How to write and edit

Editing: The art of getting it right

Martina Tyrrell
October 21, 2024

When bestselling novelist Santa Montefiore was interviewed recently for the Writer’s Routine podcast (find her episode here) she said that her approach to her craft is Get it written, then get it right. That’s pretty smart advice. All too often, we can get bogged down in trying to perfect the 1000 words we’ve just written, while failing to write the next 79,000 words that we want to write. There’s a lot to be said for ploughing on, getting the bare bones of your novel, memoir, essay or whatever it is, out of your head and onto the page, before you turn to the task of perfecting it, tweaking it, making it the very best it can be. In previous newsletters, I’ve shared some tips for good writing practice, including auditing, managing and ringfencing your writing time, having an accountability buddy, and planning your writing project before you get started. Today, I want to focus on the get it right part of writing: editing.

Editing is hard. And it’s hard for two very straightforward reasons. First, every single word of your draft manuscript has been hard-earned, squeezed out of you through grit and determination, through turning down social events and time spent with family, through missing out on your favourite TV show/book/social media app/hobby. The last thing you want to do is get rid of or mess around with any of those hard-won words. Second, you are so close to your manuscript, so immersed and invested in it, that it is very difficult for you to see its flaws. But if you’re going to get it right, you’re going to have to learn to see those flaws and you’re going to have to slash and burn.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working with a novelist, helping him to iron out some kinks in the 40th draft of his manuscript. Yes, you read that right! He’s rewritten that baby thirty-nine times. And you can tell. The writing is sharp and lyrical, the places he writes about perfectly reflecting and enveloping the inner workings of the protagonist’s tortured mind. So immersive is the writing that I found myself, at times, looking up from the manuscript surprised that I was not on the coastline that is the central backdrop to the story. Yet, after 39 revisions the story still didn’t quite work. Some scenes, characters and plotlines didn’t click and the author was determined to keep reworking until he got it right. I admire his tenacity.

I have not been with him for all 40 drafts. Rather, he came to me seeking a fresh pair of eyes. He’s had many readers, including family and friends and professional editors like me. He knows he has a great story to tell and he is determined to tell it well. After I had read the manuscript and sent him my ideas and recommendations, we met over Zoom and he told me about characters he had dropped from previous drafts, of characters whose roles had been expanded or reduced and of scenes given the chop that had been critical to earlier versions of the story.

Over the weekend, I had an email from him, telling me that he had revised again, based on my written comments and our Zoom call (draft 41). He’d then read the entire manuscript aloud, which caused him to pick up sentences (dialogue in particular) that just didn’t sound right (draft 42). He’s done it. He’s now ready to start his search for an agent who will help him get his novel published.

Editing your manuscript is slow hard work. Stephen King advises throwing your manuscript in a drawer for a few months, to gain some distance from it. It’s advice I used to give my university students. While they didn’t have months at their disposal, I advised them to write their essays with enough time to spare before the deadline that they could put them away for a weekend and return to them with fresh eyes. A manuscript that seems so personal to us in the moment can feel as if it’s been written by someone else after we’ve taken some time away from it. And, believe me, editing someone else’s work is far easier than editing your own! Next time, I’m going to talk about getting other people to read your manuscript, so I won’t dwell on that here, only to say: Do it!

There are a number of questions you can ask yourself to guide you through editing your own work. Some questions are more relevant to some genres than others:

  1. Does the manuscript follow a clear and logical pattern from start to end?
  2. Is the context/situation clearly explained? (show in the context of fiction and narrative non-fiction; tell in the case of most academic writing)
  3. Are narrative arcs complete?
  4. Do all the characters have a role to play in the story?
  5. Are the narrative arcs of each character complete?
  6. Are motives, methods, reasons clearly explained?
  7. Does the writing clearly evoke place and time? (e.g., 1950s London, 1600s Venice)
  8. Is the manuscript repetitive?
  9. Does the manuscript contain unintended contradictions?
  10. If there is dialogue, does it read like how people really speak?

Interrogating your manuscript along these lines will help you to transform an early draft into something much more honed, clear and precise. Perhaps it’s too much to tackle all of these at once. For instance, imagine you’ve written a novel set in 1950s London. You might focus your editing efforts on ensuring that your manuscript is suffused with the colours, tastes, smells, styles, cuisine, décor of that time and place. In the same, or a later, draft, you might focus on ensuring that the dialogue, the attitudes, and the mores of the characters similarly fit that time and place. In yet another draft, you might follow one character or one idea to see how it evolves and resolves from start to finish.

A difficult but important step is removing what is unnecessary. Lighten the load of your manuscript. Slashing unnecessary characters, scenes and exposition clears the way to further develop, deepen and bring to life what is important and what is at the core of your manuscript.

Handy hint

As a professional editor, I always used track changes when editing my clients’ work. In the past couple of years, I’ve also been using it to edit my own work. It allows me to keep track of what I’m removing and what I’m adding and, I guess because it’s the same as what I do professionally, it creates a sense of distance between me and my writing; I can fool my brain into thinking I’m editing someone else’s work.

What I’m reading

I recently picked up People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. I’m not sure what I was expecting – or if I was even expecting anything. But this book was a delight. It is a fictionalized account of the Sarajevo Haggadah – a Jewish prayer book that was rescued from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war. The story follows the detective work of the fictionalized book conservator called in to restore the book when it is discovered at the end of the war. We follow her as she travels through ancient libraries and scientific laboratories, piecing together the history of the Haggadah based on items she has found within it during her restoration work (a cat hair, a butterfly wing). Interspersed with these chapters, are a collection of short stories, each one going farther and farther back in time, as the Haggadah falls into the hands of various characters, among them a Jewish girl in Sarajevo in 1940, a Rabbi in the Venetian ghetto in 1609, a young artist in the Alcazar in Sevilla in 1480. Each story takes the reader farther and farther back in time through Jewish culture and history in Europe. What a delightful and educational unexpected gem.

Photo by hannah grace on Unsplash

 

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