Editing: How to See Your Work as a Reader Will
The Process #7 Why all writing is rewriting and how to do it
Hi there,
For those of you new to Wild Writing with Sanjida, welcome! I’m an award-winning writer and I write about writing, wildlife and wilderness. This is the sixth instalment in my breakdown of How to Tell a Story, from start to finish, covering ideas, outlining, plot, character, sense of place and Point of View using my short thriller, Meat, written for Comma Press. (You’ll find ALL my essays on the craft of writing in The Process).
Here’s what Meat is about:
Set in present-day Bristol, an artist, Lily, is staging her first solo exhibition of memento mori (‘remember you must die’) paintings. Things take a sinister turn, however, when Lily's scientist husband, Lars, encourages her to incorporate his latest project into the exhibition - pieces of lab-grown cultivated meat. As art collides with science - with horrifying consequences - Lily is forced to confront some dark, uncomfortable truths about her marriage.
Today, we’re going to talk about editing and, as I find this extremely challenging, I have developed some tips and hacks, which I’m going to share with you, as well as an editing exercise.
Although this essay is tailored to novelists, the concepts are the same no matter what you’re writing. I’ve, ahem, borrowed some of the material I use to teach editing to postgraduate students. I did try teaching my husband too, when he was doing his MBA, but apparently red pens and marriage don’t mix.
Ernest Hemingway said that ‘All writing is shit. Writing is rewriting.’
Editing is my least favourite part of being a writer, although I’ve grown to embrace the challenge and learns some hacks that have helped me - and I’m hoping will help you too.
As Zadie Smith once said, ‘Editing is easy. You just have to read your work as if you were a reader.’
I sincerely hope our Zadie was being tongue-in-cheek when she said this. She’s absolutely right that this is the key to editing, but it is anything but easy.
The problem, of course, is that as you have thought about your story and then spent time writing it, you will have become very close to your story, seeing events through the characters’ eyes and inhabiting its world.
It is hard to take a step back and see the story as a reader might.
When I’m editing, I like to take a bird’s eye point of view, hovering high above my story and gaining a big picture view, before flying lower and lower, focusing now on paragraphs, then dialogue, finally alighting on spelling or commas.
These different stages of editing are known as big picture or structural edits, copy editing and proofreading. And for anyone who wishes it, there is also an editing exercise to help you apply these principles to your own work.