SELF-EDITING:
Bringing Out Your Best
Two Half Brains
Make a Whole Writer
Practical Professional
Advice From
Deborah J. Lightfoot
Published Author &
Gainfully Employed Editor
Copyright (c) 2011 by Deborah J. Lightfoot
Smashwords
Edition
2011
License Notes
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Summary: For writers in all genres, tips and tricks for (partially) computer-aided editing and for invoking the critical faculties of your logical left brain at just the right time. We’ll use the Find feature to locate predictable problems: “ly” adverbs, overuse of commas, qualifiers that leech the life from writing. Then on to meatier matters of self-editing: eliminating wordiness, changing passive voice to active, when to show and how best to tell (with specifics, not generalities), subtlety, pacing, etc. Drawn from the presenter’s years of experience in newspaper, magazine, and book writing and editing, this e-book offers nuts-and-bolts advice on fixing common errors.
SELF-EDITING:
Bringing Out Your Best
Two Half Brains
Make a Whole Writer
by
Deborah J.
Lightfoot
INTRODUCTION
This book began with a program I presented at a conference sponsored by Trinity Writers Workshop and Tarrant County College–Northeast Campus in Hurst, Texas. The title of my talk was “Two Half Brains Make a Whole Writer.”
That program, in turn, grew out of my twenty-five years of experience as a content editor, copy editor, contributing editor, coordinating editor, project editor, developmental editor—just about any variety of editor you care to name—for newspapers, magazines, and book publishers. I’ve looked at a lot of writing, in various stages from raw to polished, produced by all manner of writers and specialists. In my newspaper work, I edited journalists who were not great stylists but who possessed an enviable knack for brevity. As a magazine editor, I polished the work of freelance writers who had a flair for storytelling but a tendency toward wordiness.
Most recently, as an editor of educational books and other publications for a national nonprofit organization, I’ve worked with people who are experts in their fields but who aren’t necessarily writers. They are eager to share their expertise with a wider audience, but often, the words they commit to paper require massive amounts of editorial massaging. Getting their manuscripts in shape to publish is not so much an editing job as a complete rewrite.
Which I am happy to do, since I’m also the author of award-winning books, and whenever I’m not editing, I’m writing. (My newest fiction is WATERSPELL, a fantasy trilogy: www.waterspell.net.)
I Spy, With My Little Eye …
In all the kinds of writing I have edited over the years—whether news, features, educational, informational, or fictional—I’ve noticed the same kinds of mistakes appearing time and again. Editing them has become second nature to me. I correct so many common errors on the fly, I long ago ceased to give them much thought. But as I was organizing my talk for the TWW/TCC conference, I did think about the repetitive nature of many of those common mistakes. And I thought how ideally suited computers are to find repeating patterns and bring them to a writer’s attention. Thus was born my brand of (partially) computer-aided editing.
Let me be clear: I am not talking about computerized “grammar checkers.” No such program has ever performed to my satisfaction. They may be good at asking “Did you write form when you meant from?” (To which question, I generally reply: “If I’d meant from, you stupid piece of software, I’d have typed from.”) My idea of computer-aided editing gives the writer total control over the process, and doesn’t waste time with dumb, machine-logic questions.
Early in this book I will describe practical methods of searching via computer for common, repetitive patterns. When you’ve done the suggested searches in a manuscript of your own, I believe you’ll see what an eye-opener—as well as a time-saver—the process can be.
Revision doesn’t stop there, however. After the easy part—those computer searches—comes the human part of editing. You’ll learn ways of applying your objective, analytical left brain to the problem of correcting and polishing your manuscripts. Computers can help, but they’ll never replace a close and critical read by a well-trained brain.
What’s Ahead
We’ll begin with a question: Why self-edit? Then it’s on to a basic review of grammar—and I do mean basic, so don’t get your knickers in a knot. You won’t have to diagram a sentence.
Instead, you’ll open the file of a work in progress and use your computer to save time and mental strain as you weed out common problems.
Finally, you’ll consider such matters as subtlety, clarity, pacing, and showing versus telling. For those, you must have your brain engaged.
Which brain? Left? Right? You’ll need them both: Two half brains make a whole writer.
Why Self-Edit?
“Most writers slough off the most important part of their
trade—editing their stuff, honing it and honing it until it gets an
edge like a bullfighter’s killing sword.”
—Ernest Hemingway
Why self-edit? Why do you need to spend time and energy correcting and polishing your work? If there are editors working at publishing houses who are paid to edit what writers write, then why do we need to worry about editing our own work?
