Like most authors, before I start on a big-picture edit, I make a list of what it is exactly that needs fixing. What often leads to one breakthrough after another is when I start to look for ways to combine those problems.

If my main character needs to show more reaction to traumatic event X…
If a supporting character disappears halfway through the book…
If an important location pops up out of nowhere in the climax…

… I’ll see if I can add a scene between my main character and that supporting character, set in that important location, discussing the traumatic event. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t.

If the pacing is too fast in one part…
If I need to do more world-building…
If a later plot point appears very, very convenient…

Can I add a scene to break up that fast pacing and sneak in some world-building and a mention of that plot point?

Sometimes, to fix these problems, you need to weave it in subtly here and there. Sometimes, you need to rewrite half–or all–of the book.

But when simply adding an extra scene to tackle several problems at once does work, it’s pretty damn nifty.

Of course, the number one reason I’m writing about this tactic is because it won’t work for the book I’m editing now. Oh, how I long for the days of rough drafting.

When printing my MS in order to line edit, I’ll usually print double-sided. It’s not standard MS format, but hey, it’s just for me, and it saves paper.

When a scene is draggy, though, it helps to print it out single-sided. That allows you to spread the pages out next to each other and see a lot of things in one glance instead of endlessly scrolling in Word/Scrivener/insert program of your choice.

What I like to do is marking similar ‘types’ of narration in the sidelines. If you have a lot of exposition, you can see if you’re repeating yourself. If you have a lot of dialogue, see if you can condense it. If you have a lot of description, see if you need to lump it together more, or vice versa.

This kind of overview is nigh impossible to achieve on the computer, and makes it a lot easier to see what needs fixing, and how.

Bonus: it’ll give you no choice but to clean up your desk/table to make room for all those pages.

Current progress: page 320 / 320

Yeah, you read that right. Whoo!

Here’s another thing I’ve discovered in my endless quest to annihilate all words: set arbitrary goals.

This ties in with the previous tip: If you don’t cut, you don’t know what can be cut. By the time you start line editing, you’ll probably have read your manuscript half a dozen times already. Every sentence will look more necessary than it is. You can read a page twice and get away with only cutting a handful of words that stand out as useless. It’s only when you force yourself to take a better look that you notice the rest.

Try telling yourself this:

• I have to cut at least 15/25/30 words per page.
• When the last line of the paragraph is only two or three words long, cut that paragraph until those words fit on the previous line.
• When the last page in a chapter is only a few lines long, cut that chapter to get rid of that extra page.
• When a scene feels draggy but you can’t pinpoint why, tell yourself to go back and cut three paragraphs.

This is arbitrary, you might argue. What if you can’t get rid of those extra words or sentences? You’ll be cutting words for the sake of cutting words, not because it makes for better writing.

The goal here isn’t to cut words, but to see if you can. If you go into a scene with a specific goal as opposed to “see what stands out at me as unnecessary,” you’ll be a lot more critical. I’ve cut tons of words this way from scenes that I was sure were 100% edited, done, all words necessary.

Once you’ve set a goal and re-read the page five times looking for ways to achieve that goal, and there’s no tiny voice in the back of your mind whispering, Do you need all the emotional cues? You know, you’re kind of repeating yourself with that paragraph. then yeah, please do move on to the next page before shredding your work to pieces unnecessarily.

Most of the time, though, you’ll probably spot a couple of new ways to trim. And, if you’re anything like me, it’ll be embarrassingly obvious. *g*

Current progress: page 134 / 334.

I’ve actually edited more than 134 pages; this is how much was left after all my cuts. *cracks knuckles*

Since I’m knee-deep in line edits, I thought I’d share my method and why it works for me. Although I work entirely digitally up to this point, line editing is definitely where you’ll want to print your book and go at it with a red pen.

Reason number one: The words will look different on the page.

Reason number two: You can get away from the computer, which helps against distractions.

Reason number three: Your changes are less final, so it’s easier to be ruthless. After all, you’re not actually incorporating the changes into your file yet. You know you’ll get a second chance of considering your changes.

That last reason is the biggest for me. If your goal is to cut, be vicious. I recommend not just looking at sentences and thinking of how you can rephrase it or remove words, but actually doing it. It’s easy to stick to sounding out sentences in your mind, or to think, “No, this word is essential.” Don’t fall into that trap. Take out your fat red pen, slash through any dubious words, and re-read the paragraph. It may work better than you think.

