Over on The First Offender's Blog, Lori has been blogging about the editing process of a book and what each writer does. It's interesting to see so many different ways of achieving the same end result. Here's my response:
I love editing; I think it's my favorite part of the process because it feels like I'm taking raw clay and making it into something fun and useful and finished. (I hesitated to say "beautiful" because I write humorous action/capers.)
My process starts after I have two or three trusted readers' feedback. If there's a consensus about something being off, etc., I know where the major problems are. Since I come from screenwriting which had a fairly strict attitude about page count, I'm used to going through and cutting, which is what I'm doing right now for book 1. I go through the book and ask myself questions and mark the spots:
Does the pacing flag anywhere?
Is there consistency in a characters' actions / reactions? If not, is there a good reason why not?
Have I reached deeply enough into each character so that they're unique and not just an amalgamation of traits?
Do the stakes continually escalate? Is anything solved too easily?
Does everything flow logically? If I leave a question open somewhere, or a set up open, have I paid them off by the end? Is the pay off satisfactory?
Then I start looking at the smaller things... are my verbs the best choice? Am I giving the exact right visual detail? If I'm using a metaphor, does it feel original and/or organic to that character's POV? Is each character's dialog unique enough so that if you saw it on the page without signifiers, would you know who was speaking?
I also try to pay attention to word choice, looking for the specific choice which will make the text spring to life. While doing this, I try to find repetitive usages. (This apparently doesn't always work, as my editor discovered... there for about three chapters, everyone smirked. I'm not even fond of the word; I have no clue what happened.)
Finally, since I write humor, I constantly look at the humorous bits, dialog or action, and work to see if I can make it funnier. Sometimes the first or second choice will be amusing, but if you push for the unexpected (as long as it's still in character), it can make the reader laugh out loud. It's reaching for that unexpected which takes the most effort, because it must stay in character and work within the tone / events of the story.
What do you do? Do you work in layers? Do it all at once as you go? Or edit as you write the first draft and are pretty much done when you hit THE END?
I love revising, too! It's where I feel I'm my most creative. Writing it down - the bones, the roadmap - is very hard, usually. Even if I know exactly what I'm doing or where I'm going, I hate getting it out there that first time. But after I do, I get to go back and really play with it. I may be one of the few writers I know whose revising/editing generally consists of adding, rather than subtracting, because my first draft is so bare bones.
Posted by: Melanie Lynne Hauser at March 17, 2006 08:36 AMI work in layers, I guess. The first layer (draft) is always the worst, where I wonder why the hell I'm even writing because I suck at it. When I finish a project, I do let it sit - I haven't been under a serious deadline crunch yet - so that's not a problem for me. Gives me time to think things through. Then I fix holes, characterizations that don't work and usually discover something else I need to add, or change. Finally, I print the whole thing out, get out my highlighters and colored post-it strips and polish and fine tune and line edit every single page. Get rid of repetitive words - my personal pet peeves - any form of look, step, press, move, push that I can change to punch up the action. I don't avoid those words entirely, its impossible, I just want to make sure the usage fits and couldn't be changed to make it snappier.
Thanks for the great post. I love reading about how other authors work through the process.