Here’s what a couple of highly successful authors had to say during a panel discussion sponsored by the Authors Guild in New York. These comments were published in the Guild’s quarterly bulletin.
“There’s not a whole lot of editing going on in the publishing world these days. Editors are very, very busy and they’re strapped for time, as we all know. I’m lucky that I have a very good editor now, but in previous projects there just wasn’t time. So you either hire someone to do it or you do it yourself.”
—Hampton Sides, author of Ghost Soldiers
“I definitely agree with Hampton that there is precious little editing going on, and if you’re lucky enough to have an editor who will rip your book apart and tell you why, that’s a very good thing.”
—Dava Sobel, author of Galileo's Daughter and Longitude
The Exception: Children’s Publishing
As someone who has written for young readers and also edited the work of children’s authors, I can tell you that an absence of editing is not generally a problem in the world of children’s books. Instead, editors in children’s publishing often tend toward the other extreme. Instead of neglecting to edit, they may rework a story with such total abandon that the book which finally gets published bears little resemblance to the story its author set out to tell. I know of a couple of instances of children’s books coming out quite different from the authors’ originals. They weren’t necessarily better, mind you—just different, with the editors’ fingerprints all over the final results.
The Ideal Editorial Philosophy
On neither side of the editorial desk do I have much use for that kind of invasive, heavy-handed editing. I’m a follower of the Betty Ballantine philosophy. She was a legendary editor known by everyone who wrote or read in the science fiction field. She said: “To me, the essence of editing lies in helping the author say what he wants to say in the way he wants to say it.” That’s my approach when I edit the work of other writers.
In any case, children’s books are pretty much the only genre in which editors are still heavily involved in actual editing. In other genres, particularly mass-market these days, the work that gets published is what comes off the writer’s hard drive.
A Cautionary Tale
When I speak on this subject at writers conferences, I quote from a certain mass-market paperback that shows what can happen when both the editor and the author care so little about a work, neither of them bothers to edit it. The book is a fantasy published by a big-name house that has beaucoup mass-market and trade imprints. I won’t identify this “legacy” publisher, because I don’t wish to be sued. And I never give the title or the author’s name, because my purpose isn’t to embarrass the writer. It’s his first book, and his newness shows.
The book is essentially the writer’s rough draft, published without editing. Two scenes will serve to demonstrate the problems that plague the work. In one, we see our hero preparing to climb a tree. As he stands at the foot of the tree: “He unbuckled his scabbard and started to climb.” Up the tree he goes. At the top, the hilt of his sword gets snagged. I quote again, but with emphasis added: “He unbuckled his scabbard and tossed the sword up onto the bank.”
I ask you: how many scabbards was our hero wearing? How can he unbuckle at the foot of the tree, and then unbuckle again at the top of the tree—with the author using the exact same five words to describe the action?
In the space of a single paragraph, the writer should have kept track of what his character was doing with that scabbard. It’s a goof the writer should have caught, and if any competent editor had actually laid eyes on this story before publishing it, the editor would have caught it.
Four pages later, we find this: “Though he had on a heavy woolen shirt, he was sweating after only a few hundred yards.”
Say what? Although he had on a heavy shirt—in spite of wearing a wool shirt—he was sweating. That’s a lapse of logic. Any half-decent editor would have changed that to “Under his heavy woolen shirt, he was sweating.”
I threw the book across the room at page 104. Piled on top of the uncountable errors of punctuation and grammar that had come before, the goofs about the scabbard and the woolen shirt finished the experience for me. I wasn’t going to waste time reading a book that the author and the editor hadn’t taken time to edit.
So there’s the proof, and I’m sure you’ve found many similar examples in your own reading. You cannot necessarily count on getting any editing, half-decent or otherwise, from a publisher, even a major house. If you don’t want somebody like me going around to writers conferences holding up your book in a brown paper bag as a horrible example of bad editing, then you must be prepared to edit your work yourself.
And of course, if you clean up and polish your manuscript before submitting it, you’ll have a better chance of catching an editor’s eye in the first place. Editors want to know that you care enough about your writing to make it the best you can, before they ever see it.
So do readers, if you’re among the legions of writers who are electing to cut out the middlemen—the legacy publishers—and go straight to your audience via digital publishing. Your readers will be grateful to you for respecting them enough to give them your most carefully edited writing.
Use Both Sides of Your Brain
I can hear you out there, wailing away. You’re saying that you’re terrible at editing your own work. You just can’t see the mistakes. You wrote it, so you think it’s wonderful. You can’t see anything to change or any reason to change it.
