editing – Tracey Dyck

Editing: What if I’m Making it Worse?

Tracey Dyck July 16, 2016 Uncategorized 30 Comments

I was chatting about editing with the lovely Savannah a few days ago, and asked her what her top three editing struggles were. The first one she mentioned?

“FEARING THAT I’M ACTUALY MAKING IT WORSE. Like, this is the biggest problem I have and it has literally driven me crazy and made me want to stop editing period. ‘Cause I constantly scrutinize every bit and can’t decide whether I’m actually making things WORSE!”

Seeing as it’s been some time since I compiled any writing tips around here–and considering the fact that I’m drafting and thus, editing is creeping into my mind (it shouldn’t be, but it is)–this is perfect post material.

My first tip? Save every draft.

Every single one. You added a new character? Save that draft. You reworked the entire plot? Save that draft. You changed the formatting? SAVE IT. Now, I personally don’t go so far as to copy my story into a new document with every tiny change I make–that would be a waste of time–but every time I’ve worked through the book and made significant changes, I copy and paste it all into a new Word document. That way when I start a new round of edits, the old version is still there, safe and sound. If I hate the way an edited scene turns out, no problem. I can change it back to the old version. The Prophet’s Quest, for instance, is preserved in eight separate documents on my laptop (not counting the original paper copy, which is something you never, ever want to read–trust me).

On small scale edits, try it several different ways and compare.

If that pesky paragraph just won’t flow or that scene isn’t settling into place like you want it to, write it again. And again. And again, if you have to. Then compare the different angles. Which do you like better? Keep that one and either throw the rest away, or save them too, in a separate document for such snippets.

Sometimes it helps to read the different versions out loud.

Get another pair of eyes to help out if you can. A fresh opinion will often smooth things out.

On large scale edits, run with it until you hit a wall.

Something is off in your story, you can feel it. So you decide to change your long-lost prince into the disinherited son of a duke, with healing powers instead of telepathy. Obviously the whole story is going to change. On the cusp of making that editing call, it’s easy to be overcome with doubts. What if this change sucks? What if I rewrite the whole book and end up hating it? Guess what, buttercup? You won’t know until you try.

So begin editing. Rework the story to fit this new path. You may decide halfway down that, you know what? He really should be a prince after all. But maybe you’ll keep the healing powers so that he can save the life of the poisoned wine tester. Or maybe you’ll write all the way until the end of the story before realizing that. Or these edits will be exactly what your story needed. You have to start working to find out.

“But that’s so inefficient,” you say. “To spend all that time and energy only to scrap those words in the end! The horror!” Yes. It is inefficient. But it’s not a waste.

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I should hope you don’t have to create that many drafts to get to the gem beneath the rock, but you get the picture. You may write thousands of words of a second draft before realizing you’re going at it all wrong and must start over. But those words were not a waste of time. You eliminated one option and so have a clearer idea of how to start over.

One of my long-time favorite writing “resource” (can you call a person a resource?) is author Gail Carson Levine. She has often mentioned how inefficient she is at writing, and how she’ll often produce pages upon pages, discover something is wrong, and have to start over. Sometimes those failed pages are necessary for you to dig into the layers of your story and work through a plot knot or develop your world building. It may not end up in the finished manuscript, but it’s a part of the process of getting to that finished manuscript.

Walk it out in your head.

At times, you won’t have to actually pick up your pencil or set fingers to keyboard to figure out if a proposed change will help or hinder your story. Sometimes the answer is obvious after a little thought. So before you do go change the first thirty thousand words of your WIP, stop and consider the effects of what you’re planning to edit. Every change you make, especially the big ones, has a domino effect on the rest of the story. (Or at least it should. If it doesn’t, you’re probably writing a collection of short stories, or else you have a plot problem.)

Changing the prince to the penniless son of a duke will mean that those palace scenes have to go, because your character is out on the streets with empty pockets and his finery all tattered from his unfortunate circumstances. But you need him to speak to the queen about the epidemic spreading across the neighboring kingdom to the west. How can he do that if he’s no longer a castle resident? Well, perhaps he can summon all his noble gusto to bluster his way into getting an audience with her. Or maybe he can bump into her at the midsummer festival she officiates every year. Another possibility is making the queen a charitable soul who personally feeds the homeless, and she can meet your disinherited noble boy at a shelter.

Big changes take brainstorming to make them work, and the impact they’ll have on the rest of your story needs to be considered before taking the plunge. But never fear! If it doesn’t work out like you planned, you do have the old version to fall back on.

Take a break.

Staring at the same story for months on end means you’re probably sick of it. You’ve been over the same plot so many times that all the twists are predictable. You’ve memorized every line of dialogue until they sound cheesy to your own mind. Every change you make doesn’t seem to make this book any less disgusting, and you despair of ever turning it into something halfway readable.

Stop. Step away for a while. A week may be enough time to refresh your mind and forget the flaws you’ve been zeroed in on for ages, or you may need a month or more. However long it needs to be, take a break. Read for fun. Write something small just because you can, no matter how imperfect it is. Refill your well of creativity.

