More on Editing Magic: Excerpt From My Book: A Friendly Guide to Writing and Ghostwriting
You finished your first draft. Give yourself a pat on the back. You had an idea, you tamed your inner critic, you ignored the naysayers, you chose a working title, and you kept collapsing your Table of Contents and reorganizing it. You put your chapters in order and you maneuvered the lull of the halfway point. You agonized when you got stuck and didn't know where to go next. You berated yourself in a million different ways, trying to convince yourself that you were no good at this and never would be. But you overrode it, uncovered your authentic voice and found the natural rhythm and flow of your words. When you finally got to the end, you let your readers know where things stood and what might happen in the future. Now it’s time to take the draft that you so painstakingly created from scratch, idea by idea, word by word, and edit the hell out of it.
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 suggesting that you 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 killing, 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 delineations between thoughts. 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.”
Needless to say, I declined the job.
In another case, I finished an edit for someone and when I sent it back to her, she tacked on words and phrases 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 that wouldn’t stop the flow.
To avoid over-editing, it’s important not to be hasty. By keeping a copy of the portions that I cut, I can access the exact wording of my original version in case I want to bring it back. It’s like having your cake and eating it later. Just don’t throw edited material. Save it in a file in case you want to use it later.
As you begin an edit, 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 it's a self-help book, did you describe your methods and exercises with clarity or do you need to add further explanation? Did you describe Step One in a clear enough way that someone will feel ready to move on to Step Two? Did you repeat your ideas as if your reader wasn’t smart enough to get it the first time? If it's a memoir, did you express your emotions well enough for a reader to feel them, too? Are you taking your readers on an interesting ride and making them care about you? Or are you leading them down a boring path to a dead end?
There are various steps to follow when you edit your work. I’ve discovered that a book sounds different when I read it on the computer screen, in a printout, and out loud so I try to do all three. It takes patience but repetitions and incomplete thoughts come to light in the various ways that I review the material, especially when I read it aloud.