought I'd share my own editing process with you. I honestly don’t know how much it helps to understand another writer’s process. What matters to you isn’t how I write best, but how you do. There’s not one way to play this game, there are a million. But if you’re interested, and in the hope that it helps, here’s how I edit. 

The first thing to say is that, in my case, there’s no real distinction between my writing and my editing. I self-correct all the time as I write. My paragraphs are very often short, but if I write a reasonably meaty three or four sentence paragraph, I’ll almost always tweak it and nudge it into shape before moving onto the next. Indeed, I quite often edit a sentence before I’ve even hit the final full stop. 

Why so twitchy? Well, a few things. I’m a natural fidget. I’m not at the threshold for ADHD, but I’m certainly that way inclined. But also, I’m like my wife. She can’t quite be content in a messy or ugly room. She’ll always seek to remedy what can be remedied before she can really make herself comfortable and turn to whatever it is that brought her there. 

Same with me and bad sentences. Asking me to write new text when there’s messy text just behind me? It doesn’t work. The nagging distraction of that baggy sentence, that poorly chosen word, will stop me fully attending to whatever’s next. 

Here’s the start of an upcoming Fiona novel: 

Imagine this. 

A cold night. A scatter of snow. Not much, but there’s a fierce frost, so the hard surfaces around here – paving stones, gravel, brick walls, iron gates – are glazed with diamonds. No leaves left on the trees, or not many, but the tree trunks have an iced glitter, as though constructing some new armour. 

The light? Not much. A little moon naked under scraps of cloud. Streetlamps shining their joyless yellow. The colour of the last rags of autumn, but dimmer. More suppressed. Draining colour, not revealing it. 

In the street: no cars moving. Almost none parked, if it comes to that. On this street, the cars – the BMWs and the Mercs, the Range Rovers and the Teslas – are sheltered behind walls, in garages, protected by the red blinks of security alarms. 

And a white van, its lights off. 

And two people moving. Not quiet, but not loud. Not furtive, but efficient. Dressed dark, dressed warm. Which, in this weather, is also a way to say that their shapes and faces are lost, muffled, disguised. 

That’s how the text looks now. It’ll change again before publication, but nothing there really annoys me. 

Here’s my editing journey to get there: 

Imagine this. 

A cold night. A scatter of snow. 

These words went down first thing and I haven’t changed them. The first two words are critical: it’s not normal Fiona-speak – she doesn’t normally address the reader in any way – but they matter here for a reason which will become clear much, much later. 

The cold / scatter of snow details are – for me – nice and easy: that way of giving physical detail is an established part of the Fiona voice. I like it because the voice is clear and well-differentiated, but I also love it because it’s so compact. For those writers who are still slave to the “Gotta have a main verb” dictum, the same seven words would have come out a bit like this: 

It was a cold night, with a scatter of snow on the ground. 

To my mind, all the additional words there are essentially dull and add nothing. So if I were a slave-to-the-verb kind of writer, I’d have added juice. Something like this: 

The night was cold, with a light scatter of snow hardening beneath the frost. 

And, OK, I like that more, except I’m always bothered by the word ‘with’ in this context – it’s just a lazy way to add bolt detail onto an existing unit. So I’d probably have replaced the ‘with’, by writing: 

The night was cold and an earlier scatter of snow now hardened beneath the frost. 

I’d be pretty much happy with that now – ‘hardened’ feels more active and, literally, harder than ‘hardening’ – but as I say, my Fiona-voice just skips over all that hoopla, and delivers all the information in two sentence fragments boasting a combined 7 words. 

Then we got to this bit: 

Not much [snow], but there’s a fierce frost, so the hard surfaces around here – paving stones, gravel, brick walls, iron gates – are glazed with diamonds. No leaves left on the trees, or not many, but the tree trunks have an iced glitter, as though constructing some new armour. 

I had to pick away at that bit to get it into shape. An earlier version used the word ‘frost’ twice and I kept wanting to glaze things. 

