An Extra Post on Editing

I've been trying to keep to a schedule of posting every Tuesday, and I do recognise that today is Wednesday, but I found something that I thought was interesting, especially in light of yesterday's post. Nick Hornby, writer of many novels which I have never read, has this to say about editing:

And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words—entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, backbreaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers—treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind!

I don't have any comments to make on this, really, just that it's good to hear that the 'kill everything that doesn't further the plot' argument isn't universally accepted just yet.

The Woes of Editing

Since some time mid-last year, I have been pretending to edit a 100,000 word monstrosity that I wrote with absolutely no planning – where by ‘pretending to edit’ I mean that after over a year I am currently up to scene… six? I was reading around writing blogs recently, and I found an author who said something along the lines of “I like writing, but I love editing.” To which I said, “Oh God, why?” I thought this great disparity of opinion warranted a blog post on editing, in the hope of answering some questions.

I started editing by listing my scenes in a table with columns for POV, setting, key events and characters present. That gave me a chance to read of my novel and have happy thoughts like, “This is actually not bad,” and also, “What word was I even trying to write there?”

Next, I tried to write down the plot from the point of view of each key character, so I could understand what each character knew, and when. This was kind of important because the novel is a kind of spies-and-international-intrigue thing, and the lack of planning meant people were spouting pieces of information, and then being horrified to discover the same information four chapters later.

So this was all going well and good. I got a handle on my plot, and then wrote down a revised list of scenes, and got to work cutting the scenes I didn’t need, and revising the ones I did. Before I even started the revising part, I had cut about half of my manuscript, including some of my favourite characters. It made me sad. But I have told myself I shall bring them back, and I suppose at least if I completely cut a character, I can transport them to a new story of their very own.

Then I got to the part that made me sad – revising scenes. I ended up deleting whole chunks of things that were not only my favourite parts, but also the favourite parts of the two people who have read my novel for me. I did this because I figured that not only were they not doing anything for the plot, but also because they were always the things that were just a little bit ridiculous, like the sinister criminal mastermind speaking in code with phrases such as “The orange walrus howls at the hour of darkness,” an extended joke about the colour of the protagonists underwear (because I am classy like this).

I deleted all these ridiculous bits, and then I realised that the reason I had liked the start of this story was because it was just a little bit ridiculous, and the characters were kind of odd. But all the editing advice I had read – even from the very first writing book I had ever discovered, while I was still at primary school – had told me that there was a ‘making it thin’ stage, where you got rid of everything that wasn’t strictly necessary.

In order to procrastinate from this task, which was sucking my happiness like Dementor, I went online to read what other writers had said about editing. I found a piece of cheery warning, formatted thusly:

THINGS YOU LOVE WILL DIE.

So that was heartening. Feeling a sense of solidarity – at least I wasn’t the only one deleting things I loved – I went back to editing, and managed to get through several scenes feeling gradually more enthusiastic about the whole affair. But it has left me wondering – is it really necessary for things you love to die? (That sentence came out way more deep-sounding than I intended.) Am I just a wuss who doesn't like deleting things? I mean sure, some things might not aid a streamlined plot, but does that actually make them bad? Chances are, if you love something, there’s a reason. And if your readers love it too, then why should you delete it? After all, if you’re not writing to please yourself and your readers… well, I don’t know what you’re doing.