For me, writing for the contests Rooglewood Press put on the past few years has saved my sanity as far as the Journeys of the Chosen series goes. Taking a few months to write and revise something relatively short and altogether new revitalized me. When I returned to The Prophet’s Quest or The Prophet’s Key, I was raring to go. I fell in love with those stories all over again, and resumed editing/writing with excitement.

Remember art is fluid.

Maybe you’re doing all those things, and you’re still scared to tweak and fiddle and entirely revamp things. I get it. I’ve been there. But your story might have to get worse before it can get better. And the only way to get to that place called Better is to start editing. And then keep editing. And edit some more. Your story will transform along the way, and you will too. You’ll grow as a writer. Even if you have a huge mess on your hands, you’re learning something!

Something I’ve realized after grueling rounds of editing is that the more you do it, the more fearless you get. I used to moan and groan and clench my teeth to even think of changing my books. (I still do, but those episodes tend to be more short-lived these days.) But as I slowly develop my sense of story, plot, and character, I begin to see the trouble spots more easily. Then I begin to dive in and fix them with less hesitation. The old adage is true: practice does make perfect. Or at least a whole lot better.

What are your top editing woes? What do you do when you’re worried about making things worse by changing them? How do you stay motivated to keep editing when you can no longer stand the sight of your manuscript?

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Unraveling a Mess of Threads

Tracey Dyck November 5, 2015 Uncategorized 15 Comments

Alternate Title: How I Survived the Editing Axe

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As many of you may know, my writing time over the past couple months has been all-consumed by editing The Brightest Thread, my Five Magic Spindles entry. (You can learn more about the contest HERE. I’ve also posted snippets, as well as featured my heroine and villainess for Beautiful People.)

But I’ve yet to regale you with how the actual process went, aside from brief mentions here and there.

First things first: I finished!!!!! At long last, fueled by sheer grit and determination and Two Steps From Hell music (pardon the name), I cut my entry down to exactly 20,000 words. Excuse me while I collapse in relief. Actually no, I can’t collapse. I have a post to share with you. Ahem.

I could go into all kinds of detail about how I finally came up with the idea for the story, how I read the Grimm and Perault originals, how I considered various genres before circling back to fantasy . . . But that would take too long. And if there’s one thing this contest has taught me, it’s conciseness.

So we’ll skip the beginning stages of my writing process, and simply say that I decided to pants this thing (as in, write by the seat of my pants, with little to no plan), which is not my usual method. What an adventure! Half the time I hadn’t a clue where things were going, and the other half of the time, I had only the most basic directions to follow.

Maybe that’s why the first draft ended up at 29,934 words. A huge problem, considering that the contest rules state 20k is the limit.

I should’ve seen it coming. My first chapter was 3k. THREE THOUSAND WORDS. Practically a seventh of the story! By the time Prince Hadrian entered the scene, I was halfway to the word limit. By the time he was anywhere close to rescuing Luci, my goodness, I had long since waved goodbye to 20k.

About two months after starting, I finished the first draft in a rush of glory and panic, ecstatic over the story I’d just unspooled . . . and freaking out over the task before me. How in the world could I amputate a third of the story? How would the tale survive? How would I survive?

I let my obese novella sit for a week and half, during which time I bemoaned my existence and wished I could pluck Aleida’s wand from the pages and use it to increase the word limit. Even 25k would be a relief!

But alas, it was not to be. And my complaining, which I’m sorry to say continued into the editing process, did nothing to help. Heh. Let that be a lesson to all of you!

Anyway, on September 8th, I sat down at my desk, opened the document, steeled myself, and commenced editing.

Now, here is another lesson. Do not try editing anything before reading over it first. Yes, you just wrote the thing. Yes, those words came from your brain. But you do not know them that well. You have been busy planting trees, but before you can prune them you must step back and see the forest, the big picture. I know this. A read-over has always been my first pre-editing step. Until The Brightest Thread. And I can’t for the life of me figure out why I even dreamed of skipping this step. Things may have gone more smoothly if I hadn’t.

So as I said, I jumped right into editing with high ambitions. I hefted my sharpened axe and attacked chapter 1.

And snipped off a teensy tiny few hundred words. “Well,” I said to myself. “That’s because this first chapter includes so much important setup. Surely the following chapters carry more fluff I can cull.”

Ha. Wrong.

In the name of conciseness again, I shall sum up that first miserable editing pass like this: my efforts only managed to get rid of about 3k words. Oh joy, oh bliss.

I then decided to lay down that ineffective axe and read over my existing material, something I should have done in the first place. Getting a bird’s-eye view of the story was helpful, but my next pass was still hard. I worked on it in a nonlinear fashion, combing over and over and over certain parts that I absolutely knew had the potential to shrink. I skipped from one spot to the other, targeting the easiest areas first and working my way to the grit-my-teeth-and-sacrifice-the-gorgeous-words areas. And when I thought I’d trimmed off all I could, I went back and shaved off more.

My techniques? Why, I’m so glad you asked! See, I’m not just rambling on about myself here. I really do want to offer you some nuggets of wisdom so that you have some tools next time your work falls under the knife.

Streamline. Streamline everything. Get that conversation right to the point. Put the characters where they need to be so that you don’t spend paragraphs moving them there. Every single scene must carry its weight.
Speaking of conversations (ha, see what I did there? No? Just me? Okay, never mind) . . . Ahem. Speaking of conversations, take a giant machete to your dialogue. Brevity is the soul of wit. Your dialogue might sparkle. It might amuse. It might snap with fiery spirit. But if it’s not serving to move the story along, it’s baggage. You can also use less speaker tags in favor of better action beats if that helps.
Attack the descriptions. You’d be surprised how many blanks a reader will fill in his or her imagination. Instead of spending a long paragraph describing the weather or a room or a person, pick one description that will pack a punch. Choose the most vivid, or the most necessary. All else must go.
Make a list of your scenes if you haven’t already. Having every piece of the story laid out made it much easier to see what was on the table, like having a map on which to mark out a battle plan. I even went so far as to write down the purpose of each scene. This helped me center each one around it’s reason for existence, thus trimming extra fluff.
Minor characters. Which ones are actually necessary? I needed that guard because he provided an important revelation for Luci, my heroine. But I didn’t need that oblivious elderly maid. She no longer exists. Poor Meris. Or another example: I needed at least one minor character to illustrate an important change in Luci’s circumstances, but the scene held two or three. I shortened the laughs (it was an amusing scene, and one of my favorites) by keeping it down to one minor character. You can also combine characters if possible. I did this once.
Subplots. Again, what can you afford to cut? Yes, they may be delicious twists, but if you can simplify or get rid of them, it goes a long way. I sacrificed at least one subplot concerning the villainess.
Enter your scene late and leave it early. Does the scene take half a page to get to the meat, the really interesting part? Start right there. Forget the intro. And make sure you end off sooner rather than later, at a place that will make the reader want to keep going. This piece of advice was huge for me!
Look for unnecessary words and banish them to the abyss. There’s nothing wrong with adverbs, but when every word counts, a punchier verb is often the better choice. “Whispered” is shorter than “said softly.” “Trembling” is shorter than “nervously twitching.” I Googled lists of unnecessary words and searched my manuscript for them. I was able to sluice off hundreds in one afternoon. Some examples of unneeded words or phrases are: could, start/started to, began/began to, that, then, somewhat, somehow, really, completely, very, say, all, just.

Some of this I simply realized myself. The point about starting late and leaving early I picked up from an article on Go Teen Writers. The entire post was helpful. And a couple more were given me by Rachel Heffington @ The Inkpen Authoress. (I discovered that her entry for Five Glass Slippers two years ago had been about as oversized as mine to begin with . . . yet she managed to trim it down, AND she won a place in the collection. Inspired by her success, I emailed her asking for advice, which she graciously offered. The advice about dialogue and description were largely from her.)

Because graphs are fun, and because graphs relating to wordcount data are even more fun, I made some!

This one displays my first draft wordcount as it went up to almost 30k.

And this one displays my cutting progress, as I shaved 10k excess down to zero. It was pretty intense at the end there. The last week or two, on every spare day or half-day off, I holed up in my room to work on cutting. Some days I put in as many hours as a full shift at work, emerging bleary eyed to update my family on progress.

I suppose that saying I went at it with an axe is inaccurate, because as hard as I tried to cut away entire scenes . . . I guess I’m too good at pacing? Most of the scenes were actually necessary. And trust me, I reassessed and reassessed many times to be sure. So I compressed like crazy. I think I vacuum-packed the story. I didn’t hack; I whittled. Oh, and I wasn’t just cutting: I edited too. Some of the corrections required adding words rather than subtracting.

Now I hope that what’s left is a pithy story, rich despite its brevity–not a sack of story bones with no meat left on them. I really hope I haven’t sucked it dry.

You can see how crazy the final sprint was: on October 26th, I started with 899 excess words remaining, and shrank it 54 excess words. Only 54! I would’ve wrapped it up right then and there, but at that point it was late, and I needed to sleep for work the next day. Oh, did that bite! I wanted so badly to be done. But I woke up early and managed to finish before heading out. Woohoo!

And now . . . Now the cutting is finished. I succeeded. I can hardly believe it. Every other step of the way was full of doubt. I even considered not entering the contest at all, for the sake of preserving my story. But I still have the old drafts, and if I don’t win this year, I’ll be more than happy to re-expand The Brightest Thread. There’s so much I didn’t get to explore, even in the chubby first draft.

For now, though, all that’s left is to read it over a few times to make sure it’s polished to the best of my ability, and then it gets sent to the judges!

But questers! My faithful blogglings! I FINISHED! Hallelujah!

And you have finished reading this lengthy post. So much for being concise, eh? Go on: share your own tips for shrinking stories. I’d love to hear them!