Adventures in Storytelling 3

Entry 3, Carpe editorem, occide. 

As I stated in the last entry, I learned it was okay to trust my instincts. But when it came to editing, I didn’t really know where to start. I read a couple books on editing, some more useful than others, and sort of just decided to start from the beginning. {read Storytelling 2, here}

I wrote Project Paisley’s P1 into three parts. As a finished draft, P1 was massive, as in, this-is-never-getting-published massive. It was a problem I was aware of while writing it. The seed had grown into a wild forest and was in need of serious cultivation if I was going to make anything of it.

While writing P1 I made heavy use of a tactic I call pre-editing (some call it backtracking). Pre-editing is when I go back to former chapters/sections in order to reread them. Sometimes this is done in order to refresh my memory, double check lore, or simply because I can’t do anything else. Often, if I see a mistake or I decided to rewrite something, I fix it. There are people who believe this is terrible for your writing, but I find helpful. Sometimes, I’ve gone back and read something really good and it’s inspired me or reminded me that I’m not utterly useless as a writer.

While working on part three I had some difficulty getting to my end. I took some time at the local library to print out the first part of P1. I learned from one of the aforementioned editing books that seeing your work in print instead of on a screen can help you distance yourself from it. I also learned that changing the font from your standard use font (like Times New Roman) to something less familiar (like Bahnschrift) provides further alienation.        

This technique, which I call alienation, works for me and I still use it. Placing distance between yourself and your work is like taking a break in a very torrid relationship. It can be incredibly difficult. You’ve spent hours, days, months, years with a particular project. Cutting yourself off from the creative process that held you in thrall for so long is like clipping off pieces of your own soul.

But you must cool that fire before you can really edit. Pre-editing, for all the use I got out of it, wasn’t helping me edit. It was creating a longer and more unwieldy draft. I spent so much time with part one that I had difficulty pulling away from it in order to finish part three. I ended up adding an entirely new section to part two, while I believe this worked out for the best, when I finally got around to finishing part three, I was dealing with a draft so large I knew that no company would publish it as a first novel.

Still, I persevered. I sent the draft to a printer in order to have the monstrosity printed and mailed to me. Note: don’t ever do this. It is cheaper to buy your own ink and paper, print from home in batches and store in a three-ring binder.

In 2019, I started a new fulltime job. Circumstances required me to shelve P1 for months.

Then, Covid happened, and I dusted P1 off. 2020 was a hard year for most of us, but opportunity lies in even the worst elements of chaos and hardship. Never pass up an opportunity to exercise your passion.  

Distance granted me clarity. But not crystal-clear clarity. More like, cold light of day, icy shower clarity.

That’s a little harsh, but you catch my meaning. There were things about my writing that shocked me. The overuse of -ly words, the abundance of had and so, the rambling sentences, the ones that ended randomly unfinished.

And that was just the technical stuff. There were lore errors, inconsistent naming, naming conventions I suddenly found that I hated…

But, as I went further and further into my first draft edit, I came to realize something. For all my mistakes, I enjoyed reading it. Sure, it was messy and unfinished, I had a hundred little things that needed fixing, plot threads that needed tying up (or cutting entirely), but it was good. Or, at least, it was good to me. It hit me as something I would like to read.             

Writing is an organic endeavor. Where you start shouldn’t be where you finish. This became abundantly clear when I took P1 off the shelf and began my first few rounds of editing. My ending was better than my beginning.

My skills as a writer improved dramatically from the first sentence to the last sentence. Both still needed work but the last sentence was in a much better state than the first.

I came away from my first draft feeling better than I expected. I wrote an end-of-edit letter to myself and stuck it in my binder to act as a rubric for my next move. In it, I outlined several things I needed to work on:

1. My voice is passive, I need to own my words.
2. If you see had or so, delete immediately/rewrite the sentence.
3. Various lore and worldbuilding mistakes and inconsistencies.
4. There are somethings here that I simply don’t like.  

By itemizing the issues in P1, I felt more confident and put it back on the shelf for another month.

I needed a break, editing is hard work, in many ways harder than writing. Editing engages our creative drive, but it also demands our reason. There were times where I found myself arguing over if I should delete a certain word or rework a sentence. More than once I crossed out a word only to mark it with a simple “ok” only to cross that out.   I started the next month, rested and ready. I used my end-of-edit letter to focus my second pass on the nuts and bolts of my writing. My voice was there, but it was buried under mountains of passive verbs and extraneous adverbs. Not to mention that I used the words had and so like crutches.

99% of the time, had and so are unnecessary and they take away from the active action of the characters turning them into passive meat puppets and robbing your voice of it’s confidence. “She had become tired” should be “she was tired.” “So she changed her plans” needs to be “she changed her plans.”

This paragraph: “She ran quickly, speeding down the hall and roughly turning the corner. She threw herself into the next room. Slammed the door and waited silently for the danger to pass.”

Became: “She ran. Her pace picked up speed, slowing as she rounded the corner. There! She spotted the first open door and threw herself into the room. She pressed against the door. Waited. Sweat slipped down her temple. She heard steps—stilled.”     

You’ll note that the second paragraph became longer and the sentence length became more varied. By removing the crutch of adverbs, I was forced to think more about the scene. How do you add tension without an -ly guiding the reader?

Variation is the spice of writing. Vary your sentence length. Vary your grammatical structure. Vary your verbs, nouns, etc. There is no reason sentences in fiction can’t be one word. Or twelve. I also vary my punctuation and my diction.

Note: I don’t want to make it seem as if this all happened between my first and second draft. Writing doesn’t work that way. One day I simply began to notice these changes in my writing. That being said, I’ve gone through four drafts of P1 and I’m currently rewriting most of it. I’ll address the last two issues in the next entry.    

These are my tools, pre-editing, alienation, end-of-edit letter, and variation. They go by different names, some people don’t like them, some don’t find them useful. And that’s okay. Writing is not carpentry. We craft our own tools and use them as we intend them; if it doesn’t work, we toss it out even if it works for someone else.   

Own the tools of your craft. Use them to help you identify your crutches and build the confidence to yank them out.