I look forward to the posts on Editing. I think I’ll be doing more editing than writing next year now that I have a couple of decent first drafts under my belt.

For Ms. Browne. It seems craft is like peeling the proverbial onion, always more to learn. How do I know when to quit revising?

I’m writing a Nanowrimo novel so the editor is of at the moment. But I will have a draft in about a months time. The standard advice seem to be to let the draft lie for a time (a week, a month) before picking it up again. But I know from experience (academic writing) that when I get to the end of a draft I already know about a ton of things I want to fix.

Should I still let it lie or immediately fix the things that I feel needs fixing?

And then what Lynda said, when are you done?

I tried it, and was very pleased with the results, so I sent the chapter to one of my beta readers who had been bored at several points before (definite problem with the writing there). He loved how the rewrite made things so much better. The action was clearer. The dialog, more crisp.

I had expected to get no more than a 7% cut from the GAP, but my second draft was 16% shorter, and all of it improvements. One reason the GAP worked so well for me is that I can be wordy and take several words to say what really only needs two words to express. GAP helped me spot that.

“Self Editing for Fiction Writers” is one of my favorite books on writing so far, along with Noah Lukeman’s First Five Pages. I found both very reader friendly. That’s important for some of us.

With my research and review manuscripts I have to force myself to stop editing and send it to the other authors. By the time I submit, I’m sick of the thing and never want to see it again (but, then have to go through the whole peer-review process which can be a complete nightmare :-P).

Anna, I have a tendency to rewrite as I go (I’m dyslexic, so my writing is ripe with errors). It’s a hard habit to break. I’m trying to limit it to when the characters throw me for a loop, like when I found out two of my characters were brothers or a character takes a sudden turn that doesn’t mesh with previous actions; otherwise, I forget.

One thing that helps me from going back and constantly re-edit myself is to make use of Word’s change tracker (I picked this up from my scientific manuscripts). I’ll insert comments/questions to myself as I write. The highlighter is also useful for marking problematic sections of narrative or dialogue. I use different colors for problem dialogue or places where I’m telling, instead of showing. I can then easily find the problem area later after I’ve let it ferment for a while. Also, I’ll often find the answers to my problem areas later on in the narrative.

And another question for Renni…any suggestions for those of us who are dyslexic? I spend a lot of time going over what I’ve just written to make certain it’s close to being grammatically correct (I rely heavily on spell check)…even then I still end up having to do a lot of editing later. I’ve gone over this post at least a dozen times to make sure I haven’t completely embarrassed myself.

Question: When writing for youth, is it okay to switch POV? I’ve heard lots of reasons NOT to do this when writing for young people (ages 10-14), but in my WIP the two main characters are separated for a while (due to a Disaster)and we get a look in the less-dominant one’s head while we find out how she returns to her friend. Am I doomed?

Thank you for your time!

I vouch for Ron’s suggestion of color coding sections you know are awkward. It’s a way to keep going without
losing momentum or worrying about finding it again. Often the next section provides a resolution for fixing the bad spot.

There are so many aspects of editing (spelling and grammar, word choice/usage, sentence structure, theme, etc.) What order would you suggest attacking them in?

My biggest question is: what is the difference when editing a short story versus a novel? What do you trim in a short story that you normally wouldn’t in a novel? How do you decide what’s too much or too little when the story is so much smaller?

Currently, I have two finished short stories and one novel under serious construction.

There are changes I want to make to some of the conversations and events in what’s written so far before I *can* continue writing the rest of the story (the changes will affect what I’m currently writing and I’m afraid I’ll forget or it won’t make sense to me later at re-write stage). But I AM CERTAIN that if I go back into those chapters, I’ll get sucked into editing stuff that I should leave alone for now. I have inserted some track changes comments, but it’s better if I stay out of the ms entirely. So I took the time to make a new brief outline of the chapters so far showing the additions and changes and I hope to follow THIS instead of getting sucked back into the ms. We’ll see if it works. Any advice would be appreciated.

Okay, another question: Once I cut out a lot of the flab, I’m left with a long series of very short paragraphs. Is this a no-no, and if it is, is there any way to remedy the situation?

I’m interested in her views on this type of editing, even though most everything says not to do it this way. I know it adds to the writing time but does shorten the editing time.