Go Inside Your Skull
Perhaps the first step toward shaking yourself out of this notion is to take a look at the structure of the human brain. This may help you to better understand the resistance you’re encountering inside your own skull.
We human thinkers are split down the middle. Our brains are built with two halves.
We have a creative right side:
* The right side of the brain is the intuitive, imaginative side. It
trusts gut feelings.
* It works randomly, jumping from task to
task.
* It sees the big picture.
* It forms mental images or
impressions that may be hard to break down into their constituent
parts and put into words. If you can see images of your story inside
your head and you think it should be so easy to describe what
you’re seeing, easy to translate those images onto paper because
the pictures in your head are so vivid, but you find yourself having
a terrible time capturing that imagery with words, then that’s an
indication that you may be a strongly right-brained person.
We also have a logical left side:
* The left side of the brain reasons things out. It’s analytical
and critical.
* It works sequentially, doing things in order.
*
It sees the parts, the details, piece by piece.
* It uses words
easily. It’s the side that memorizes the rules and mechanics of
grammar.
There’s a quick and fun test you can take online at http://www.web-us.com/brain/braindominance.htm. The “Hemispheric Dominance Test” has 18 questions. Answer them honestly without trying to skew the results, and it’ll give you a good idea of which side of your brain is dominant.
I answered 10 of the questions as a right-brain thinker, and 8 as a left-brain thinker. That means I’m pretty well-balanced. And it’s that balance, I believe, that’s led me down the career path I’ve had. With a journalism degree, my first job out of college was as a newspaper copyeditor. That’s analytical work. Then I moved into magazines, as both an editor and a feature writer. And these days, I write and edit books.
About My Books
I’d be crazy to speak at a writers conference (or e-publish my presentation) and not mention my books. That would be unnatural. So here, briefly, are the award-winning nonfiction books with which I began my career, years ago: two of Texas history for adults, The LH7 Ranch and A Century in the Works; one for young readers, Trail Fever.
What I do these days, however, is write long, intricate fantasy novels. You can read about (and buy) my sword-and-sorcery trilogy, WATERSPELL, at http://members.authorsguild.net/waterspell/.
OK, end of shameless self-promotion. I’m a writer by choice, but to make the main part of my living, I edit. And in my editing work, I use my logical left brain along with my intuitive right brain.
Your Brain on Grammar
When it comes to grammar, I’m pure right-brain, and I suspect you’re a right-brainer, too. Most creative writers are.
Examining the details—the individual word choices, the spelling, punctuation, grammar: that is analytical, critical, left-brain work. The left side tends toward memorizing and applying “rules” of grammar. But the right side says: “Don’t bother me with rules. I want examples. I want to see things in context. I want to see examples of mistakes alongside the right way to do it.”
That’s how I think. I long ago forgot the “rules” of grammar. Couldn’t tell you what a participle was if my life depended on it. The dictionary definition of a participle—“A word having the characteristics of both verb and adjective”—means nothing to me. But show me an example of a participle, and I’ll say, “Sure, I see those clunky things all the time.”
I’ll assume that you don’t know your participles from your partridges, either. (Here are brief examples, just in case you care:)
• Present participle: Arriving early, they cooled their heels.
• Present participle in the perfect form: Having arrived early, they decided not to wait.
• Past participle: Baffled by the crime, the detective nearly gave up.
• Past participle in the perfect form: Having been discovered, the perps copped to everything.
But now, forget the word “participle.” You won’t see it elsewhere in this book. The labels don’t matter.
My philosophy is that the terminology and the rules of grammar are important only inasmuch as they serve the storyteller. The writer/storyteller need never be a slave to the so-called “rules” of grammar. Writing that is pleasing and effective is far more desirable than writing which is merely grammatically correct. My goal—and my advice to you—is to write with grace of expression and clarity of thought, and hang the rules if they need hanging.
So here’s the deal. To understand and follow the editing tips and tricks that I will present in the next sections, you do not need to know what the word “participle” means. You don’t need to know what the word “gerund” means (you’ll see, soon enough, what it is). I’m going to assume that you have forgotten (if you ever knew) the terminology that grammarians apply to the language you use every day.
It is perfectly possible for you to know (and use) grammar without knowing about grammar.
Do you see the distinction? You can know, through your personal experience with the language, that you can’t write: “Verbs has to agree with their subjects.” You know that sentence is wrong, even if you don’t remember the specific rules you were taught in English class about “agreement of subject and verb.” For a writer, practical application is more important than remembering the rules.
