Editing

Development / World Building

The highest level of editing involves shaping a project from the top down. This type of editing guides the ship and gives a writer boundaries to keep them focused.

Germinating an Idea

Unlike in tests, the first instinct is rarely the best. Developing an idea involves considering what’s been done, what you want to do, and what you don’t want to do. After a few iterations you can find novel approaches and deeper views that avoid shallow platitudes and rehashes.

Setting Parameters

Writing is about making choices. Editing is about sticking to those choices. Early in the process, putting in a list of cant’s and wont’s guides a writer. Working within constraints means problem solving and innovation instead of tricks and gimmicks.

Populating Your Garden

A story is, essentially, agents overcoming challenges. To develop an idea, a writer needs to consider the agents that exist in the world and the types of challenges possible to face. A mismatch of ability of the agents and severity of a challenge makes for a flat story or even parody.

Structure / Genre

The next level deals with the mechanics of presentation of ideas. This type of editing focuses on meeting certain expectations and sharpening awareness of the scope and history of stories.

3 vs 5 Act

Essentially the traditional story structure doesn’t differ conceptually between three and five acts. They both include a set up (protasis), a conflict (epitasis), and a culmination (catastrophe). The difference comes in the weight and length applied to the second and fourth components. Films tend to work in a strict fashion with single scenes or moments representing the turns in the story referred to as Pinch 1 and Pinch 2. A written work can make entire volumes expressing the building of conflict and the falling action represented in these two acts.

Rising and Falling Action (Perturbations)

While the act structure deals with the concept of rising and falling action, it tends to leave people thinking of them as one-off situations. A story can have multiple rises and falls throughout. Academically speaking, these are called perturbations, waves in the story world. Planning out perturbations gives a story shape and pacing. This is important when speaking of genre and managing reader expectations.

Tropes and Cliches

Meetings and exceeding reader expectations is key to a successful book. This can be a tightrope walk between offering what is familiar and creating unique, original surprises. Feeding into expectations too hard becomes cliché but ignoring or avoiding tropes leaves readers confused about what they are reading.

Genre Choice

Anymore, there are few books that can be described as falling into a singular genre, most are hybrids of three or more. Part of this is the push to find and fill a niche in a fragmented market. It is also a way to create novelty, blending two sets of expectations makes it easier to surprise in one area while providing a solid backbone of familiarity in another.

Content

One of the first things that pops into mind when hearing the word ‘editing’ is content editing. This is the same type of editing that video and film undergo. This includes taking the parts and making certain that they follow a progression, removing dead ends, and ensuring elements don’t get lost.

Continuity

Events that occur in a story effect other events. Many writers lose threads over time, forgetting what they set up or not seeing how one decision bars others. Continuity editing keeps a story world contiguous and prevents unexpected surprises for the writer and reader alike.

Arcs

Characters, places, objects, and ideologies grow and change throughout a story. These changes don’t have to be unidirectional, always growth and advancement, but they do need to follow a progression. A character mastering a skill out of nowhere leaves a bad taste for readers. Similarly, a major change in society and its views makes the story world feel like a skipping record.

Adherence

Even stories about the real world (literary fiction and non-fiction) need to adhere to certain rules. When rules aren’t enforced, it leaves the reader no anchor to engage and stay immersed in a story. One character being arrested in a scene and another avoiding that fate requires an explanation. Sans that explanation, the reader feels cheated by society or the writer and both are grounds to put down a book.

Line Editing

The other go-to image associated with editing is line editing. This is the nitty-gritty of looking at a story one sentence at a time and ensuring they fit together.

Syntax/Flow

Firstly, line editing aims to keep the time, voice, and point of view syntaxes straight. Tense swaps happen in dialog and certain types of descriptions but who is doing what to what at what time needs to be understandable.

Secondly, line editing is about keeping the sentences flowing into paragraphs and paragraphs into pages. A few stark or rough sentences can provide emphasis but too many abjurations can feel like driving on an unkempt country road.

Dialog Checks

This also has two major goals. First is to look at the word choices being used. People, real people, have a limited vocabulary and tend to speak with certain adages and phrasing. These are often case-dependent, which also needs to be considered.

The other goal is to avoid mislabeling speakers or creating emotion through dialog tags instead of within the dialog or scene. If a tag needs to provide context, it should do that upfront not after the fact.

Scanability

Much the same way as people eat with their eyes before their mouths, readers digest and feel a story by the page. Long, oppressive blocky paragraphs require dedication to push through, quick, staccato sentences indicate dialog and action.

Considering the shape of the paragraphs on a page can help to create and maintain tone both lyrically and visually.

Copy and Proofreading

The least glamorous portion of editing is telling the computer that it doesn’t know what you were trying to do and its suggestions are all garbage. I mean, proofreading.

Spelling and Typos

The most common place typos sneak through is when you have spelled a homonym correctly but used the wrong one. The computer doesn’t tend to catch these mistakes, but readers do. It is also important to look for aberrations within the spelling of names, it doesn’t take more than two Sara vs Sarah’s to leave a reader wondering what conjoined twin isn’t being fully described.

 “Some people are just willfully alliterate.”

Someone misspelled a word but it turned out to have a wonderful outcome, regardless.

Punctuation Grammar rules might change over time, but they do so slowly. Puttin all the right punctuation in the right places is the least fun component of writing and something best outsourced whenever possible.