A Long Day at the Edit-stone

I think the closest physical activity analog to editing is interval training. You cruise along for a while, then there’s a frenzy of activity. In editing, that activity is often like running up a very steep hill. It’s not really that big a hill, but the effort is exhausting and you have to keep going.

For the most part, At The Queen’s Command is going along pretty easily. When I edit, I break things down into two round. First I read over and make hand edits on the physical copy of the manuscript. I used a magenta pen this time: colors differ, and a magenta pen came to hand easily. There wasn’t too much scribbling, and some pages are untouched. Others, however, have these vast swaths bracketed off, with the note “mod” or “fix” or “smooth” in the margin.

The internal editor is really good at picking out words to change and the like, so that’s what I do when I make changes on the page. But when large blocks of text need to be fixed, I wait until the writer half of the brain is engaged to actually do the writing. This way the editor doesn’t get frustrated and neither does the writer.

In this book there are two main reasons why chunks of text need to be rewritten. The first involves dialogue. One of my main characters didn’t come into his voice until later on in the book. In doing my edits it was fascinating to watch him slowly get there, but the early places were way off. He was too wordy—as if he’d had some sort of an education. He really hasn’t—at least not an education where grammar played a big part.

Getting his voice right involves a lot of going line by line and rewriting things the way I know, now, he would say them. I am shortening a lot of sentences, breaking big words down into shorter ones. There are also a few conventions and catchphrases he uses, so I slip those in. Ideally a reader could look at a run of dialogue without any attribution, and be able to tell who the speaker is.

The other big set of changes is the emotional through-line for another character. I started out wanting to approach his relationship with his wife one way, and wrote most of the book with that in mind. I decided, late on, that it’s much better if I reversed it. It makes the pain he feels in the end much sharper, and makes him more believable. This necessitates, however, the rewriting of some emotional stuff, including a couple scenes that go on for several pages.

I know that sounds like a lot, but you’d be surprised how easy it is. In a parallel example, you want to take a daytime scene and want to make it nighttime. You have the following sentence: “The sunlight pierced the leafy canopy and dappled the tombstones.” Clearly daylight, probably noon, lots of green, white stones, probably some moss and fungus. We all have the visual.

But if you change it to: “The moonlight pierced the leafy canopy and bathed the tombstones in a ghostly glow,” suddenly you have an entirely different picture. It’s midnight, there’s an owl in those trees, shadows everywhere, the tombstones are all knocked around and cracked, and it’s cold enough to shiver. And yet all you’ve done is swapped a couple words and added one or two.

These are my days now, through the end of the month. I should have a special announcement about the book tomorrow. We’ll see. So far I am very happy with the book and how it has come together. Editing is a lot of work, but when the book is as fun as this one, it’s not a chore.