Day 246: Editing Pt. 2

I've been searching through mounds of text for interesting tidbits about different authors' editing processes, but so far I haven't seen much variation on the theme I laid out in part one. As far as I can tell, pretty much everybody at some point just has to sit down, read the draft, make changes they want to see, and do some rewriting. This strikes me as strange. There are so many different ways to approach the initial draft that I figured there would be just as many for editing. Some people start with the plot, some people have no plot at all. Some people write scenes in order, some go all over the place. There are a dozen ways to structure scenes, chapters, plot arcs, and just as many ways to tackle actually writing them. But I cannot find a single person who varies notably from Sanderson's process. It's weird. I thought there would be at least one weirdo who insists on editing back to front, or rewriting every single chapter again after reading it, or some other, totally bizarre method. If they exist they aren't very forward about their process.

Since there is so little variance in this compared to the initial creative process I'm forced to come to the conclusion that there's not much else to do but do it. Here are some interesting tips and tricks I found along the way though.

An interesting quote I found from Anne Rice from a 2013 Facebook post about the impact of creative editors on her work:

"After the publication of The Queen of the Damned, I requested of my editor that she not give me anymore comments. I resolved to hand in the manuscripts when they were finished. And asked that she accept them as they were. She was very reluctant, feeling that her input had value, but she agreed to my wishes. I asked this due to my highly critical relationship with my work and my intense evolutionary work on every sentence in the work, my feeling for the rhythm of the phrase and the unfolding of the plot and the character development. I felt that I could not bring to perfection what I saw unless I did it alone."

I should note that she had all her work copy edited, which is very different and has nothing to do with how the story actually plays out. Copy editing is like proof reading. Often the sentence structure ends up modified to suit a particular voice, but the content itself doesn't change. Maybe I'll do a future post about this.

This quote from Toni Morrison from an interview in 2019 serves as an interesting counter point.

"I remove from them this emotional connection of defending constantly; everything that someone says about your work may not be right, but I say you must pay attention to it. If I am restless about it, something is wrong. I may not know what it is; what I say is wrong may not be right; but pay attention to my unease, or anybody's unease."

Without letting someone else comment on the creative aspects of your work, I'd guess it's pretty much impossible to field the kind of information you need to improve it. This is the sort of thing I'll have to worry about much later, but I do plan on letting an editor have a good look at it. I'm not quite arrogant enough yet to think that it'll be the perfect story without any help.

I also found a neat website by an editor and writing coach at ladyknightediting.com. She has some great posts about writing, editing, and the profession in general, delivered in bite sized tips that I've been consuming like those horderves you eat twenty of before realizing what you've done. She even beat me to the copy editing vs proof reading post. Oh well, I'll just do it anyway.

Here's a quote from Stephen King on the editing process:

"Editing is like pruning the rose bush you thought was so perfect and beautiful until it overgrew the garden."

I think this reflects King's style of writing more than anything about editing. He openly admits that his drafts run on for thousands of words more than necessary in his book 'On Writing,' which I find really funny. It seems like a point of contention he's never quite been able to overcome. Hopefully there won't be too much weed whacking going on after I get started but I'm sure there will be quite a bit. I think the biggest job will be to rework the characters rather than straight up remove content, but I could be wrong. I'll find out soon enough anyway.

That's about all I've got. I'm a little disappointed there weren't more approaches to editing a first draft. I found a bunch of different approaches for third party edits, from having someone else run through and edit for you, to just getting a bunch of vague feedback and using it to direct the edits. I'll have to do all that after an initial edit though.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley