More On Editing Magic: Excerpt from my book: A Friendly Guide to Writing and Ghostwriting

By Andrea Cagan

In order to perform a successful edit, you’ll need to employ both ruthlessness and restraint. If a particular word or phrase stuck in your craw when you read through the first draft, you may have ignored it but it will come flying out at you in the rewrites. No matter how much you like something you wrote, you have to get rid of it if it doesn't work. This is where ruthlessness comes into play. The cleaner you make the text, the more an erroneous word or a non-rhythmic phrase will stick out like a brown dirt stain on a white wall. Just like an athlete has to make significant decisions in a split second that changes a previously planned method of execution, a writer needs to wield the editing pen ruthlessly to recognize and delete unnecessary text without hesitation. It helps to remember that you are not alone. The most celebrated writers in the world are doing the same exact process that you’re doing.

Author Raymond Chandler said, “Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.”

As hard as you may try to reword something, there are times when the only solution is to kill off the parts of your writing that don’t work. In the words of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch:

Murder your darlings. If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

He is advising you to avoid being too “precious” or self-indulgent as you try to hold onto text that may sound good on its own but doesn't belong there. While you’re committing murder on your work, however, it’s important to be mindful of over-editing which can be as disastrous to the finished product as refusing to change a single word. This is where restraint comes into play.

If you're not sure if something needs murdering, leave it in place until you can determine if it’s expendable. Is it adding value to your work or draining the life out of it until it reads like a textbook? Your sentences may be grammatically accurate, the spelling may be correct, and the punctuation may be spot on, but what good is any of that if the energy is sapped from your writing? You have to make sure that your edits are not removing the heart and soul of your story and making it lackluster. I'd rather see messy wording and underdeveloped ideas than perfect sentences that are dull and predictable.

When you become overly attached to a sentence, phrase, adjective, adverb, or anything else, you're acting like a hoarder and you need to be strict with yourself so you can break a bad habit. If you refuse to search through your manuscript with an eagle eye and let go of superfluous text, the book will suffer. And so will you.

A woman once contacted me to edit her manuscript. I told her to send me the first twenty pages so I could get a feel for her writing and see if I was the right person for the job. She ignored my direction and sent me hundreds of disconnected pages with no chapters, page numbers, paragraphs or segues. She included a note that said, “I haven’t read this over. I didn't edit it at all. I wrote it fast and I have no idea what's in there. Please make it all work.”

I declined the job.

When I finished an edit for someone else and sent it back to her, she tacked words and phrases onto the end of sentences that I’d meticulously structured with what I considered seamless pacing and rhythm. She also deleted entire phrases for seemingly no reason. She was an award winning musician and I’d expected her to be keenly aware of rhythm and pacing but her expertise in music didn't translate to the written word. I had to go back to my original timing and wording and find a place for her additions and subtractions so they wouldn’t stop the flow. This is more hard work after the fact.

A word of caution:

Never ever get rid of edited material. Place all of it in a file so you can access it later. You may reread something that you edited and decide you liked your original version but now it’s gone. I once worked with a motivational speaker who didn’t get the point I just made. I stopped her when she was about to delete something from her book that I thought needed to be there.

“Don’t get rid of it,” I told her. “Save it in a file. You might change your mind later and it’ll be gone.”

“I know what I’m doing,” she said like a ten-year-old girl. She hit delete and that was that. I bet you know what came next. When she realized her cut had been hasty, she tried to rewrite what she had tossed. She couldn’t do it. She became angry and frustrated and couldn’t blame me because we both knew what had happened. The worst part was that she didn’t learn from her mistakes. She kept doing it. It was the longest edit I ever done. She was the polar opposite of a hoarder – someone who throws away things that they need. Keep it just in case. It’s like having your cake and eating it later. You never know what will go and what will stay until you get into the rewrite and see what cries out to be shifted and changed, added or deleted.

If you’re writing a self-help book, ask yourself, “Did I describe my methods and exercises with clarity or do I need to add further explanation? Did I describe Step One in a clear enough way that someone will feel ready to move on to Step Two? Did I repeat my ideas as if my reader isn’t smart enough to get it the first time? If it's a memoir, did I express my emotions well enough for a reader to feel them, too? Am I taking my readers on an interesting ride and making them care about me? Or am I leading them down a boring path to a dead end? Your readers will not like that.