The leaves on trees bit is sort of dull, except that the reader has no idea yet of time of year, so this was my way of telling the reader that we were in November, not January. 

The list of hard surfaces – paving stones and the rest – is also dull, but it’s dull in a quiet suburban way, which is just right for the location. I do not love the ‘around here’ phrase. Where else would the hard surfaces be? So those two words need to go: an edit that still needs to happen. 

I like the ‘some new armour’ image: that’s true to Fiona’s voice, but it also delivers a sense of battle-readiness. 

The next paragraph also needed some tweaking and plucking: 

The light? Not much. A little moon naked under scraps of cloud. Streetlamps shining their joyless yellow. The colour of the last rags of autumn, but dimmer. More suppressed. Draining colour, not revealing it. 

Again, the first two sentence fragments (four words in total) just went down on the page and stayed there. The moon and cloud stuff is quite like me – I’ve probably used something like that phrase before – but I’m happy with it. Should it be a little moon or not? I don’t quite know, but it’s going to stay little for now. 

Also (I’m only just noticing now; I don’t observe these things as I write) I especially like it that we have these themes of battle and vulnerability emerging from the text. Although we’re really just describing a theme, we already have a hint of battle (armour), a hint of vulnerability (a naked moon) and references to draining colour – a disguise, not a revelation. All this means that the description has a kind of sprung quality. Nothing dark has happened yet, but you already know this is a crime novel, not a romance. 

Then I had to tinker quite a lot to get the next bit right. I want to paint the colour of a suburban street, with a little snow on the ground, not much of a moon, and sodium-type street lighting. I could just say ‘The street is it by yellowy-orange sodium lights’ or something like that. But the point isn’t really the colour, is it? It’s the feeling. And what is the feeling? Well, that’s the bit I had to struggle to get to. 

What I’ve ended up with combines joyless, rags, dim, suppressed and draining colour. Listed out like that, it feels alarmingly single-note, but I think it works OK on the page. In effect, we start out with a colour description (‘joyless yellow’) then work through a chain of thought to figure out that what’s really happening here is an emptying out of colour, not any kind of addition. 

Oh yes, and some editors would worry about the repetition of the word ‘colour’, but I’m not fussed. The repetition doesn’t feel accidental or obtrusive, so it’s fine with me. 

And so on. 

The two people in the white van dump a corpse in one of these wealthy suburban gardens and then vanish. The book is about the investigation and shenanigans that follow. The chapter doesn’t quite say ‘they dump a corpse’, but it gets reasonably close… and this is a crime novel, so readers assume (correctly) that murder is going to be on the agenda. 

All this is how my editing process runs, always. It often starts before I hit a full-stop. It usually starts before I reach the end of a paragraph. It is very pedantic. It cares about two unnecessary words or a not-quite-perfect word choice. 

It’s utterly hard-wired and instinctive. The act of writing and the act of editing are so conjoined, I don’t really think of them as separate. 

I don’t consult a style manual for these edits. In the end, what drives me is a sense of dissatisfaction with bad text and happiness with good text. My whole writing-editing journey is just about making 1,000,000 tiny choices that move me from a mostly-grumpy place to a largely-happy one.

Next week, I’ll talk a bit about my more macro-edits. Till then, I have the moon to worry about. Little, or not little? Hmm… 

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

For the next few weeks, instead of posting into the Feedback Friday forum, I want you to post into the Introduction To Self-Editing forum. Remember, to log in first. The task I set each week will correlate with what Debi Alper teaches in that week's lesson, so if you're not a Premium Member yet and want to get the video teaching that goes along with the task, you can join here, or purchase the course as a one-off here.

This week's assignment from the course:

Share a plot summary (can be written out as a synopsis or just with bullet points) in the forum. Point out where you think tweaks to structure, plot, and pace might be required, and see if others agree.

Til soon. 

Harry