The Trials and Tribulations of Editing, a Post by R. Clint Peters

I recently stumbled across a post about editing.  I was thrilled.  I am on page 16 of 210 pages of The Dakota Connection, a Ryce Dalton novel, and on page 114 of 218 pages of Prerogatives, a Pendergast Brothers novel.

The first point made in the post was to step away from the book you want to edit.  Take couple weeks off.  If you have another project, focus on it.  Give yourself the opportunity to temporarily erase the book from your mind.

My primary efforts recently were to move Prerogatives closer to publication.  I have been furiously editing the novel, trying to find ways to incorporate the lessons learned in my study of how to write.  There have been some interesting developments.  And some interesting conclusions.

Prerogatives was my first book, originally written under the title of The Pendergast Prerogatives.  I quit counting the mistakes around page ten.  What sort of mistakes?

Characters, Emotion and Viewpoint by Nancy Kress recommends fleshing out the main characters, create a photograph of words, allow the reader to become friends with the character.  That was the first mistake in Prerogatives — the characters were flat, without color or dimension.  They didn’t have any warts.  The friend that started me on this journey even wanted to know what the main character looked like.  I knew what the hero looked like, but that information was never inserted into the book.

The second point I gleaned from the post was the most interesting.  The final editing  should be a two-part process.  The first time through, look for spelling errors, grammar, punctuation — the basic mistakes we all make when we write.  Count the words in the sentence (less than twenty five is the recommended number).  Insure there is only one thought per sentence.  Look for the mechanical mistakes, such as the same word starting five paragraphs in a row, stilted conversation, word usage (their vs there).

On the second edit, look at the content, and ways to develop the characters.  Does a character walk into a blank room?  Or, does the reader discover there is a large wooden desk in the corner, a worn sofa along one wall, and two cats sleeping on the ends of the sofa? If the character is asked to take a seat on the sofa, how does he interact with the cats?  Or more importantly, how do the cats interact with the character?  The fact the room has two cats adds color to the photograph of the person in the room.  If the reader is a cat lover, the person behind the desk will become a better friend.

My present edit focus in Prerogatives is to develop the characters, allow the reader to become friends.  The first version of the book was strictly tell, there was no showing.

My big problem at this point is I was in the process of editing Prerogatives six months ago, but I don’t know where I stopped when I started a new project for NaNoWriMo.  The pages I have edited to date appear to be better that the first version, but not as good as the version I want to provide my readers with.

Where am I now?  I think I have done most of the mechanical editing in both The Dakota Connection and Prerogatives.  Content editing will be the most difficult because there are more things to look at besides the red squiggles under a misspelled word.