We’ve made it through another week! Today we’ll cover the next phase in my editing process as Editing Path Part 4 covers the Orange Edit. This week was busy but good. Next week, there won’t be a blog post and I’ll go into all that in two weeks. I hope things are going well, but here’s what’s going on with me:
Drawing from the Well
I didn’t get as far this week as I would have liked, but I did get a little done. The upside is that I am identifying more pieces that need to be added to round and smooth this book out, but that does mean there’s more work to be done. It’s all part of the process.
Page 81/276
38,897/143,920 Words
Filling the Well
I only finished two books this week, but one of them was a biggie: The Bible. I’ve been reading it for the second time for a year. I learned so much thanks to the Bible Project and I feel like I understand it so much more than ever before. The other book was The Song of the Jubilee. I couldn’t get into it. I’m finishing the sequel, The Gambit with Perfection, but I have no idea what is going on. I won’t continue with the series.
#40/105 for #ProjectBookworm2023
Season 2 began this week with the Race to World First for Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible, the new raid in WoW. I don’t follow RWF, but it’s still a fun time. The Race is over now, though. Still, the new patch is great.
Continuing in watching movies I should have seen a long time ago (and movies with Tom Hanks), my wife and I watched The Green Mile this weekend. I’m still thinking about this movie. That should come as no surprise since it’s Stephen King and those books and movies make me think, but I’m blown away by how good it is. It’s on HBO Max.
Well Chat
We did our first read-through and we’ve gone over the broad strokes. Now, it’s time to get into the fine details. This comes in four large pieces.
Part 1 looks at overall internal consistency. This means things need to make sense from the beginning of the book to the end and at every point in between. If characters are traveling from one place to another, it can’t be said that it took one amount of time on one page and a different amount on another. If a character is standing, they can’t suddenly stand up again. If it’s summer in one chapter, the next can’t be in winter (without some kind of connecting tissue, though even that is one heck of a stretch the way I write). This does require another read-through, but I often know what to look for by now because of all the notes I’ve made in the Brown and Red Edits.
After that, I get into physical descriptions and settings. These are vital to give the reader a strong visual of who is on the page and a sense of a real place. This is also a delicate balance, though. This step often involves removing description about half as often as adding it. If you harp on a character’s “startling green eyes” too often, readers eventually set the book down to say, “We get it! She has green eyes. They’re pretty. What are three other things about her.” And that’s when you’ve lost them. You want your descriptions to pull the reader in, not push them out. Thanks to Hello Future Me here and here for the copious notes on this subject.
The penultimate step is not always necessary (and I’m always grateful when it’s minimal). This is where I look for any info dumps. These are a big no-no. These are worse than over-describing people and places. I have a short, but powerful, list from K.M. Weiland that helps recharacterize these by trimming the fat, adding a monkey’s paw, and rebuilding them through drama. It’s a lot, but it makes info dumps a thing of the past.
Lastly is a big fat look at Show, Don’t Tell. This comes from a little YouTube channel called Quotidian Writer. The list here goes into a lot of detail ways to avoid and fix instances where I’m telling my reader something that should be shown. There are definitely times when it’s appropriate to tell. The adage of Show, Don’t Tell IS NOT universal. It’s importance, however, cannot be understated. So I spend a lot of time refining areas where I feel like I’m telling and should be showing. Again, I’ve got a fair sense of this by this point as I’ve gone over the manuscript close to a dozen times.
So, after ALL of this, I’ve finally made it to my third draft. Things are starting to look sharp at this point. The next step in the Blue Edit is to tighten it up. It’s like the Orange Edit was working out for size and bulk and the Blue Edit is doing high-rep-low-weight workouts to burn fat and lean down into a fierce machine. We’ll get into that in the next blog post. See you in two weeks!
The Brown Edit– First Read-ThroughThe Red Edit – Developmental EditThe Orange Edit – Fine Detail Edit- The 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