We went to Italy! Before I get into Editing Path Part 5 and continue working toward a return to normalcy, I wanted to share the most amazing trip with you. My wife and I went to Italy for 11 days of travel, wine, pasta, and fun with friends new and old. A friend of mine from college got married and invited us all out for it. It was an absolute blast and I can’t wait to go back. Here are some photos.
Drawing from the Well
Nothing to see here because of the aforementioned vacation. More to see next week.
Page 81/276
38,897/143,920 Words
Filling the Well
I only finished two books the last two weeks: The Gambit with Perfection and the Phantom of the Earth Publisher’s Pack. As with Song of the Jubilee, I just couldn’t get into it, so we’re moving on. I did, however, read A LOT of Wizard’s First Rule on the plane rides. I even learned what the eponymous rule is. It’s SO GOOD. It’s blisteringly long but I’m enjoying the heck out of it. I look forward to finishing it soon.
#40/105 for #ProjectBookworm2023
No gaming updates this week. That’ll probably drop off for a while.
Continuing in watching movies I should have seen a long time ago (and movies with Tom Hanks AGAIN), my wife and I watched several on our flights while I was away. We saw The Whale, which was wild and moving, The Terminal, which was a crazy true-based story, Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was insane, exciting, and awesome, and, lastly, Downton Abbey: A New Era, which was a fitting and moving conclusion to the entire series. Great run of movies to hop across the Atlantic and back.
Well Chat
We’re up the third draft now after reading, collating, and refining the book. Now we go even further into what many would consider minutiae, but it’s still important to me. The Blue Edit comes in five large pieces.
The first part is looking at the opening line of every chapter. By this point, I’ve read them a lot. I have a good handle on what is in each chapter. What I do here is craft a sharp, attractive hook to put on the front of each chapter. This is intended to pull the reader in. I treat each chapter, in this review, like a short story. How do I hook someone enough (especially during a POV change) to get them to willingly and excitedly put the last chapter out of their mind in favor of the next step in the adventure? A killer opening line is the answer.
After this, I spent three steps strengthening the prose by removing weaknesses. The first of these is the word “very.” I try to be careful of using this word at all, but it sneaks in. I have a chart goads me to translate weak phrases like “very afraid” into stronger adjectives like “terrified.” This process usually doesn’t take long, but it is important. The one exception here is dialogue. I still look at it, but if it is in a character’s nature to use very, I let them.
Next up is a series of weak words that usually just need to be cut. These include examples like “started” and “suddenly.” This takes a little more time because there are more unique examples, but is equally important. Now, there are times for some of these, but a review allows me to trim out those that are just thought shorthand that add nothing and actually take something away from the manuscript.
The last strengthening exercise is looking at filter words. Anything that feeds the experience through a character using words like “felt” or “saw” weakens the manuscript. This is more difficult as it’s a much “softer” approach. I can’t necessarily find and replace like I could with weak words and very instances. The advantage of doing this, though, is that it brings the reader closer to the action. This is, obviously, more engaging and improves the book.
Finally, I get down to what I call “Compression and Balance.” I do one complete pass over every sentence and paragraph in the book to find ways to say the same thing in fewer words. I also look for areas that can be wholesale cut because they’re unnecessary world-building. That’s Compression. Balance looks at things structurally to find out if the word count is within 1% of equality across the Eighths of the book. I covered these in four posts in the past (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). I think I’ll review and repost those soon. Either way, the important part here is to make sure that the pacing feels consistent across the major plot points throughout the book.
This is getting deep, but we’ve arrived at the fourth draft. We’re close to done here. The next step in the Purple Edit for really deep work. We’ll get into that in the next blog post. See you next week!
The Brown Edit– First Read-ThroughThe Red Edit – Developmental EditThe Orange Edit – Fine Detail EditThe Blue Edit – Line Edit- The Purple Edit – ProWritingAid Edit
- The Gold Edit – Edit Out Loud Edit
- The Green Edit – Final Read-Through and Polish
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG