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Self-Editing for Fiction Writers
1) Read it aloud. This is a popular piece of advice for good reason. All sorts of problems suddenly come into focus, from pacing issues to characters' individual voices. If it's a book that's likely to be read to children you could also get someone else to read it to you. It doesn't matter how useful or otherwise that person may be as a literary advisor, the points where they trip over the language or rhythm will be the points where a parent reading aloud is likely to trip. 2) Simplify your plot into a numbered list of events. This will be dull, but it's particularly good for complex narratives as it shows up timeline errors. 3) Think or read several times through your plot or story with a different secondary character in focus each time. Mary may be a more important character than John, but if John behaves inconsistently just because it's important for Mary's character development, the book is weakened. It's worth giving John a bit of time at the front of your brain to make sure this isn't happening. 4) Be honest about your own reactions, all of them. Sometimes you will just be too close to your own work to have much idea about it, but usually even early on there are clues. If, when rereading, you find yourself rushing over Chapter Four to wallow in Chapter Five, it might mean Chapter Five is great – but probably also that Chapter Four needs work. 5) Follow the niggle. In my rueful experience, if you have a niggling feeling that something is not quite on the money, then you are almost certainly right. If you absolutely can't work out what the problem is just now, highlight the offending section in another colour and come back to it. These days I actually rejoice (well, in a mild sort of way) when I work out what's wrong with a scene because I have almost invariably known on some level that the problem was there, and now I can fix it. 6) Kill your darlings. This one gets bandied about even more than 'read it aloud'. But how to identify a darling? Sometimes you might like what you've written just not because you wrote it, but also because it's good. You can usually tell a 'darling' because it's a one-off that doesn't have much to do with the rest of the story. It may be a phrase that includes a stunning but thematically inappropriate image, or a scene which is terribly poignant but fails to develop the characters and holds up the plot. That said, the darlings which are most painful to remove are the ones that have been woven into the text because you loved them so much that you built some of the story around them by way of life support. If trying to work out what's wrong with a specific scene is driving you fruitlessly mad, it may be that this is the problem. Look at each element of the story in turn, asking what the consequences would be if you removed it. Something that appears to be very well embedded in the text may on examination turn out to actually shored up by filler material, and this kind of analysis can detect that. 7) If you're stuck for a solution, go back a stage from your apparent problem. I've spent dozens of hours sweating over my writing thinking 'this bit doesn't work!' but being completely unable to figure out what I should replace it with. It took me a while to cotton on, but eventually I realised that a good proportion of the time the difficulty was that I wasn't pruning back far enough. Very often the sentence or paragraph prior to the offending text was harmless in itself, but it was leading me gently down a dead end. This seems obvious for plot problems, but it also applies to subtler issues of characterisation and style. 8) Cut and cut again. This is another general one that everybody knows. The trick is motivating yourself to hack away at your lovely prose, even the bits that aren't darlings. It can be done – after some years, I've actually come to find cutting enjoyable. It's liberating, and it allows the best bits of your book to shine out more, concentrating it into shinier and shinier pure diamond. The mild regret at the loss of some elegant touches pales in comparison with the thrill of regarding the taut new shape of the whole. 9) Keep note of things you repeatedly find yourself doing wrong. This isn't a very edifying experience. But if I'd been doing it I'd have cottoned on to point 7 years earlier. A more positive spin on this would be to keep a file noting serious problems you've encountered with your drafts, and how you've fixed them. The chances are you'll spot some characteristic weaknesses and may even be able to avoid introducing them at draft stage. 10) Keep reminding yourself that self-editing isn't a boring extra, but a vital aid. It may not be fun, but that's why a lot of people don't bother. If you do, you've greatly increased your chance of getting out of the slush pile and/or of making your editor like you and want to acquire more of your shapely MSS. |
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"We wished we had more projects to give you, because you just did them so well!" Sue Parish, former Head of Editorial, Egmont Publishing |
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