Cut It Out: Self-Editing Basics

Hey there, bombshell.

Brace yourself. The topic is self-editing, which I normally despise. But this kind of editing you do AFTER your brand-spankin’ new manuscript is finished and you’ve celebrated with too many cocktails, tequila shots . . . and perhaps bottles of Veuve Clicquot.

Once the hangover is gone and you’ve taken some time to absorb and enjoy COMPLETING A TASK 98 PERCENT OF THE POPULATION NEVER WILL, then you must . . . edit.

Super important note here, so pay attention: No one is perfect. You’re not perfect. I’m not perfect. Fuck perfect. Your mistakes keep me employed.

Now, onward.

If you’ve spent more than five minutes on this website, you know my mantra: Create first. Critique second. Because we use two different parts of our brain for each task.

THE Guide, a #1 Amazon Bestseller, stuffed with tips and advice to get out of your head and writing.

I spend the majority of my time teaching people how to lose the internal editor in order to create. When you begin an edit, the creating part is over. The manuscript is on your desk, shimmering under a halo of light that comes directly from the gods. It’s your baby. I get it.

Yet somehow, you now have to dissect that baby like the frog in eighth-grade science. The first slice is a bitch. But this process will help keep your editor from stealing into your house late at night to smother you in your sleep. (I kid. Sort of.)

First, let’s be perfectly clear: self-editing is a shit-ton of work.

Grammar, punctuation and spelling can be fixed by most word processing software. No biggie. But here, we also need to address dialogue, character depth, plot, narrative, setting, the list is endless. So we approach it one baby step at a time.

Pick one thing, one focus, and go through your book line by tedious line looking to remedy that. Do it over and over and over. Sometimes, this makes many people wish they never wrote at all. Often, you’re looking at more than a dozen passes through your manuscript. But take heart. We editors do this all day long.

So let’s say you’re going to tackle your book with an eye for plot first. Can you look at page one for plot, then review that same page for narrative and character depth? Um, no.

You can’t figure out any of those things from reading one page. And you sure as heck won’t be able to keep track of all three elements at the same time across multiple pages. (Oh, you go ahead and try. Just remember I told you so.) The secret to awesome editing – of any kind – is focus. One thing at a time.

Editing means critiquing, analyzing and making shit better. Sorry, we have no shortcuts.

Without further ado, I give you the top eight problems in 99.99 percent of manuscripts that come across my desk every day.

The Top 8

1. Verb tenses

First, plain past tense is not your enemy. Neither is present tense. Past participle and past perfect, not so much. Why say “had been” when “was” works just as well? It’s easier on the reader.

Second, watch for tense shifts. Example: Winston plays outside with Anita and dropped his jacket in the front yard. He knows his mother picked it up. Winston was going to be surprised when he saw Anita takes it home instead.

Is that not the biggest cluster fuck you’ve ever seen? Don’t do it.

2. Research

Check your facts. Double-check and triple-check too. If Sally is shy and quiet, she is not going to make the first move with Brian. If they vacation in Tahiti, they won’t be wearing down jackets. John and Steve are muscle-heads. It’s highly unlikely they’re going to stop for burgers at McDonald’s. If the dog is highly aggressive, he won’t be easily distracted from growling at intruders with a tennis ball.

3. Show. Don’t tell.

“But I don’t like you,” Ashley said coldly.

First, given what Ashley said, we can tell it was cold. Second, saying “coldly” is telling. Show your reader what you mean so she can see it too: “But I don’t like you,” she said over her shoulder, flipping her hair as she walked off.

“Your daughter’s pink bunny slippers are the most adorable things I’ve ever seen,” she said, smiling.

Right. Ask yourself, would anyone say that with a frown? No. So chop “smiling” off and decide what you want to the reader to see about this character. Is she a sucker for all things pink? Missing her own children? What emotion does the sight of  those slippers bring about?

“Your daughter’s pink bunny slippers are the most adorable things I’ve ever seen,” she said. Her voice cracked as she struggled to hide . . .

More about ‘show versus tell’ is here.

4. Exclamation points

Exterminate them like the vermin they are. They suck the life out of perfectly useful sentences. Instead, use colorful words or italics for emphasis.

5. “There” phrases

There is, there are, there was, there were, there had been, there will be – kill them all. They too drain the life out of sentences. Make ’em active. More here.

6. Suddenly

It’s a four-letter word, and one even I won’t use. It’s overused and, therefore, almost never conveys the sense of urgency a writer is after. More here.

7. Dialogue tags

“We write a quote like this,” she said. Because he or she “said.” Not sighed, laughed, smiled. We don’t growl, bark, groan or snivel. We say things.

The fact remains: far more vivid verbs exist, but they distract the reader from what’s important, which is the fucking dialogue. Don’t mess with that. The exception is a change in volume. Yell or whisper is acceptable.

More about that is available here and here. Every time you use something other than said, you’re telling the world you are an inexperienced writer.

8. Clichés

The trite, overused and just plain tired phrases we rely on to convey meaning quickly. They lost their impact ages ago and are beyond stale. Why is this a problem? Because they annoy people. And they create the impression the writer is too lazy to come up with something original. Some people just tune out when they read a cliché, so they may miss the point you’re trying to make.

Finally, you can find, ohhh, about a gajillion books and articles out there on all of the above and more. Questions? Hit me up. Email beckster7219 (at) gmail (dot) com OR tweet @rebeccatdickson OR shout out on my Facebook community.

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The Others and the Extras: The Importance of Secondary Characters

A guest post by Scott D. Southard

A Minor CharacterOh, the lament of the poor minor character.

Pushed to the sidelines, knowing full well they are not the focus of the story.

Love is probably not in the cards for them. They are the ones injured in the line of duty or acting as a living joke. Characters created merely to be a soundboard for the main characters. Or someone for the reader to compare the main character in the universe of the story. A tool, nothing more.

It would be a thankless life, I am sure, if they were real. Probably spent at the refreshment table, trying not to fall asleep as they wait for their big moment in the sun. And then the scene arrives – a few quick jokes, maybe a heart-to-heart – and then they are back at the table, once again snacking on one too many cookies.  Waiting…

Everything about the secondary character revolves around the main character. An existence built solely around another’s experiences. Even if a secondary character dies, it is a moment for the main character to reflect upon their own life decisions. (Unless they are an evil secondary character, then usually they are left on the floor somewhere, discarded, a bloody remain for someone else to find later – but we never read about or see that bit in movies or television.)

Yet, for me, the secondary characters are important. Because, like a missed plot point, an awkward description or a writing oops, they have the power to rip me out of a story, leaving me on the sidelines of a tale just like them.

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The image of Charles Dickens I have in my Dining RoomCharles Dickens was the master of the side characters. His book are filled with marvelous secondary characters, and in each book, each chapter almost always seems to introduce a new one. They can be comic, yes, but also tragic, surprising and powerful. Each of them are wonderfully layered. (Well, honestly, maybe not in The Pickwick Papers, but it was his first book so we will give him the benefit of the doubt.)

It is an art to create a throng like that. Consider a book like Oliver Twist, where next to his gathering oddities, our hero, the little Oliver (the heart of the tale), is almost drab in comparison.  The Artful Dodger, Mr. Bumble, Fagin, the terrifying Bill Sykes, the tragic Nancy… Yes, in Dickens the minor characters are what make his books.

Now there is a good chance that this was all just part of Dickens’s incredible talent, and we can each only dream of having this ability to create so many credible secondary characters, but there are things each of us can do to make our own just as rich, just as powerful, and just as important.

Take the Time

No one ever said writing a book was easy. It is an art form, like playing the piano or painting or dancing. And like those art forms, it should be difficult. Writing a book should be the hardest thing you ever attempt to do.

I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary fiction these days and one thing that seems to come up again and again for me is the lack of substance in the secondary characters. Yes, I am speaking in broad terms, but they feel like supporting members of a sitcom sometime – hired merely to appear and  make a few quick lines and leave.

Writers, it’s unfair to the character, and it is unfair to your readers.

That’s not to say your supporting characters can’t come in to do the few lines, but make sure they are fully realized so the “performance” feels real. This means, taking the time to break down the character, finding their own plot, their own story. You might, of course, not use any of this in the book, but the character will feel more real for you if you go to this trouble. And if all of the characters feel real to you, they will feel real for your audience as well.

One of my favorite suggestions for writers is to go out and listen to people. Sit at a coffee shop or a restaurant and simply observe the people around you. (Don’t stare.)

  • Listen to the meter of a person’s voice. Is there a beat or a rhythm to their conversation?
  • How do they breath in a speech, or take their pauses?
  • How do they laugh? (What does the laugh sound like?)
  • How do they sit? Do they lean forward or back? Do they use their hands or arms a lot while talking?

Each of these descriptions, when added to a character (no matter how minor) will make them as real as the person you are spying on… I mean observing.

Avoid Stereotypes

I hate stereotypes.

All good writers should hate stereotypes.

Many times when you bring up the term, people think of it on purely racial or sexual lines, but that is only one part. There are so many different kinds of stereotypes in our world, from the dumb jock and cheerleader to the corrupt politician. The fact is, if you (the writer) can’t see a character beyond a two-word description, chances are you have a stereotype right there.

And remember, there is also a good chance if you are using a stereotype, chances are you are insulting someone, somewhere. No one wants to insult a reader.

Like my discussion above, this is another example of taking the time to fix a situation. Yes, when we create a first draft of a book, not everything is as fleshed out as it should be (even the characters), but it is in the re-reading of the manuscript, the continuous editing that characters should become something more.

And here is the hard truth: Sometimes a character is wrong for the “role” we create for them. If after editing and editing and editing, a character still seems to you like a shadow of a real person, edit them out. Maybe create a new character to fill that position. Chances are if a character doesn’t seem to step out of the bounds of a two-dimensional role, he might never do it – especially if they began life as a stereotype.

Everyone Grows

A Jane Austen DaydreamWhen I was writing my new novel A Jane Austen Daydream I could not stress enough over character development. This is not surprising when one considers my main character is Jane Austen. Along with Shakespeare and Mark Twain, I can’t imagine a more foreboding literary figure to capture on paper. And in the book, I try to re-imagine her life as she might have wanted it, with plots and characters reminiscent of her own books.

One thing I have always admired in Austen’s novels is character growth. In Pride and Prejudice, Darcy and Elizabeth both grow, but other characters do as well. This is not true for all of them, of course. (The silly mother is still the silly mother.) Remember though, character growth doesn’t always mean growing into something better or learning a lesson, it just means growing. Being different than they were on page one.

For my novel, knowing the mountain I was attempting to climb in making a book like this, I agonized over each character. I have the notebooks to prove it. And by the time I finished, I could look each character straight in the eye. They were that real for me.

Remember, we are all different than we were last year or even earlier in the week. Take the time to ask how the story impacts and changes each of the players. No one lives in a vacuum, not even fictional characters.

Quirks Are Good

We are all quirky.

We all have them even though we don’t always want to admit it. Some would say this writing blog is my quirk. So be it, I embrace the quirkiness of it.

One thing Charles Dickens did very well is give his characters quirks that moved them into the realm of literary legend, no matter how small. It might be a unique speech pattern or a bizarre passion for something, but they became real to us, even sometimes these quirks can become heartwarming.

Consider the minor character of Mr. Wemmick from Great Expectations. An attorney’s clerk by day, at night he would go home to a castle he made out of his cottage. It is a charming and fun insight into a character that today in a book might be simply cast as “Clerk 1.” An extra to be forgotten.

Now, I’m not saying you need to do something that extreme with a character and build a castle, but consider this…. Let’s say you have a character that is a clerk:

  • What is on his desk? Anything odd or unique? Is the desk messy or clean?
  • Does he have a wallpaper on his computer? What is it a picture of?
  • How does he dress?
  • How does he act around the others in the office? Shy, timid? Or bold? Inappropriate?
  • Is there anything on the wall of his office? Quotes? Pictures? Scribbled notes?

And those are only a few suggestions. But just starting with questions like that can grow a character into someone who is more than a vessel to simply answer a hero’s (or heroine’s) questions. Clerk 1 can come alive!

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In someone else’s story we are all minor characters.

It is a bleak thought, wondering if we are the comic relief or unintentional scoundrel. Whatever the case, each of us, every single one of us, is a full-fledged individual with aspirations, hopes, a past, a future. Giving those to your characters, every single one of them, will make them as human as you and me.

Your audience (and your characters) will thank you.

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Scott D. Southard is the author of four novels published in the last few years, A Jane Austen Daydream, Maximilian Standforth and the Case of the Dangerous Dare, My Problem With Doors and Megan. You can find them via his Amazon author page or  on Google eBooks. He is also an editor with rebeccatdickson.com. Got a manuscript that needs a special touch? Contact us and ask for Scott.