If not? Underline your change with a green pen to remind yourself to ignore it when you’re entering your edits on the computer. You may be surprised at how rarely the green pen will come into play, though.

Usually plotting–whether of a new book or revisions to an existing draft–comes in two stages for me.

Stage one exists of a) hardcopy plotting in my notebook, b) keeping random notes on my phone or in my e-mail, or c) any combination of those two.

Hardcopy plotting is the most common. I don’t use charts, doodles, arrows, tables, or anything fancy; at most, I’ll make lists. What it comes down to is that I ramble. At length. I ask questions, tell myself not to be such a dumbass, mock my characters, suggest possible fixes, change directions mid-sentence, underline important parts… You’ll find a lot of question marks, “probably,” “maybe,” “what if,” “possibly,” “OR WHAT ABOUT,” and “does this work?” in these pages.

Stage two consists of making sure it all works using Scrivener’s corkboard function. I’ve currently got three different versions of BLINK’s plot–I duplicate them for each draft. Here’s the latest version, showing my plans for the first part of the book:

The yellow notes are questions to myself, while the blue and purple tell me, respectively, to (re)write a scene from scratch and to significantly edit an existing one–except I just realized there’s a purple one that should be blue, so clearly my system is failing me. (Also, I’ve already incorporated some changes, so I removed the color for those notes. )

Since this book has proven to be very tricky to share in terms of snippets, I thought this might be a better indication of my progress.

Generally, I consider my procrastination to be less “procrastinating” and more “downtime”, which is necessary sometimes.

I mean, a lot of the time.

Anyway, I’ve noticed a pattern in that I procrastinate a lot more when it comes to editing than drafting. I love drafting. For one, I only draft when I’m excited about a story, so it’s much easier to dig into it and keep going. For another–and I think this is a much bigger reason for my lack of procrastination–you can measure your progress in drafting so much easier.

When you draft, it’s all about the words. A thousand a day? Two thousand? Four thousand? Since I’m not the type to go back and edit (unless I get really stuck), this is easy to measure.

When you edit–that’s tougher. In advance, you can’t know how much time and effort a certain edit will take (though the more you edit, the more accurately you can predict this). So how do you measure progress? Number of problems fixed? Number of scenes added? Number of words removed? Number of pages edited? Number of hours put in? It’s much less clear-cut. For someone as addicted to productivity and progress as I am, it makes editing a real chore.

I think another big reason might be the pressure. When you draft, there’s nothing to screw up. You can go all out. You can finally bring your characters to life. It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be there, and you know that when you start writing you’ll come up with all sorts of fantastic new things. It’s exciting. It’s adventure. It’s discovery. If you screw up, no big deal–that’s what edits are for!

And then the edits actually need to happen and you realize–gulp. Now it does need to be good. There’s no more discovery, there’s no more freedom. You have a plan, there’s no room for deviation, and there’s actually a real, tangible book there that you might screw up with these fixes.

So when I’m getting ready to edit something… I tend to drag it out. Oh, I need to do more brainstorming first. Oh, maybe I need to do another readthrough. Oh, I’ll just fix this tiny thing here first. Maybe I should get another beta reader’s opinion before I dig in? And wait, I may need to abruptly switch projects soon, so then it’s really senseless to start on editing now, and oh look, something shiny!

Editing. I fail at it.

All of this is a very long-winded way of saying that one of my delightful CPs OKed my editing ideas for BLINK last night, which means I have no more excuse not to dig into edits. As in, now. Today.

Maybe this post will stop me from procrastinating?

What about you? Any major difference in how you approach drafting vs. editing?

Every book presents a different set of problems. I went from having two books in a row that were too short to two in a row that were too long, and it looks like I’m going back to the too-short side of things with my current WIP. It’s a different kind of ‘too short’ than the others, though. This time, my problem is that my action scenes/major revelations follow each other too quickly, which means I’ve run through three quarters of my plot before I’m even half-way through.

Apparently a book needs more than just “WE’RE ALL DOING TO DIE!” action scenes in order to work.

Oops?

It’s fixable, but it got me thinking about how different my ‘to edit’ lists per book are. (I’m not the only writer who keeps a ‘to edit’ list while rough drafting, right?) And how similar they are. A couple of things always crop up.

