- early example of editing c. 1988. This was the first draft of a short story for teenagers called ‘The Bogs.’
One of the hardest things for the novice writer is learning how to edit. Often, the person is reluctant to change a thing. This is understandable when you have spent weeks, months or even years on something but it is also unwise.
Editing what you’ve written is as important as the writing itself.
I quite enjoy it. Its a bit like when you’ve let your bedroom become a tip. You leave it and leave it until one Sunday when you are bored and there’s nothing on the telly, you decide to give it a thorough tidy. Not just a pulling the duvet over the bed and kicking the socks under the chair tidy. A proper one, with Windolene and dusters and a trip downstairs to lug Henry out of the utility room version of tidy.
The best time to edit something is after it has been left in a drawer for a few weeks. You can then read through it with a cold, calm eye and assess where the story drags, which sentences need pruning and which paragraphs and chapters need to be vanquished forever.
Various writers use various methods for this. When I was learning, I literally took a pair of scissors and cut up my work, slotting some sentences higher or lower down the page, as taught by the legend who is Gwen Grant (left). Now, of course, I have Word and Windows and I cut and paste using the tool bar icons.
However, that’s just the first stage, where you are patting the story into a solid lumpen being.
Next comes the polishing. That means reading it out loud to see how it sounds. Inevitably it sounds rubbish and leads to more cutting – this time paring sentences and paragraphs for pace and tone.
You know when the tone is wrong when it jars. Did I really want my character to come across as such a pompous prat? Would she really use that phrase? Usually a subtle twist here, a slight change of phrasing there, is all that’s needed to get it right.
After that comes the detail. Checking for over-used words and repetitions. I am terrible at sprinkling sentences with ‘very’ and ‘just’ – words that don’t add anything to the sentence and detract from the content but seem perfectly OK at the time.
Finally comes the ‘printing off for the final read-through’ stage. The part where you think ‘this is the copy I’d send to the editor.’ Only it never works out like that. Today for example, I got stuck on page 11. I’d see one word I wasn’t happy with, change it, print it off. Further down the page I spotted something else. Back to the printer. Then a further thing somewhere else… How come I didn’t see these individual typos and wordy sentences before? Good question! If only! Six page 11s were printed before I was satisfied. Don’t even get me started on page 12…. Editing. It can take a while.
- Saturday Girl, the book formerly known as Getting Rid of Karenna that started out as The Bogs (above). Still in print. Still a classic. £5.99 OUP. Bargain.