All I ask is that you know what I mean when I talk about nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. That’s grammar at its most basic: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are fundamentals of the writer’s toolkit. But just in case you need a refresher, here are brief definitions:
Noun: A naming word.
Adjective: A word used to
modify a noun.
Verb: An action word.
Adverb: A
word used to modify a verb.
Easy!
Now, go to your computer and open the file of a piece of writing you’re working on. (If you’re afraid to mess with the original file, open it as a copy.) Read on, and get ready to edit.
STEP 1: Find the Troublesome “-ing” Words
Among the handiest features of word-processing programs is the “global search” or “find and replace” command. With it, you can easily change a character’s name, for instance, everywhere it appears. Suppose your main character began life as Gertrude, but after you got to know her better, you decided that “Gertrude” didn’t fit her personality. With a simple find-and-replace, you can rechristen the girl “Ginny,” “Griselda,” or whatever works.
Use the find-all-mentions feature of your software, and you’ll avoid gaffes such as the one I once encountered in a Western adventure story, in which the Romero family became, halfway through the book, the Morales clan. Apparently the writer renamed the family midway through crafting the tale, but he forgot to go back and change the earlier mentions. His editor didn’t catch it, either. Baffled readers were left to figure it out on our own.
Find-all (global search) is basic to the method of computer-aided editing I’m presenting in the first half of this book. If you don’t already know how to use the “Find” or “Find and Replace” feature in your software, take time now to locate it on the menu. Typically, it’s under the “Edit” drop-down menu. Play with it for a few minutes, if you need to get familiar with it.
Notice that you can specify whether you want to search for a whole word, or a part of a word, or a particular sequence of letters that may or may not be a whole word. For instance, if I search for “you” in the file of this manuscript, the search will turn up not only the word “you,” but also your, you’ve, you’ll, yourself, you’re, etc. If I search for “at,” I’ll also find that, what, great, later, etc.
The computer’s ability to quickly find word and letter patterns lets you focus on specific problem areas, one at a time. We’re going to search out several problematic patterns, beginning with the clunky things I call “-ing” words.
In the file you opened on your computer, call up the “Find” feature, and type ing into the search block.
This search can be tedious—you’ll find “thing,” “ring,” “string” and other perfectly innocent words, when what you’re hunting for are verb-like words that end in -ing. You may find you’re using “-ing” words to “back into” too many sentences:
Flipping her hair off her shoulder, Alice turned to go. Reaching the door, she paused. Turning to face him again, she started to speak. Thinking better of it, she stormed out.
A long string of sentences like these will drive a reader nuts. Rewrite to eliminate at least three-fourths of these sorts of “ing” opening phrases.
Also check for “danglers” that don’t quite say what you meant:
Being late to work, the boss fired her. [The boss wasn’t late. She was.]
Lying in the hammock, it struck her that Ralph was okay. [A hammock with a temper?]
While walking his dog, the fire alarm sounded. [Talented fire alarm!]
Plunging hundreds of feet into the canyon, we saw the waterfall. [“We” weren’t plunging. Turn it around, and the sentence makes sense: We saw the waterfall plunging hundreds of feet into the canyon.]
Every time you find yourself using an “-ing” word to back into a sentence, consider rewriting it in solid subject-verb-object form. The result is usually clearer and crisper:
Muddy: Running to the stable, he mounted his horse. [He
mounted while he was running?]
Clear: He ran to the stable
and mounted his horse.
Muddy: Reaching for his gun, he fired several shots into the
air.
Impossible: Firing several shots into the air, he
reached for his gun.
Clear: He drew his gun and fired.
Muddy and weak: Crossing the stream, she tripped. [Problem 1:
It’s unclear. Did she trip while crossing the stream, or after
crossing? Problem 2: It’s telling, not showing. This is a weak
sentence that describes action that would be better shown,
perhaps like this—]
Clear and active: She waded into the
freezing water. The current caught her midstream, slamming her off
her feet.
Use the Find feature to locate your -ing words, and study each carefully. Recast any sentences you’re backing into, any sentences that are unclear.
I don’t mean that you should eliminate all -ing words. Such words at the beginnings of sentences are not necessarily problematic. Your “ing” search will likely turn up the -ing form of a verb that’s functioning as a noun. (This is a “gerund.” But as I promised earlier, you don’t need to know what the word “gerund” means. You just need to be able to recognize such a critter when you find one in your writing.) Examples: