#5: Ten Things To Bear In Mind While You're Editing
by Metara
Do you edit your work? Yes? Was that a yes? It had better have been a yes. Yes. Okay. Good.
As a basic principle, you shouldn't even think about editing while you're writing the first version of something: just get it all down on paper or on the screen as fast as you can. When you have your draft--COMPLETE--that is the time to sit down and take a long, hard look at it.
This isn't so much an article as a Top Ten list of some of the more common, easily fixed problems with freshly written material. It's the work of a few minutes to sort them out, but I still see so many stories getting posted online with just these sorts of issues rife throughout.
The majority of my quotes in here are genuine real-life examples from The Far Sea.
As a general note, it's often a good idea, especially if you've invested a large proportion of your time on your work recently, to LEAVE IT for a period of time before you start editing. You're often too close to it after finishing the draft to be able to go on and edit it. You won't see your mistakes, and you won't be able to look at it impartially as your readers will.
Put your draft in a drawer (if it's longhand) or drop it in a forgettable folder if it's on the computer, and do something else for a few days--a week if you can manage it. Endeavour not to think of your story at all. This can be extremely hard as we all, heady with relief after finally finishing something, are then desperate to get it out there and away.
Don't rush this stage. You'll regret it, and quite possibly will find yourself going back and editing it again anyway, a few months down the line. Do your loyal readers a favour and don't make them read it twice because you screwed up the first time. I SPEAK FROM EXPERIENCE HERE FOLKS.
Draft:
She bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then seemed to draw herself together, finding strength from somewhere. She looked back at him and her eyes were very serious.
Edit:
She bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then seemed to draw herself together, finding strength from somewhere within. When she looked back at him, her face was very serious.
Of course this, like all good things, can be taken too far. Urple prose is caused by people trying too hard to vary their vocabulary and using unfamiliar words without quite knowing what said words mean. Avoid thesauruses (thesauri?) unless you are absolutely desperate not to have to write "angry" for a fourth time.
Say, for instance, you've got
The lamp guttered again, throwing distracting shadows over the work, and she sighed and raised her free hand to push her hair back...
followed by
The rent was nearly four feet long, through the width of the sail...
You could change the second starting sentence to
A jagged-edged tear ran nearly four feet through the width of the sail...
Which I did.
Of course you don't always have to follow this rule. Sometimes it's nice to start two paragraphs with the same word or phrase, either because the repetition's doing something artistic or simply because it works the way you've got it. All rules can be broken in certain specific situations. Just keep an eye out and make sure the majority of your paragraphs don't start the same.
The man climbed out of bed. He went over to the mirror. He looked at himself. His eyes were sore. His tongue was furred from drinking too much.
If you're guilty of this, try instead to combine the short sentences in interesting ways. You're probably also using "was" a lot--try looking for other verbs with a bit more character, and/or replacing the "it was this, it was that" with your character's own direct views of the scene. A bit of dialogue, a thought, the sky is the limit. With the above example you could do something like
Drunken Bob dragged himself out of bed and limped over to the mirror. His eyes, when he managed to open them wide enough to see, were red-veined and sore, and his face a delicate shade of green--in short, he looked like crap."Bleah..." Drank too much again. Way too much. My aching head...
His throat was dry, too, and there was a fuzzy feeling in his mouth. He stuck his tongue out and examined it critically, feeling rather impressed despite the rising nausea; he'd never seen tongue-fuzz that color before... Uh-oh, here came the chunder...
Thanks for the demo, Drunken Bob.
I mean, come on, people. We've got something like a hundred thousand words in this language, heaven knows how many of which have a colour association. Off the top of my head I can think of at least fifty picturesque red things that aren't rocks (blood, wine, poppy, rose, robin's breast, setting sun...), and I've never come across any eyeballs that I'd want to stick in a solitaire ring.
If you still need further discouragement, one of my acquaintances stated that whenever she reads about "orbs" for eyes, she imagines the eyes orbiting the unfortunate character's head. That was what you were going for, right?
Addendum: Of course you are allowed to use "orbs" in certain very rare and specific situations. It's one of those descriptive terms that's a bit like cayenne pepper--definitely best in small doses.
He found himself backing off a pace."Listen to me!" Dark lunged, grabbed him by both shoulders; his eyes flared suddenly. "You must promise me--"
"Dark--"
"Do it right! Finish it! You know how! Don't let me come back again--"
"I--"
"Promise me!"
"All right," he said, shaken. "I promise."
...And I only had one "said" in it :)
As for stock epithets (the young warrior, the red-haired woman, the gallant brave Odysseus, the rosy-fingered dawn)--they get argued about a lot. They probably should be used less than they are: I once read a D&D novel where every other paragraph seemed to contain at least one instance of "the green-eyed warrior", and after about the fiftieth time I was laughing too hard to take anything in that book seriously. Unfortunately I have acquired the habit of using stock epithets myself, and can't seem to break it. Try at least to be sparing, and only use them when for whatever reason you CANNOT refer to the character by name (i.e. his name was the last word in the preceding sentence and you need to make it obvious that he's talking now without ridiculous amounts of reptition).
One of these things is not like the other.
ELOZE:
They reserved rooms in the town's only inn, a shambling wooden building called the Wayfarer; the quarters were plain but welcoming. Link had just about finished unpacking the small bag he had brought with him, when there came a light knock on his door.
Redux:
I don't like it, but I can't think of anything better, and though we argue for a long time, neither can Ria. It's mid afternoon by the time we leave the workshop. We eat a hurried and uncomfortable meal and start back on the long trek up to the coast road.
About intentional tense shifts: In Redux, scenes from Sonic-Two's point of view were told in first person present tense, but when Two was not around as an observer, I switched to the more traditional third person past tense. This was done as a stylistic choice to set up a contrast between Two as the hero, and the various villains, and I never mixed tenses within a single scene, or with the same observer.
...swung his legs over the side and found the wooden ladder. He climbed down quickly and jumped the last two rungs, landing on the wooden boards with a soft hollow thump.
Here's one for the Department of Redundancy Department. Firstly, "wooden" really doesn't say anything in context as it's unlikely that a bunk bed's ladder would be made out of anything else. Secondly, "wooden" again for the floorboards? Bad author, no biscuit.
...swung his legs over the side and found the rather rickety wooden ladder. He climbed down quickly and jumped the last two rungs, landing on the boards with a soft hollow thump.
Well, switching to "rickety" as the focus of the phrase adds something useful to the description of the scene, at least.
This is specifically for when you start a sentence with an -ing word. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but if you don't use it properly, or get your grammar slightly confused, bad things can happen. It's a very very common mistake. And you probably won't even notice anything's wrong, until someone points it out to you, usually in the most embarrassing manner possible.
Leaping out of bed, she ran down the stairs and out of the front door.
What's wrong with this?
Well, she can't run down the stairs and out of the front door while leaping out of bed. And that's what this sentence actually means, and that is how people are going to read it. Quick grammar lesson: the -ing word here is what is called a progressive verb, meaning the action it describes has to be CONTINUALLY GOING ON (progressing).
Padding barefoot into the long dining room, she saw him there already at the breakfast table, working his way through a pile of buttered toast.
This one is acceptable, because everything described happens as she is walking into the dining room.
Oh, and don't rely on MS Word to fix your grammar. Word is retarded and cannot understand context. It also invariably flags any occurrence of the passive voice, which drives me wild. I never write in Word. If you're not sure whether you can do something under the laws of English, go and ask a human.
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