E is for Editing
I yearn to be writing a novel again—to be walking across the
park with characters’ voices in my ears, telling me exactly what they think
they should do next. I’d like to be
sitting in a café, scribbling down outlines and rough drafts on bound books
full of graph paper, then going home and turning on the computer and typing it
out.
But I stopped doing all that about 18 months ago, when I
typed the quote from Machiavelli that ends my novel. Since then I have not been writing, exactly,
I have been editing. It’s not the same
thing at all.
It’s not that editing can’t be fun. It’s just that I thought I already knew how
to do it. I know the difference between
‘which’ and ‘that.’ I am not afraid of
punctuation. I never leave green lines on Word.
After all, I had a PhD supervisor who studied with the
famous Strunk of Strunk and White’s style guide, back when Strunk taught English
at Cornell in the 1920s. Strunk told my
supervisor Harriet that it was not enough to learn to write well; she should
also learn to bake a lemon pie. Harriet
did both. By the way, if any of you have
consulted Stephen King’s good book on writing, you will find it owes much to
Strunk and White, though I don’t know if Stephen King ever learned to bake
lemon pie. The thought of the kind of
pie he might bake is scary.
The first thing I’ve had to learn is that editing a novel
has nothing to do with copyediting.
That’s the easy part.
Since I’ve been editing, I’ve learned that writing a novel
is much more than typing down grammatically correct sentences. I asked my writer friend Amey to read my
manuscript. I hadn’t realised that she
would do it properly, and that it would take her over six months to do. Amey taught me that, in a novel, every
sentence and every phrase in that sentence has to serve the plot. Her own mentor was one of my favourite
novelists, Doris Betts, who, according to Amey would have excised the redundant
‘t’ from her name if she could.
Around the same time that Amey was reading and commenting on
my manuscript, a tutor at an Arvon retreat told me I should try to get my total
word count down (the rough draft was 149,000 words). He advised me to reduce it to 85,000
words. I burst into tears and sought
solace from my friends who hang out in Café Aphra. I thought it couldn’t be done, but after
learning how to follow Amey’s Bettsian principles, I cut it to 117,000. Then, after learning on another writing
course that 95,000 words were the absolute limit for a publishable book, I lost
a few scenes and useless characters and cut it to 94,500. One of the many ways in which editing differs
from writing is that you are really happy when the word count goes down.
But cutting nearly 50,000 words may still not be enough to
edit your book into a good novel. You
may have to rewrite entirely and then cut it back once again. See ‘R is for Rewriting’ in a couple of weeks.
If writing the first draft of your novel is like a romance,
the editing and rewriting phases are more like a rocky marriage and perhaps,
eventually, divorce. I’m not quite ready
to get a divorce from my characters and plot, but a trial separation might be
in order. I’m yearning to write
something new.
Frances Hay
I always dread that editing phase you speak of. My first draft is always way too long with lots of dross that has to be burned off, but it's worth the effort when you end up with a publishable work in front of you. Thoughtful post! I'v just got to finishe anothe bit of my current work before that editing begins- although for reasons I won't explain just now I've been doing that editing for months too. :-)
ReplyDeleteI always leave green lines on word...!
ReplyDelete