Any tips for editing?

[Toni McHadden]

My writer’s circle have said that I need to improve my editing skills. I think they are right yet IDK where to start.

Any tips on how to start editing my work?

[Matthew Brown]

I’m no editing expert. Far from it.

However, I’m not going to let that stop me from trying to offer an answer.

The best advice I ever heard about editing is to finish the story and then put it away for a few months. When you come back to your work, it will be (more or less) like seeing it for the first time. All the flaws you need to fix should be much much more obvious.

That is easier said than done.

[Sarah]

Hands up who’s editing at the moment!

I’m very good at finding ‘ways’ and ‘methods’ and ‘systems’.  In fact I’m better at that than the editing itself – no surprises there.  At the moment I’ve got each scene summarised on an index card (current count is 95 cards) which I’m now indexing into a small ringbinder (Filofax for info).  I also have a Numbers spreadsheet of each chapter broken into scenes (currently 5 pages) with a brief summary of each scene description (which should tally with index cards) and it also has a notional attempt at tracking plots and subplots (still haven’t mastered this and would be so very grateful for some handy hints and tips if anyone has any).

Keeping up so far?

Not only do I have all of the above but I’ve also downloaded a calendar for the timeframe that I’m writing in – quite handy and, some of you might point out, something I should have done when I first started writing this in November.

I’m still messing about with my scene order and have even changed the personality of one of my characters (turned out this was quite helpful).  My word count is currently 85k, with expectations of reaching about 90k, although I anticipate I’ll be losing another 5-10k at some point in the future.

For those who are interested and dabble in apps and so on I rediscovered hiveword.com which offers quite a neat way of organising characters, plot lines and so on in a more visual format.  However, it’s perhaps a bit much for me at this stage.  It’s maybe not so different from Scrivener but marginally easier to use as there aren’t so many bells and whistles.

And for all you research fiends out there have you been using Zotero?  This is a great app (I have it on my Mac and iPhone) which syncs and is easily populated with references from websites and any other material you might access.  The only thing that could improve it (in my very humble opinion) is the ability to scan the ISBN code on a book, but hey, the app’s free, so I’m happy to do it the old fashioned way.

Thanks for reading (if you got this far).  I do rather feel like I’m writing into a vacuum at the moment and my inner teenager is crying out that ‘nobody understands me’, so thought this was the perfect forum to exorcise these writing demons.

Now back to whatever the hell it was I was doing!

[Toni McHadden]

Wow, you have a really big system. When I edit it is just read through and make changes and note plot problems.

Do ya mind if I ask you some follow up questions some time @Sarah?

[Sarah]

@Toni – Replied below!

[Sarah]

Hi Toni, feel free to ask away! Sorry to take a flipping age to reply to this, would be great to chat about this and all other things writing. And honestly all of these systems only really amount to is a distraction from the task at hand.    I even totted up all the characters mentioned in the book I’m currently working on to see if there were too many by comparing it to the number of characters in War And Peace. Proportionately it works out to be approximately the same. I’m sure I’ve got better things to do with my time…

[Toni McHadden]

Can you tell me how you figure out which passages need to be changed?

[Sarah]

Hi Toni, very good question! Sometimes reading the scene/text out loud can help as a starting point.  Always look at what paragraph/chapter/scene comes before and after as well – this is good for making the writing more balanced in terms of what you need to add or take away.  So, for example, if you’re introducing two characters then you need to give them equal airtime (assuming you’re doing fiction).  Of course this is what I would do and people will have different opinions!  There are other things I’ve sort of learned along the way, but DM me if you want.  I’m not an expert by any stretch but I have a sort of interest in this and of course it’s great to chat to other people about these things.

[Matthew Brown]

There is a tool I wrote for Thanet Creative which takes a text input and spits out a list of the most and least common words as well as a few graphs and charts.

Words Counted

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