Just as painting can take more than one coat, even using the best of materials, our writing generally needs going over a few times before it’s ready for viewing. In this article, I will review three necessary phases of editing our fiction. In the first pass, we check for the essential elements in each scene. The second pass is a good time to check grammar and tighten our words. Next comes the polishing phase.
What I’m talking about is editing your novel after the hard part (for many of us) is done; getting that first (as Anne Lamott says) shitty draft on paper.
For however long that takes, and whatever approach you take (pantster or plotter), you need to either politely or abruptly kick the editor off your shoulder. Get rid of him or her; send her to St. Julian or Greece or a spa and let him or her know the “call” for help will be coming.
Once you have a beginning, a middle and an end, and most of the scenes in between, it’s time for some editing. This is your book, so approach it in the way that suits you best. Remember that I’m only providing some suggestions. For example, if you want to do the first pass stage of editing after writing each scene, go for it.
Pass One
Read through your novel, scene by scene. In this first pass, you are looking to be sure certain elements have been included, so you might think of it as a “fattening up” stage.
The acronym I’ve chosen for this part is S C A R E. We’ll be looking to see if each of these elements is included in almost every scene. You may, with my permission, also think of CARES, as in Kathy cares about each scene.
S is for senses: Smell, sight, hearing, touch and taste. It is overkill to include all five senses in every scene, but thinking about them and how they might be incorporated is useful for every scene.
C is for conflict. Every good novel puts obstacles in front of the protagonist, obstacles that get larger as time passes and the first obstacle is conquered. The sooner in the book the conflict is apparent, the better. But conflict in every scene? Yep. I have the problem of letting my characters get what they want, all too easily. It makes for short books that are often boring. If I want to borrow your highlighter, you develop a need for it that far surpasses mine or your concern for me. If I am an amateur spy and I ask people questions, they should either clam up or lie. Such obstacles force the protagonist to move in another direction, try another route.
Conflict doesn’t mean hand to hand combat or shouting arguments; it means competitive or opposing action of incompatibles. It means that things won’t come easily for your characters. Ideas, opinions, actions, diverge, causing problems. Every scene should present such states. The conflict can come as a surprise to your readers and your characters or as something expected. “I knew no one was about to tell me, a stranger, about the problems at the mill. I had to find another way.”
If you share with me that aversion to conflict, you can find good advice in books by James Scott Bell and Les Edgerton.
A is for action. Every scene needs to move. Like conflict, when I say action, I don’t insist it be fast-paced and hard-hitting. The action we’re seeking is movement from one place to another, with, if possible, a change in the character’s mindset, status or position.
It used to be that action scenes were followed by reflection scenes, where the character reacted to or thought or spoke about the previous scene’s action or change. Today’s fiction, especially genre fiction, doesn’t take time for an entire scene of reflection.
But that doesn’t mean your characters must not react. They must. R is for reaction. Newton’s third law is for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. When someone tells me I’m too fat for my capris, I have a reaction. The reaction, of course, depends on who says it, on the tone of voice and on my current mood and feelings of self-esteem. I might silently agree and verbally say, “My fashion stylist says I need to wear my clothes snug.” Or I might run off, weeping.
That brings us to the last letter: E for emotion. If I don’t give rat’s patoot about someone’s opinion, my emotions aren’t apt to be brought out by what they say or do. But the scene will be stronger if you show an emotion. Here’s where it gets tricky. Briefly, you don’t want to write, “She was horrified.” You need to show how the character feels, if anger causes her to chew her sandwich into ever smaller bits. Also avoid “She felt, he felt, unless you’re talking about the sense of touch. Emotions are what justify our actions and our reactions, and sometimes the action alone reveals the emotion. But sometimes you need to be blatant. Donald Maas’s The Fire in Fiction deals extensively with ways to include compelling emotion.
Going through the SCARE list will allow you to decide if you have included each of those elements or if you need to add something. Fatten it up, with senses, conflict, action, reaction, and emotion.
Pass Two
Pass two is where you work on weight loss for the manuscript you fattened up in Pass One.
Go through your pages and look for opportunities to trim fat. Don’t use two words when one will do.
Here’s where (if you have not already) you brutally kill your darlings. Look for those scenes that you loved but that really didn’t move the plot along or provide motivation or develop character. They were, simply, cool. Funny. Witty. A showcase for your brilliance. If you’re in a critique group, those scenes are likely to be where your critique group said, “Not quite sure the purpose of this scene,” or “This one bumped me out of the flow.” Kill them, without mercy. File them into a “Gems” or “Dead Zone” file that you promise yourself you will use at another time.
Read for places where you explained needlessly. In their essential book, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Renni Browne and Dave King tell us to Resist the Urge to Explain. RUE. “She threw the book on the table and he saw its spine break. She was angry. ” Prune the last sentence. You showed the emotion. Resist the need to explain.
Cut out as many “ly” words, wimpy adverbs, as possible. Replace them with powerful verbs. “I hate you,” she said angrily. “I despise you,” she said.
Tighten your core: Aim to cut a page a chapter. Find, for example, a metaphor to replace three adjectives: “She’s a fat, lazy, dog that never moves farther than the dinner bowl.” “The sloth of a dog stretched as far as dinner.”
This pass is the time to eliminate those clichés that you have not yet replaced. You may leave a few. Sometimes they work; more often I leave them because I can’t come up with a twisted cliché or an alternative.
Look for overused favorites. While you’re writing your novel, jot down those words that you know you overuse: some of mine are looked, just, really, glare, growl. What are yours? Get rid of them. I don’t know how many is too many, but when I do a count for my editing clients and discover 206 justs, that’s just too many.
As Elmore Leonard advises, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.”
Cut or seriously reduce the lectures. Readers will be aware of your biases: you don’t need to stand on a barrel to say your piece. If you must editorialize a little, make sure it is a little. And it works best if it is part of the conflict: dress-for-success vs. serve-the-world characters meet and the conflict ignites.
It won’t reduce your fat by much but it will strengthen your writing if you use only a few exclamation points.
Pass Three: Polish
Don’t skip this pass, even if you plan to hire an editor or your publisher provides one. This is the time to proofread, checking for typos, grammatical errors, sloppy punctuation. You’re apt to find errors, even if you’ve spell-checked your book, because of the changes you’ve made in the first two editing passes and because spell checkers are lame (I will not go into that rant in this article).
If you’ve changed the names of a character or a place (like The Blind Chukar café in my novel), be on the lookout for times where you’ve left in the old name.
If you can, read your book aloud. (I get bored.) Read the dialog aloud, as much as you can bear. Look to see that your language is fresh and crisp, and that your narrative voice has remained the same throughout the novel.
Once you’ve completed these three phases of editing, it’s time to send your manuscript off. I’m sure you could find more ways to buff the shine on your pages, but at some point you may be smoothing your work into dullness. It’s time to move on to the next book.