• Plot elements and characters that need to be better established for later events to work
• Distinguishing characters’ personalities/voices more now that I know them better
• I often feel like I go overboard on the drama in, uh, dramatic scenes. As far as emotional impact goes: less is more. It still needs to be readable.
• The em-dashes. Oh my, the em-dashes.
• The sentence fragments. Oh my, the sentence fragments.
• The ambiguous pronouns. [rinse and repeat]
• Establishing the world/situation better from the very start.
• Streamlining overlong conversations and infodumps.

A lot of this is basic line editing, and the majority of my ‘to edit’ lists will consist of more book/character-specific comments. The funny thing is–I end up disregarding half of my comments to myself when I’m actually editing, because distance shows me that it’s not always as bad as I thought.

Sadly, I don’t think that’s the case with my current problems. Ha! Back to work.

So I’ve been working on those short story revisions I mentioned a few days ago. Right now, it’s looking like this:

The red: Corrections. (Normally there’s way more, trust me — this story has undergone dozens of revisions, so it’s quite polished already.)

The green: Something new I’m trying out, inspired by Juliette Wade’s Wednesday Worldbuilding Workshops, in which she highlights phrases in story openings that give her information about the worldbuilding. What I’m doing is similar: I’m indicating parts of the story that reveal important information, be it on the world-building, the main character’s motivations, or the actual plot. Since the revisions I’m doing are 100% about clarity, I’m trying to approach it as a totally new reader would and figure out information on a sentence-by-sentence level.

I’m… honestly not sure if it’s actually helped yet, but it’s a really interesting exercise.

Any new tips, tricks or exercises you’ve given a try recently? How’s it working out for you?

… can be pretty tough to achieve.

Since I’ve always been a fairly sparse writer, my revisions used to be all about adding things: how to complicate the plot? How to give this character more screentime? How to add more detail and depth to this scene to avoid talking-head syndrome?

So it came as kind of a surprise that I just trimmed my manuscript by over 14k (after slicing 12k from an earlier draft). I felt pretty danged proud of it: I cut entire scenes and streamlined others, simplified a few plot things here and there, and line edited the hell out of it.

Now, with my hopefully last read-through, I find myself asking two questions with every scene I read:
* Can I cut or streamline this scene? Can I condense these paragraphs? Does this move quick enough to keep the plot flowing or do I need to cut more? Is this bit of description really necessary?
* Where can I add more detail and description in a way that would add to the scene?

While I’m sure this makes perfect sense to most of you, it still seems painfully contradictory, and I’m having a hell of a time figuring it out. When is scene-setting vital, and when do you just need to get to the point? When does lush prose add to a scene, and when do you just need to use the simplest words available? When does a simile spice things up, and when does it make the writing come to a screeching halt?

Normally, I just go with my gut feeling; after reading this book so many times I lost count, my gut feeling seems to be hiding under the couch.

I suppose all of that just means that I’m pretty much ready to call this draft finished. There’s a reason for beta readers, after all *g*

On Monday, I started draft 4 of Always Read the Fae Print. With relative ease, I slashed over 8k within the first few hours: I deleted all the flashback chapters, took out a plot point and some of the surrounding fluff, and simplified another scene.

The next few hours were tougher, but I managed to kill another 1.5k or so by snipping some other minor scenes.

Yesterday was even worse: I cut about 700 words, if that, all by taking out some snippets here and there and condensing some conversations.

Today, I’m completely stuck. My goal was to take out at least another 1.5k, but I just cannot find any other damn scenes to snip – at least not in the parts of the book that need snipping – so I ended up making a scene list of the problem spots. Maybe some distance will help me see opportunities to snip, combine or condense scenes that I just don’t notice on a line-by-line basis.

I’m happy to be back at work. But I’d probably be happier to finally be done with this and start sending out some queries, already

The obligatory snippet, wherein Our Heroine and Our Heroine’s Mother attempt to summon an old Frisian god:

      ”Maybe I should cast a spell to call on him.” Mom rummaged through her backpack, teeth digging into her lower lip. “Shouldn’t be too hard to get his attention.”
      More magic. Hurray.
      ”Why can’t gods just have cell phones?” I slumped against the rock.
      ”Some of them do,” she said. “Forseti’s just old-fashioned.”
      ”That wasn’t actually a serious question.”
      ”Well, you should know this stuff, honey.”
      I thumped my head on the rock behind me.