GAH!

If you're having trouble--print out a few chapters, sit down with a cup of something hot and a red pen and have at it. Some people recommend that you 'edit' somewhere different from where you 'write,' but I find that the two are not completely separate, so it doesn't bother me to edit in my favorite place--sitting in a comfortable chair in the sunlight. When I'm editing, I discover that I need to add stuff, so I'm writing while I edit (and editing while I write normally.)

A lot of advice says to read through the entire book as fast as you can to get the overall feel--this is probably especially good if your plot wandered off on you. The idea is that you're not supposed to change little things until you take care of the big things. I always ignore this, preferring to edit as I read. I used to print out right away, but now I like to clean it up online by going through it a couple of times before I print anything. I do manage to get through the book without overdoing the editing on the first chapter or two, though, so at some point I start editing less, and just ensure that the overall story makes sense.

If you do edit on hard-copy, don't get so far ahead that inputting the changes feels like too much work. Just mark-up a chapter, then the next time you're in the mood to watch something mundane, type in the changes while you're watching TV. Then do the next chapter. And so on.

Plan on submitting your first chapter to critiquecircle.com in two weeks--that always gets me busy revising and polishing since I hate submitting stuff that has errors that I already know how to fix.

Oh, and don't worry about getting it perfect the second time. You can always go through the whole thing again (and again, and...)

I'm not even to that point yet... I'm too busy removing redundant text. *Sigh*

But I'll keep your advice in mind!

Some suggestions for editing:

- read the story out loud. Where you stumble, rephrase the sentence

-search for places to put concrete detail

-get rid of adverbs, stock adjectives that mean nothing (beautiful etc), unnecessary brothers and sisters of "said"

-make sure every paragraph starts and ends with tension. first and last sentences are always the most important, the ones in between are "graveyard-ed"

-paint the background of your scene so the action isn't happening in a white room

-remove unnecessary beats (if you are anything like me)

-ask yourself how your main character would react (lots of situations where the main character passively watches/listens to something, it eventually becomes a problem)

-decrease repetition of ideas

-replace tired descriptions with fresher ones

-visual pacing (paragraph vs. dialog)

-ask yourself "could I make it more difficult for the MC by introducing more conflict in this scene?"

-make sure chapters and scenes have a beginning, middle and ending
also, make sure there is conflict in every scene

that's all I can think about now

I wish I could do that but it's currently going beyond me. I am a bad individual.

I actually enjoy the editing process more than the initial writing. Grab thesaurus, deconstruct each line, each passage, tweak and change. It’s my nature. I wrote for Tim's suggested corvale (sp?) contest an entry the past two nights and I tweaked that 850 word bad boy like a massage therapist on a whiplash patient! (it''l be posted this weekend on the site).

That’s why you all have 66-100k words and I don’t though. Different mindsets.

How about some suggestions on how to get started with this?

Editing is one of those iterative cathartic moments... kind of like ripping of a bandage to see the scab underneath... whereupon you rip off the scab, only to find another bandage under which is yet another scab....

Then you begin to realize that not all is as it seems...

Actually, it has been an awfully long while since I last edited something. I need to get back in the writing/editing saddle again.

--Tim