The Editing Onion

Editing isn't a one-stop shop.

Editing. It's the dirty word of writing. For most, it's the part where the fun and creativity goes to sleep or drives off into the sunset, leaving you with a boring, tedious, time-consuming, and oh-so-not-at-all-fun WORK of finding out just had poorly you can spell and how much you use weak verbs and too many adverbs and why you should just chuck your Creative Writing MFA and go sell... Sorry. Got a little lost in the weeds there. 

But it doesn't have to be. 

Maybe it will never be fun exactly, but it doesn't have to totally suck either. 

And the best thing is that the more you learn to do it effectively, the better you tend to be at it. 

But, at its heart, what is it exactly?

Not That Kind of Onion

No need to cry about it, editing has layers, just like an onion. (I never said my puns were actually funny. Sorry.) Still, just like our sweet Vidalia metaphor, editing gets more specific and more useful the deeper you dig into it. 

When lots of folks think about editing, they are thinking of just one thing. That one thing might be proofreading. It might be copyediting. It might even be concept editing. Some folks might mentally jump straight to story editing. But each one of these isn't just a 'one thing.' They're all just a part of something bigger--the process of editing.

For me, rather than breaking it into categories like those, I prefer to think about the pieces of the story we're editing, hence my onion metaphor. 

Layer 1: Words

The atom of your story (yes, it's a new metaphor, just stay with me) is the individual word. It's the basic building block of your sentences, your paragraphs, your chapters, and your stories. It's the tree that makes the forest possible. And unlike that cliche, sometimes we writers can't see the trees for the forest. We're so busy noticing the sprawling majesty of the story that we can't or don't notice the individual words that created it. 

Do you ever proofread or copyedit your story and miss a wrong word simply because your eyes didn't tell your brain it was wrong? That's because you're not really looking at the words. You're looking at the thing they are doing together (and that's important too, but we'll get to that later). Your brain self-corrected because it knows the trick you're doing with those words, so it doesn't care that you used 'or' instead of 'of' or didn't put an 's' on that verb for subject-verb agreement. It simply doesn't care. It's looking at the bigger issue. 

That's why editing at the word level is so important. At this level, you need to be able to pull apart all those words like Legos and see them in smaller chunks--even as standalone bits. How do you take them apart?

You could always read slower and follow the bouncing finger across the page. But I've found two other methods I prefer that are more effective for me. 

1. Read chapter-sized chunks or short stories backwards. 

This means you are looking at each word in reverse order, out of the story context. It allows you to see the word as itself, as a single unit. I don't recommend this for novels, but it doesn't hurt to use it on a single chapter as you finish it.

2. Listen to your story in a robo-voice. 

Don't use fancy AI "natural speech" voices. Those sound too real, and they'll fool you. You need the clunkiest, most irritating computer voice you can find. The more stilted, the better. That way, you hear each word as a standalone sound, and you notice which ones really stand out as wrong to your ears. 

Layer 2: Sentences

Now we look at our sentences. I hear you, I really do. "What about my story?!" Hold on. We're getting there. Be patient. I know you have other stories to write. 

Is your sentence doing the thing you designed it to do? 

Does it get its action across? 

If it does, does it do it with a weak verb and an adverb or with a strong verb? 

Are you filling up space with ambiguous pronouns and passive constructions or with strong nouns? 

Are you putting the most important part of your sentence at the end or the beginning? Or, conversely, if you are writing a mystery and need to hide that clue where a reader will gloss over it, are you putting it in the middle of that sentence so it's easy to miss?

Is your tense consistent when it needs to be? What do I mean by "when it needs to be"? I mean, you may have a valid reason to jump from past to present for a weird flashback or character interview (Ed McBain does this masterfully). But in most cases, jumping tenses from past to present and back again is something we do accidentally. So look out for it. 

Layer 3: Paragraphs

Editing your paragraphs is where you start to get that weird mix of proofreading and actual story editing (to a degree). Why? Because a paragraph is one of the components that builds your story progression. It's a step along the way, so you have to look at it in several ways. 

First, on a proofreading level, check for a few things:

• Are you repeating the same word or phrase over and over? 

Example: I went back to the house, and when I was inside the back door, I fell down. After landing on my back... (you get the point, too many "backs" spoil the prose). Find a new word or rewrite the sentence in question.

• Is your tense consistent? 
  
