ten tips for self-editing

Ten Tips for Self-Editing

Suncoast Writers Guild

Elsie Quirk Library December 2019Camille Cline

The Literary Spa®

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The purpose of a writer is to amuse himself, to

indulge himself, to get his books into print with

as little editorial smudging as he can, to slide

through society with as little friction as

possible.

—John Updike, Bech at Bay

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“It was a basic tenet of [Gardner’s] that a writer found

what he wanted to say in the ongoing process of

seeing what he’d said. And this seeing, or seeing

more clearly, came about through revision. He

believed in revision, endless revision; it was

something very close to his heart and something he

felt was vital for writers at whatever stage of their

development.” From Raymond Carver’s foreword to

John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist

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Why Edit Your Work?

◼ Editors acquire polished manuscripts. Like

any good businessperson, she is looking for

products that fit the market her house serves.

◼ Like a good artist, she is looking for narratives

or prescriptives that tell a part of our larger

human story.

◼ If both these needs can be met without much

editorial smudging, editors are happy.

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Tip 1: Write First

“I don’t fiddle or edit or change while I’m going

through that first draft.”

—Nora Roberts

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Tip 2: Edit in Three Layers

◼ Big Picture

◼ Specific

◼ Minor

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Tip 3: Look at the Big Picture

◼ Identify the type of book you’ve written

◼ Fiction: Historical and inspirational novels, thrillers and suspense, mysteries and crime, romance, science fiction and fantasy, literary, short story and poetry collections, children’s/YA, graphic novels.

◼ Non-fiction: Memoirs, business, technical, health and self improvement, religion/spirituality, sports, reference, travel…

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Big Picture

◼ A.k.a. developmental or substantive

◼ An expansive view of your novel’s premise, voice, narrative distance, overall structure and plot, characterization, and themes.

◼ Most main character and narrator issues.

◼ Match the voice to your message, blend dialogue and interior monologue, stabilize story structure.

◼ Find novel’s true beginning, construct denouement to ensure payoff, and show growth in characters.

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Tip 4: Revise to a Structure

◼ Revise to an Outline: Chapter, Scene, Theme,

Character

◼ Revise to an Arc: Use a graph

◼ Revise to a Profile

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Tip 5: Look Outside Your Book

◼ Proposal

◼ Overview

◼ About the Book

◼ Market

◼ Target Audience

◼ Competition

◼ What qualifies you

to write this book?

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I revise, rewrite, edit and delete more than ever

before…I see self-editing as crucial to the

process as the initial writing.

—Peter Straub

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Tip 6: Get Specific

◼ Specific, line-by-line edits can tease out issues surrounding the big-picture ones.

◼ Most helpful if you know something’s wrong, but don’t know where to fix.

◼ How to revise for a visceral response, flesh out the world beyond your first-person narrator, uncover exposition masquerading as dialogue, root out tangential scenes, place your flashbacks appropriately, make your opening character description clear and concise.

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Tip 7: Get a 360˚ View

◼ Revise in Layers: Codify the weaknesses, focus on each story element, copy edit

◼ Revise for a Visceral Response

◼ Substitute a Scene for Summary (v.v.)

◼ Root Out Tangential Scenes

◼ Create Layers of Exposition

◼ Blend Dialogue with Summary

◼ Fill in Cookie-Cutter Personalities

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Back to Tip 5: Look Outside

◼ Sample chapters

◼ Annotated chapter outline

◼ Marketing and publicity campaign

◼ Biography

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“If you want a slice of life, look out the window.

An artist has to look out that window, isolate

one or two suggestive things, and embroider

them together with poetry and fabrication, to

create a revelation. If we can’t, as artists,

improve on real life, we should put down our

pencils and go bake bread.”

—Barbara Kingsolver

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Tip 8: Be Your Own Mechanic

◼ Hone in on the minutiae and the mechanical

alterations you can find in most style and

usage guides.

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Tip 9: Detail Your Work

◼ Peer closely at paragraphs, phrases, and words

for opportunities to give your story more

detail, control your point of view, tag your

dialogue correctly, and vary chapter length. In

a few cases, this level of editing can help you

escalate pace to maximize tension.

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Tip 10: Fine-tune Your Revision

◼ Revise For Clarity

◼ Revise Toward Originality

◼ Give Your Story More Detail

◼ Use Names Sparingly

◼ Check for Tense Shifts

◼ Revise For Length and Vary Chapter Length

◼ Resist the Allure of Adverbs

◼ Escalate Pace To Maximize Tension*

◼ Revise Toward Good Grammar

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Back to Tip 5: Look Outside

◼ Ensure that samples deliver on promise of the

proposal

◼ Copy edit and proofread

◼ Use an editing sheet

◼ Title page

◼ Footers

◼ ISBNs in Competition section

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Editing, for [Knopf editor Gary] Fisketjon, is something akin to meditation. He can edit a book only if he can shut out everything around him; he even avoids reading other authors when he's working on a manuscript. 'You have to get into a trance,' he says. 'Because an editor can only use the standards set by the book in hand. It's not like, 'Why couldn't this work be like something else?' It can't work that way. So you've got to get into the vernacular of a book and see where the book is not living up to its best moments and try to point them out.

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“Fisketjon works on one book at a time, and

rarely reads a draft twice. He always reads on

paper, never a computer screen, and always

edits with a green pen. He goes slowly, maybe

five pages an hour, filling the margins with

suggestions about semicolons, snippets of

dialogue, choice of adjectives. Nothing is too

minute.”

—Nashville Scene

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We can sum up the editor’s usual performance during

revision by saying that…he converts the analyses into

suggestions for specific cuts, changes, and

additions. It’s routine editorial work: All it requires

is intelligence, sensitivity, tact, articulateness,

industry, patience, accessibility, promptness,

orderliness, thoroughness, a capacity to work alone, a

capacity to work with others. Plus sensibility and

craft. No humans need apply.

—Thomas McCormack

Former Editor-in-Chief, St. Martin’s Press

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Thank You

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