S03EP02: The Novel Editing Process - TRANSCRIPT

S03EP02: The Novel Editing Process

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Hello, again! I'm back with another podcast episode after several months of silence. Here's the transcript for the newest episode, where I discuss my editing process for my novels as it currently stands. This episode was released May 19, 2023. I'm experimenting with longer episodes, as well as going off-script more often. I hope it's turning out well.

 

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Episode Transcript

Hello, and welcome back to Hyba is Writing. I’m your host, Hyba, and it’s good to be back! I’ll start this episode off with addressing the prolonged absence: Hey, it’s been a while. I’ve been dealing with stuff. Burnout and work, mostly. I wish I had a more glamorous reason for my disappearance, but it’s really just. Adult life kicking my butt. But I learned some lessons, left my job, and realized that I need to focus my efforts on doing something I love. Wouldn’t you know it? As soon as I had that realization, my motivation and creativity started seeping back into my bones.

So, today we are going to be relaunching Season 3 of the podcast with this episode, and since I’m at a place where I’m revising and editing two standalone murder mystery novels, I decided that today, I’m going to be sharing my current editing process.

I have found that the editing phase can be a force to be reckoned with. If you have ever reached that stage in your story-writing, you might feel similarly. At this point in the writing experience, if you’re writing a novel, you’re usually faced with this huge document which needs editing, and sometimes it’s hard to even know where to begin. To make matters more complex, there’s more than just one kind of editing. There are developmental and conceptual edits, there are structural and evaluation edits, there are line edits, there are copyedits & proofreading, and so on. I’m sure there are others out there that I haven’t listed. There are a lot of different sub-levels that exist under the umbrella of editing.

So, when you enter the editing phase, it can be a bit overwhelming. Of course, writing the book is hard enough, but going over the book and combing through it – or looking at it through different-tinted glasses – that can be a beast of its own. And that’s the beast that I am currently doing battle with.

In fact, this can seem so overwhelming that you may get that startup procrastination, where the hardest part of working on a thing is just getting started. I have found, however, that if you organize your editing process and put a system in place, it can make things seem a lot less overwhelming. So, in hopes that this can give you an idea of how best to put your own editing system in place and break it down into manageable chunks, I’m going to be sharing my process as it currently stands.

Now, obviously, all of us have different skills, different writing approaches, and our manuscripts have different needs. So it stands to reason that you’ll probably have to change and adapt whatever systems you create to better suit your needs in general, but also the needs of the particular project that you’re working on. Which means that there probably will never be a one-size-fits-all solution. I myself have gone through many kinds of editing processes, and the one that I’m currently using is the one that works best for the two projects I’m working on.

Alright, enough talking. Let’s just get started.

My writing process is a little lengthy. I prefer to edit as I write. I know – I know – there’s a lot of advice out there that goes against this, because it stifles your ability to write freely and so on – but I really have tried a bunch of different approaches and at the moment this is still the one that suits me best. I try not to overcomplicate my writing process any more than it needs to be – what works for me works for me and that’s that.

So that generally means that in terms of grammar, spelling, sentence structure and syntax – my drafts end up looking quite alright when it comes to these things. What I’m not always great at is plot – I’m good with the first part of the story, the rising action – basically, Act I. Somewhere in Act II, I start losing it. I think there’s a very technical term for that – the muddy middle, or the sagging middle, or something along those lines. I’m very, very familiar with the concept of the muddy middle. I hate it. With a passion. And usually I bump into this wall because I don’t do a lot of plotting and planning beforehand – or, if I do, I end up changing my mind halfway through writing and end up without a plot again. Anyway, my point is, I need to work on plot and plot holes when it comes to edits.

That’s generally the first thing that I feel like I have to approach, so that’s Phase One of my editing process. Revising and editing the plot. I believe this is pretty much the same as a developmental or structural edit. In the past, I have approached that in a lot of different ways. Recently, however, I found myself looking at my draft – this huge, almost 200-page document – and feeling at a loss for where to start. So many pages. So many words. So many scenes. How to keep track of it all? Where to even begin?

Overwhelming.

Since I’m working on murder mystery, I found a murder mystery framework online and used it as a kind of checklist as I checked over the plot of my story and where I can improve it. So, for example, the framework might say, “Make the crime around which your story centres a unique, unusual, and baffling crime.”

So, I’ll analyze that. Is the crime in my murder mystery unique? Has it been set up to be baffling and unusual? In one of my murder mystery novel drafts, the answer is Yes! In the second murder mystery novel, the answer is Kind of. And then my next step is to decide whether or not I really need to change the nature of the crime in the second novel to make it more unique, and if so, how to do that, and how hat might affect my plot.

That’s just a tiny example of how I might use a framework to go through a story’s plot, piece by piece, break it down, and fix it up where it may need fixing. In some places, I’ll realize that I stray from the framework – but I’ll decide that I don’t mind because I want the story to go in that direction. I’ll make decisions, review all the clues and red herrings, make sure it all makes sense and connects in a way that is logical, and of course revise all of the subplots to make sure I’m not leaving any gaping plot holes in my story.

You don’t need to use a framework, obviously. It’s just something that I’ve found helps guide me in an area that I will admit I’m not all that skilled. Plotting is sometimes the bane of my writing existence. Alas, even if I start off with discovery writing, plotting must be done, sooner or later.