  
• Does your paragraph do one thing? Does it serve one purpose? 

Each sentence in a paragraph should work together for a common goal. That's a lost art, particularly in fiction, where we treat paragraphs as just a list of things that happen. But each should strive to accomplish one thing, whether that is plot movement, a character beat, a downbeat for pacing, etc. 

Layer 4: Scenes

Now, I'm not talking about a whole chapter here, although sometimes a scene does take up a full chapter. But it doesn't have to. You may have several scenes in a single chapter. (Look for your "***" breaks.)

You need to treat your scene similarly to your paragraphs. They need to be a single cohesive whole that points to something significant in your story. A scene may establish character. A scene may be a point on which you pivot your plot in a new direction. A scene may be one of the steps along the way to your rising or falling action. A scene may even be after your story as a denouement. 

In many cases, for a gifted writer, a scene can do and will serve more than one of these purposes at a time. 

Does your scene have its own story structure? In other words, is a character trying to achieve something? Is something or someone getting in the way of that? And what happens to the character by that failure or that achievement?

Layer 5: Chapters/Short Stories

This one is really similar to scene editing. Even though it might (or might not) be made up of several scenes, a chapter still needs to maintain its own "story." That means the scenes that are a part of the chapter have some kind of story glue that binds them together. 

In a short story, this is also where you examine the high-altitude work that we'll cover below for the novel as a whole. 

In the chapter that's part of a longer work, whether novella or novel, this is where you make sure the chapter is living up to the goal you give it as the author. Is it supposed to be a stepping stone (the "B" to connect "A" and "C") between major plot points? Is it a relaxing character moment? 

If it doesn't seem to have any purpose that meets a character or story need, then on a conceptual level, that's a big clue to re-evaluate whether or not that chapter needs to be a part of your novel at all. 

This is where the story editing process gets painful. This is where the whole "kill your darlings" cliche comes into play. This is the genuinely hard work of editing. 

Layer 6: The Whole Shebang (The Novel/Novella)

Now, this is the fun part. It's also the tricky part. This is the high-altitude view of your story. The ultimate question is this one: DOES MY STORY WORK NOW THAT IT'S FINISHED? 

That's always going to be a matter of a lot of moving parts:

• Are my characters consistent?
  
  
• Do my characters fit the tone of my novel?
  
  
• Did I introduce characters or story elements that ended up forgotten and left by the wayside that I need to weave back into the narrative?
  
  
• Does my theme/tone remain cohesive throughout the book, or does it change midway? If it does, then which one needs to be the primary tone?
  
  
• Do I have to highjack my main character to make them do something against their nature (as I've demonstrated it throughout the book) in order to make my plot happen? If so, is there a more natural way to make that plot point happen? Or do I need to rework the plot? Or rework the character from the beginning to make that choice more believable? 
  
  
• Do I EARN my ending? 
  
  
• Do I really need that extra chapter for a denouement?
  
  
• Are details consistent throughout the book? If something happened three days ago in one chapter, did I make sure to add the extra day to make it four days ago in the next chapter? (if a day has gone by)
  
  
• Have I done a search for key names--characters, places, events, etc.--to keep them consistent?
  
  
• Even though I've read the story multiple times, do I still feel like it's the book I wanted it to be? Remember that old nugget of "writing the book you want to read that doesn't yet exist." Does that still hold true after reading it, especially multiple times?

If you thought it was painful to have to redo a chapter, wait until you have to redo your novel because something you planned early on no longer works. This layer is deep. It's less about the minutiae of proofreading details and more about the big structural issues. It's all about examining the skeleton of your book and making sure it still fits the story you're hanging on it. 

It's Not Done Piecemeal (Unless You Need It That Way)

None of these layers of editing happens in a vacuum. In fact, they often happen together, simultaneously. The better and more effective you become as a self-editor, the more comfortable you become at seeing issues in each of the levels of editing at the same time. 

Now, having said that, as you are learning to become a better editor, you may want to split the work into layers as I've outlined here. It might make sense to you to check your words as you also work on fixing your paragraphs. Or you might be beginning your journey in editing, and it might make more sense for the time being to do each layer by itself until the skills become natural to you in the same way a sword becomes an extension of a samurai's katana. 

Ultimately, it's up to you. The most important thing is to make a commitment to editing your work into the best final product it can be.