So much for New Year resolutions… first blog update in 3 months!
Over the weekend, I wrapped up the third draft of my novel and submitted it as part of the Write Your Novel course offered by the Australian Writers’ Centre. I’ll be getting input from classmates in early May and feedback on the climax/resolution from our tutor (i.e., the last 39 pages).
This felt like a significant milestone for me – I think I’ve got a much better handle on the entire story and why my characters are doing what they’re doing. I also made significant progress in how I’m presenting the aliens – I created a few challenges for myself as a result of how I want to portray them, but they feel more fleshed out now (to me, at least)
I hadn’t realised what a colossal task this editing round would be – after all, I’d already edited it once and knocked off the rough edges – how much more work could it possibly need?
Answer: A lot.
I had a lot of constructive feedback from my classmates on three earlier extracts from the novel (5,000 words each), with some great questions about my characters’ motivations, their internal monologue, and anything that was unclear to them. This was one aspect of what I needed to do in my editing – making sure I’d thought about their questions and addressed them in the extracts they’d seen, and then applied the same thinking to the rest of the novel.
The other (and much more time-consuming) task was to identify and rectify my use of “lazy” words, such as “now”, “still”, “very”, “look”, “back”, etc. – the kind of words which are very easy to type when you’re throwing ideas on a page, but which don’t add anything to the story, or are used in place of much better words.
In the same category of edits, I tried to channel our tutor’s “highlighters of doom”, which she used in her reviews of our extracts to call out when we’d used the same word multiple times in a short passage of text. This is harder to do than it sounds when you’re looking at something you’ve written…
These repeated words are another form of lazy writing but can result in much more interesting descriptions of scenes – if you can spot them and find another way of conveying the concept. This doesn’t always come easily – some words are hard to substitute, and you risk creating highly contrived sentences – sometimes, a carrot is just a carrot, not a “carotenoid-rich subsoil root vegetable” – there is a balance to be struck…
Along the way, I think I found the most essential tool of all when editing – I can’t recommend it highly enough:
As a result of judicious use of this secret editing tool, I managed to knock off about 2,500 words from the version I had three weeks ago, even while I added in new material throughout the manuscript. The final version of the third draft was just over 159k words.
And a few practical editing tips:
- Read the story in reverse order, a paragraph at a time – I tried this and found it helped pick up many things I’d missed. Because you don’t get caught up in the flow of the story and don’t have the full context for it, you end up reading the paragraph for what it is rather than what you think it should be saying.
- Software assistance – I’ve recently started using Grammarly, a super-charged version of the spelling and grammar checking tools in Word. It’s a bit clunky at times but very good at spotting potential issues – especially things like words you’ve missed out – it’s amazing how good your brain is at “filling the gaps” in a sentence when you’ve left out a word… I didn’t always agree with the issues it identified, but it did make me stop and think about what I’d written much more.
- Keep notes – every time I spotted an issue (e.g., a word that I’d over-used or didn’t need at all), I jotted them down so I could do a global search through the whole manuscript – I mean, what are the odds I only had the issue in one paragraph!
My next steps are to read my classmates’ manuscripts (while they read mine) and provide some constructive observations on what they’ve done and what might make their stories even better. Along the way, I’m sure this will prompt me to think of further changes I’ll need to make to my novel. After that, I’ll get their feedback and work out what I need to do to elevate my story to the next level.
I can see why people say that writing the first draft is the easy part – editing is hard work!
Hi Tony,
I agree writing is hard word, especially when it comes to editing. I think of the first draft as a block of wood, roughly hewn into shape. The editing is working on the finer details of the sculpture, that brings the text alive.
Congratulations on persevering with it – and thank you for sharing what you learnt in the process of your the multiple edits.
Gah. I cannot wait to read this novel.
Sorry… Patience is a virtue, PaoYi…
Sounds like a difficult process, but totally worth it. I suppose you can only really see just one step ahead.