This is also where I take a look at my characters. Are all of the characters introduced necessary to the story? If they aren’t, do I really want to keep them anyway? In one of these drafts, I had a character who took up a huge part of the story – she was in about one-third of all of the scenes in the book – and during this editing-the-plot phase, I actually made some pretty big plot changes that essentially removed the need for her entire character because I’d gotten rid of that entire sub-plot. That’s a pretty sizeable chunk of plot. Poof. Gone. No need for it.

This major revision can sometimes be really challenging, because it’s essentially critiquing your work and accepting that certain elements – which you might love – need to be cut or changed. But it forces you to figure out what’s important in your story. And that does sometimes mean making tough decisions. I like this character enough that I might give her her own story – but I don’t need her in this one.

So, I’m trying to get into this headspace where I can confidently say: OK, I working on this draft, I did all the fun things I wanted to do with it and I’ve had my fun – but now it’s time to get professional, and that means doing what’s best for the story, not just what I like most.

You can also have a checklist of plot items you may want to focus on. Just having something to guide you can really help you sharpen your focus on areas that you need to give attention to. Plot in general is such a big part of your story. It comprises of your overarching plot, your subplots, and by extension your character arcs. It’s kind of a pretty massive undertaking to review edit plot, so having some kind of helpful checklist or framework beside me to guide this first stage of my editing process is a huge help.

One of the things that makes this easier, though, is that for the first time – in my case, anyway – you’ll have the overall big picture of your story, and that can help to identify the powerful parts of the story and the parts that are not so powerful. Not every part has to be powerful, of course, but if there’s a part of your story that should be powerful but doesn’t pack as much of a punch as you want it to, that’s something to revise.

Another thing that I did during this revision stage is that I went through and researched some investigation-related elements that I wasn’t completely knowledgeable about, since I don’t work forensics and generally don’t have that kind of knowledge just rattling around in my brain. I realized that I’d set up a crime wherein the perpetrator would, with today’s technology, be very easy to identify and track down. So, I had to make a decision: Change or heavily edit the crime, or find a way to make it so that the culprit is able to evade the police regardless.

I’ll write all of these decisions and notes down in a separate document. Then, once that’s done, it’s on to the actual editing of the scenes in the book in order to apply these decisions and changes. That’s probably the longest phase in my editing process. There are simply so many elements to keep track of, to break down and evaluate, and to edit.

So, that’s the overall Editing the Plot phase of the editing process. Next up, after that, is the line editing. This is where you look at sentences and paragraphs. How are they flowing? In particular, this is where I like to make sure that the tone of the story remains consistent, or that the tone in a particular character’s POV is consistent. Mood, style, tone, voice – all of these elements I try to focus on in this phase of the editing process.

It generally takes a lot less time to do this, but I do feel like I have to be particularly careful here. It’s easy to keep changing and changing and changing the wording until finally you end up with something that’s a bit over the top, especially if you’re going in and adding more descriptive words and phrases. This has happened to me before, and I realized afterwards that I liked the original draft much more than the edited draft because it was just – simpler, blunter, cleaner. I felt like I added way too much purple prose to my edited version in the quest for a little more description and a little more mood.

I try to add in description here, too, because I always feel like I’m lacking description in my scenes. While I personally enjoy them that way sometimes, there are specific areas in a story where description is helpful to the reader’s understanding and comprehension, so going through and specifically focusing on that can also be helpful.

Finally, it’s time for me to do a final proofreading edit. So, that’s where I go through and make sure I spelled everything correctly, make sure I chose the right words in all the right places and used them correctly, make sure that there are no punctuation or grammar errors, and so on. That’s a super quick process and I actually like to do that by turning my document into an ebook! I don’t know if Microsoft Office Word has this capability (I feel like it probably should) but in LibreOffice, I can just save my document as an EPUB file. Then, I’ll put it in my phone or email it to myself and open it on my phone. And voila – an ebook! I go through, and anytime I see something that needs a final polish or quick edit, I’ll highlight it and leave a comment there with the correction. Easy peasy!

And the other benefit of this is that I’m seeing the book in a different layout and presentation, which everyone will tell you really helps when it comes to identifying errors that you wouldn’t otherwise notice in your document. But you can also do that by just changing the font type and size on your document, so really it’s all about what you prefer.

And that’s usually my editing process done, unless I want to get some beta readers involved. In that case, it’s a case of waiting for their feedback and deciding whether or not to apply edits to areas of concern that they highlight. Hopefully they aren’t huge edits!

So, that’s my current editing process for my stories. At any stage of the editing journey, it may help to get your manuscript printed out. I did this for the first time recently, and it didn’t even cost me as much as I thought it would. As I was working on the edits for these two novels, after a while, I got sick of staring at my computer screen. I had a headache just thinking about going onto my laptop, opening the document, and interacting with it. No, thank you! So, I printed out my manuscripts. Since then I have been truly enjoying the editing process. It’s so much easier to apply revisions and identify issues on a physical manuscript versus scrolling through hundreds of pages to find that one scene or that one paragraph.

Also, it can be a huge mental boost to have a physical manuscript in your hands. Having these two thick, spiral-bound documents in my hands – the amount of pride and happiness I feel, knowing that I wrote every single word in them, and that these are TWO WHOLE BOOKS THAT I WROTE? Unparalleled. Beautiful feeling. And it lasts for weeks, if not months. It’s an amazing feeling.

That’s all I have for you today. Thank you so much for tuning in to my podcast – it has been a while, but I’m glad to be back at last! If you want to get in touch with any Qs, comments, or suggestions, you’ll find my social media in the episode description.

Until next time: happy writing!