Year Two: Editing
I want you to imagine a very compelling preamble about how I haven’t posted in awhile but how all of that’s going to change. And then I want you to imagine how this implies that you should read the hell out of this blog because it will give you mindgasms and inspire you and whatever else reason we read blogs for.
Did you do that?
No? Well then we’re in the same boat because I have no idea how to do that either.
If you did imagine all that you should probably start a blog.
I started this blog just over a year ago when I wanted to try and write three drafts of three novels before turning 30. On account of an existential crisis. Such was my fear of turning 30 that I actually managed to pull it off.
I had an optimistic outlook for how long it would take to edit the three books.
Three second drafts by the end of next year! Choo Choo motherfuckers!
In fact, if I go look through my old posts, I'm pretty sure I had a notion that I would be able to get one of the novels published by the end of 2018, whether through Amazon, or a traditional publisher, or by printing and throwing them out my window till the police arrived.
Instead I'm just about to start the third draft of Children's of the Pantheon, Book 1, which I've been exclusively editing this year. Exclusively! I like the sound of that. Sounds like focus, sounds like love. Sounds like it’s just my intimacy with that particular book that has derailed my initial forecast.
But still. I’m on the tracks. I’m chugging along. And in this post I'm going to explain my uh, 'process' of ‘editing’.
See the first draft of CoP was rough as hell. As one of my readers said, "It reads like you wrote it in one month." Which would have been brutal if it wasn't literally true.
Readers?!? I'll get to that later.
The second draft was cleanup, a fitting term considering the methodology I employed was explicitly called 'the vomit draft.' (Here's a nifty link to article on that.) That second draft felt like it took longer to write than the first. I'm not entirely sure if that's true, hour-wise, but it's certainly true in the sense that the second draft only got finished around July. Granted, I no longer hyper-caffeinated or worked till midnight, but what kind of excuse is that? Sure I saved on Starbucks, even though I got one of them loyalty cards (a side effect of 3 novels in 3 months) but the truth is I didn’t apply the same amount of pressure to myself, no oil, no self-immolation, and also, I have very little experience with editing something of that length.
I’ve edited essays, stories, poems, articles and a book on Buddhist Architecture in Thailand (what?) But this was a goddamn novel. A 100 000 word goddamn novel. Man, was I proud in some latent phallic way about the length when I first finished, but now, oh god now, it’s too long. It’s too big, it’s a bitch to edit! It barely fits into my schedule.
As for the readers; their feedback is the foundation for my upcoming third draft.
In On Writing, Steven King writes that once you have got a functional version of the story, send it out to a select group of readers whose opinions and tastes you trust and value. My readers involved a select group of friends who were kind enough to give it a go, with a focus on fans of fantasy and players in my Dungeons and Dragons campaigns.
In terms of what to change and who to believe, I again defer to the King:
If the readers uniformly (or in the majority) hate something, fix it.
If they love it, keep it as is.
If they disagree its a wash.
That third one's my favorite. Feels great to have someone thoroughly dislike a section that someone else enjoys. It’s like the prognosis changed. Doctor came back, the tests were clear. I have literally sighed in relief, and possibly fist-pumped when someone else said they liked a part that was borderline eviscerated (with love) by someone else.
Also I may have learned things. These are my own personal lessons as it were, not necessarily rules for other writers to live by.
With the exception of #1 which you should live and not die by and it is
Don’t take the feedback personally. Don’t Take The Feedback Personally. Do Not Take It PERSONALLY. And seriously, do not take it personally as a writer or a human being.
I once wrote 95% of a novel involving a fictional creative writing class that an actual creative writing teacher reviewed the first few pages of, then edited and gave me feedback on. It was nice of him to take the time. It also sent me into a depressive spiral.
It was also humbling. And numbing.
Because this time I enjoyed the feedback. I loved it. I was not the story. It’s something else, a sculpture I’m working on, a world that I was still crafting. A stack of paper or a series of words in a made up fantasy place with magic and shit.
See with feedback, it felt like for the first time I was getting a real roadmap towards making this story, this world I’ve created AWESOME. It was a list of steps towards my goal. A way of bringing what I wanted into higher resolution. I now knew what to do.
Sometimes I did lapse into frustration- tried not to show it, when someone misinterpreted something or asked a question another reader understood the answer to. But the book isn’t my opinion; it’s theirs. We could probably go back and forth on that one, but personally I believe it isn’t alive till someone else reads it or hears it.
The fact that it wasn’t total dogshit was also a comfort.
Ahh, what else did I learn?
As cool as it looks, printing out hardcopies to edit is a total freakin’ waste of time. You got to lug it around, keep it together, try not to crumple the damn thing. Then you edit in pen! Pen! Sure, seems like a good idea, but you can't ctrl+f to find if you overused a phrase. Can’t copy and paste a damn thing without actual scissors and a glue stick. All of that seems pretty obvious in hindsight. I’m also guessing a large swathe of dead pre-word-processing writers would have loved to have the miracle that is Google Docs.
2. Editing is hard. And it is not the last hurdle, it might not even be halfway. And that’s okay.
3. Priorities: If you need to cut things, rejig the plot, close plot holes- try to do all of that BEFORE doing line edits for language. There's no point spending ages on a description only to cut it later.
4. Flow is still very important and must be maintained. The temptation I have doing line edits is to tweak the language whilst forgetting that I wrote the original in a voice and at a pace that worked. Rereading the new edits starts a frustrating process of trying to work out how to fix the pacing.
5. Do not take long breaks between editing. You don't have to edit like a madperson for 8 hours a day 7 days a week, but taking a break from the editing- which I did, a hiatus of two weeks, to almost a month or more at times, makes it far more difficult to remember things. I ended up rereading sections, rechecking my wiki and re-worldbuilding- more time wasted retracing my steps.
6. You don't know shit about shit! You just don’t! Until my readers gave me feedback I was often off the mark in terms of what I thought was good vs bad. Write the book as its meant to be written, but don't get hung up on trying to be perfect, or make it literary or 'good' according to some vague notion of standards you expect readers to have. Write the hell out of it and hand it over. See what happens.
7. Based on feedback: Story is king. It's the crux of it all. Tell a good yarn and the rest is window dressing. But in fantasy so is explaining things- so is making sure they understand the world and aren’t overwhelmed by the differences, or unclear about a random term or culture. Not explaining things enough was one of the most consistent forms of feedback I had. The more foreign the world the more explanation is needed.
Aside from the books, I've started two serial stories that I'm tempted to put on Wattpad. Both of them have the first chapters written. One of them is terrible, terrible, god-awfully glorious smut. The other’s alright. So whether I do that anonymously is another question as well.
There's a lot going on and I've been silent for ages. I want to try and update the blog once a week at least, but I've made promises like that before and broken them, so I'll do the walk before I start the talk.
The site has also been fairly spruced up. There’s now some of my previous performances along with upcoming performances, as well as other tweaks. Go ahead and take a look!