The pedantry and the poetry (Editing Series V)

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

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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!