Would You Like Editing With That?

 

 

(kitteh snurched from Lolcats)

I spend much of my time editing, both for myself and for other people. Some days I enjoy it. Some days I think it is a punishment from the universe not only for my sins in this life, but also the sins I’ve committed in, oh say, my past ten lives. And maybe someone else’s.

The fact remains, though, that editing teaches me new stuff each time I do it, and reminds me of the stuff I already know. It is, truth be told, learning by mistake – yours and those of other people. It’s like putting your hand on the hot plate until you realize that it is going to hurt and finally think ‘Ah-ha, not gonna do that anymore.’ Copy editing is about hunting out the things that slow down your prose, that make it flabby and unexciting and less than it has the potential to be. For your own sake, learn how to edit or find an anal retentive reader-editor who will go through your work with the highlighters of doom and show you where your problems are occurring and recurring. Structural editing is an entirely different fish – it’s about shifting flesh, growing new limbs on your fiction, changing the shape of a body – and I suck at it, which is why I have other people to look at the structural side of my work.

I am, however, good with the copy editing, so: some thoughts that have been bouncing around in the birdcage of my skull for the past few weeks:

Crutch words
If you know – and if you’re even a slightly self-aware writer you do know this – that you have words you habitually over-use then you should also know to go through you work on the first pass and DELETE THOSE WORDS. If it helps, if you’re a disorganized kind of writer and find it difficult to see those words because you’ve developed a sort of willful blindness to them, then make a list. Surely someone has said to you at some point ‘Man, you use the word susurrus/proffer/zygote an awful lot’, so write them down. You need to know and remember your own weaknesses. Every time you finish a story then click on the good old ‘Find’ button. Through the magical properties of Word you will be taken straight to the offending mot and you can either get rid of it entirely or substitute something else for it. Fix this kind of stuff before it goes out into the world and causes you shame.

One problem I’ve noticed with some writers’ work is when they replace a crutch word that’s been pointed out to them, they will replace it throughout the text with the same replacement word. So, my solution for this is a piece of anal retentive nerdery: create a table in either Word or Excel (whatever your preferred fetish) and entitle the columns Crutch Word, Page Number, Replacement Word. At the end of this process, you can see what you’ve done in tabular form – and you will notice very quickly if you’ve sinned once more.

This sort of thing can also occur with phrases and actions – do you have all your characters at one point or another clench their fists? Run their hands through their hair?[i] Lick their lips? If yes, then please add these to your table and search and destroy appropriately. Why? Because (a) it’s boring for a reader to see all characters doing the same thing, and (b) because your characters are distinguished from one another not only by how they speak, by their various desires, but also by their actions, big and small.

You may also need to de-that-erise your work – how many times does the word ‘that’ appear in the text? Are all those starring roles necessary or will a cameo do just fine? How many times do you say something ‘seems’ or ‘appears’ or is ‘like’ something else? Indeed, have you had an attack of “the somes [sic] of all fears” – ‘something’, ‘somehow’, ‘somewhere’, ‘someone’ – instead of giving specific details that provide clarity for your reader?[ii]

In a first draft, even a second draft, repetition is understandable. By your final draft, it’s a hanging offence – what? Oh, they tell me no capital punishment is allowed for writing crime recidivism. *sighs dramatically* Repetition, in small measure, can be wonderful. It can give a sentence or paragraph a cadence, a lovely rhythm. It can make your prose sing. When over-used it simply looks like lazy, uninformed, boring writing.

With Vocabulary, Bigger is Better
No, not the size of the word itself (although on occasion the multisyllabics can rock your sentence), but the number of words you know. Make sure you’ve a decent dictionary and a portly, respectable thesaurus[iii]; one of those desk calendars with wordly definitions; better yet, subscribe to the OED online and get them to send you a word of the day. As a friend of mine, Amanda Le, has often said in frustration, “The thesaurus is your friend, please use it.”

My point? Keep learning new words; collect them as other nerds collect stamps and Star Wars figures. But (and this is the important bit), use them – take them out of their original packaging and use them.

Synonyms in particular can expand exponentially the number of things you can say in a paragraph. Shared meanings connect synonyms, but it’s the fact that those meanings can vary ever so slightly that can enrich your writing. This is, of course, semiotics-lite. A word can have many meanings, can signify a variety of things. The meaning in any one place depends on the context in which the word is found. Using this technique in your writing can help keep your fiction fresh and to ensure unnecessary repetition is kept to a minimum.  More words, more meanings = an enriched, layered, nuanced text. Huzzah!

Equally, don’t go using big words just for the sake of it – a five-dollar word can clutter up your prose as surely as a spilled box of Lego can clutter up the lounge room floor and can have easily as many pointy corners. Big words can hide your story, obfuscate meaning. If you have jammed in so many big words that a reader thinks ‘You know, if I hit myself over the head a couple of times with this dictionary, I’ll just pass out and I won’t have to read this crap’, then you’ve got a problem.

Editing is Not Having Your Skin Peeled* Off – It Just Feels Like It
Editing, not unlike publishing, is showing people your baby and worrying that someone is going to say ‘Hey, lady, where’d you get that monkey?’ Invariably, someone will mistake your baby for a monkey – I’m sorry, that’s the harsh reality and you need to get used to it and grow a thicker skin … maybe some kind of fur covering. Yes, I know it hurts. I am a Clarion South grad – I know what it is like to have your epidermis removed 16 times in the space of a 3hr session, 5 days a week, for 6 solid weeks. In fact, almost 8 months later and I’ve only just realized that this is why, when I’ve been about to edit my own work, I break out in a rash and want to cry. But I suck it up, postpone the pity party (although I do steal the choclit and fairybread first), and just get it done.

Because here’s the thing to keep in the forebrain, the backbrain, and the middle-y-bit-brain: Editing is about improving your work. It’s not about being told how clever you are. D’uh.

With a bad editor (sometimes a frustrated writer who is trying to edit the work into something s/he would have written if they could), editing is about as much fun as a cavity search. With a good editor, it can be a revelation. With someone who understands your writing, with someone who wants the work to be the best it can be in and of itself, it can be fabulous. You will still have those smacking-self-in-forehead-how-could-I-have-been-so-stoopid-moments. You will still howl at the sky, rub ashes in your hair and rend your sackcloth garments, crying ‘I am an eejit’. You will still vow to never over-use the word ‘zygote’ again. And you will learn. And you will fix your fiction. And it will be better and it will shine and you will be a happy writer.[iv]

Sooo, what do you look for in an editor? Can one distinguish a good editor from a bad editor by the simple expedient of looking for wings on one, horns and a tail on the other? Alas, no. How about a white hat-black hat scenario? Nope. I’m gonna have to sleep on that one. I’ll get back to you. Go, talk among yourselves, go for coffee, maybe have some cake, take a walk by the river.

 * In an amusing irony, Karen Miller just emailed me to tell me about a spelling mistake. It’s often said that one’s purpose in life may simply be to be an example to others. Well, there ya go.

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[i] This is my personal recidivism = hands through hair all the damned time. *sigh*

[ii] Yes, I am aware of the irony of me having just written ‘something’ twice in the preceding sentence. Thank you.

[iii] I heart the Oxford dictionaries.

[iv] See how I did that? Using repetition to establish a rhythm?