How much should I edit?

February 22, 2019February 11, 2019 Zoetic WordsLeave a comment

“Editing is like gardening, prune the branches, then the leaves.” I don’t remember who said it but it’s good advice. Think topiary.

Prune out the boring bits, the curly bits that go nowhere, the lovely words which don’t relate to the plot but sound wonderful. Copy and paste them into another file and find somewhere else to use them.

Ensure repetition is a rhetorical device for emphasis rather than redundancy.

Prune away the fluff and fuzz, anything which stands between the reader and your story.

Stories as mirrors

January 28, 2019January 19, 2019 Zoetic WordsLeave a comment

Mirrors

When I can’t understand something important, I search, I research and I write. I write and write everything I know, everything I feel until clarity comes. Sometimes I don’t completely understand until my story is told. Sometimes I don’t understand the details even then.

What is a draft if not telling yourself the story. Rewriting and editing are for clarifying it all first in the mind of the writer so that the reader may ask the right questions to find their own answers.

Reality is too complex

January 23, 2019January 19, 2019 Zoetic WordsLeave a comment

Reality is too complex

Build on the bare bones of your structure. Make your story whole. Tell it in all its complex twists and turns.

Edit anything which clouds your story. Cut the irrelevant, the redundant, any repetition. Polish your baby until the light at its heart shines clear. Clarity above all.

Do you want to escape?

January 14, 2019January 5, 2019 Zoetic WordsLeave a comment

Get out of your head

As a reader, I want to escape into a story and don’t want to return until I absolutely must. This kind of escapism is not unusual. Life is not ideal. We can’t always afford to take ourselves away from the life we have. Books and movies give us a more affordable way to live a different life, if only for a few hours. When we escape like this, the last thing we want is to be dropped out of our fantasy world and brought back to reality with a thump.

When editing, my job is to look for things which will drop a reader out of the story. Some of these can be:

spelling, grammar and punctuation errors;
characters acting ‘out of character’ or stupidly;
inconsistencies;
awkward phrasing, lack of clarity;
breaking the rules of the story world;
breaking the rules of the genre (killing the hero in a romance story).

These and others are dangerous to the career of the writer because once a reader is ‘dumped’ out of the story, they might:

remember all the things they should be doing instead of reading;
get so frustrated they throw the book at the wall; and/or
never forgive the writer and write them on their blacklist.

Writing and Editing

March 28, 2018 Zoetic WordsLeave a comment

Editing

Great quote. Stories, characters, plot bunnies, they can burn inside until you let them out onto the page. It can take some time to write a complete story, almost never in one sitting, especially for full-length novels and family sagas.

First drafts can bear very little relation to the finished book. Unless the writer is very experienced and a rather detailed plotter, the story often changes through the writing process as the writer learns more about the characters, setting and the details of the story. Often the writer doesn’t completely understand the whole story until the first draft is finished.

There are so many ways in which to tell a story. It can take some time and often more than a few rewrites, to find the best and most effective way to reveal, at the appropriate time, all the essential pieces of the puzzle or the fire at the heart of the story.