What's that you say?
Editing? Isn't my first draft good enough?
My name is Ken Mears. And I'm Alyssa Fales. And welcome to Writer's World.
This episode is for those who finished the first draft of their novel or short story and have decided to take the next step of editing.
You may be thinking, I don't need to do revisions or second drafts. I'm a first draft writer.
Well, we will be making the case that you definitely should revise.
Why isn't my first draft good enough is a question we hope to answer by explaining some of our first draft mistakes.
One of my many, many first draft mistakes was the story I had in my head and the one I had written down didn't match.
I thought I had my story memorized, but I went back to the beginning of my story and it's completely different than how I had planned it out.
So I'm still working on making my story one complete story of how it is in my head.
In my first draft ever, I made the mistake of being very condensed in my writing.
Put it simply, instead of making it super exciting and descriptive, I went with the bare minimum, which kind of makes sense considering I wrote it when I was 11 and 12.
In fact, I cringe whenever I read the first draft of The Castaway Hero just because it is in such horribly condensed language.
And my first draft I wrote when I was 17 and still I'm like, add more description here and I just move on.
And I definitely in the first draft did a lot of telling instead of showing.
And one of the very basic first rules of writing is show, don't tell.
But I didn't really include a lot of showing in my first draft because I was just trying to get the story right. But oh my gosh, in some places it is so bad and choppy.
And I agree with Ken, like I look back and I'm just like, oh my gosh, you couldn't even write like a little bit. It's crazy.
Another more minor mistake that I made and a lot of writers tend to make is using filler words, which we'll talk about later and overusing certain words.
For example, I have a tendency to overuse words like massive, moment, and often. Of course, these are specific to me and they'd be specific to other people as well.
Interesting. Another draft mistake I made was my tenses didn't match.
Sometimes I would write in the past, sometimes I would write in the future, or I would switch between the first and the third person. I was not at all consistent.
And the last of my problems that I will mention right now is that I had a very bad tendency to avoid depth in my world.
Pretty much everything I wrote in my first draft was very much on the surface and superficial. Luckily, by the time I worked on it again, I had matured enough that I wanted to dive deep and really understand my world and convey that depth to my readers.
Okay, well, you get the idea that our first drafts were not perfect. And here is a secret. No one will ever have a perfect first draft.
Now that you have accepted this and are ready to move on to editing, Ken will be giving us an intro into basic self-editing 101 right after a short break.
Without further ado, let's get into the basics of self-editing. I turn the time over to you.
All right. So a while back, I took a class on three ways to up your game with writing. All three things fall into the category of self edits that you really can do on your own.
So let's start with doing strong writing instead of weak writing. This one is quite simple. You want to avoid using passive voice and weak words.
While we could do a whole episode on voice for this, I will just point out what a passive voice is.
With a passive voice, the subject is acted upon by some other performer of the verb. Weak words are words like stuff, things, went, and so on.
What you want to do is use strong language. This is using an active voice and strong words.
Active voice is much more direct and the subject is something or does something. The next thing you can use is action beats.
Action beats are used in place of dialogue tags and still indicate who is speaking.
In addition, they are a great opportunity for world building and show the characters interacting with the world and others.
For example, just a plain old dialogue tag would be something like Melissa said. What you want to use is an action beat like Melissa gestured toward the door.
This helps show that something is happening and also breaks up dialogue so it isn't so monotonous.
And the last thing I want to address is crutch filler and filter words.
Starting with crutch words, these are words that an author uses too much. I already mentioned how I use a few too much earlier in the episode.
Some examples of crutch words I use are things like massive, moment, and often.
These are specific to you and it wouldn't hurt to use a website like wordcounter.net to see which words that you use with a high frequency.
Side note, these don't include like the or a or do they? They do not.
Okay. With filler words, these are the words that are often in there with no real reason.
A starter list you can go off of includes had, has, that, was, were, be, been, got, did, didn't, so, can, can't, just, seem, and very.
Last but not least, we have filter words. These are words that filter how people feel and they can ruin the experience.
These include words like felt, smelled, and saw.
Often these are very unnecessary and filter the reader's experience, not allowing their imagination to have as great of an influence.
Some questions to address after this run through of the basics are, can, how long does editing take?
Self-editing doesn't take too long if you're smart about it. Of course, it is much shorter if you're aware of these sorts of things ahead of time so you can avoid making them in the first place.
And honestly, even if you don't avoid the mistakes altogether, it is really easy and quick search for all these words in your document and decide whether to get rid of them, change them, or how you're going to rewrite that section to get rid of it.
How do I stay motivated in editing? It just seems so much.
I would recommend you reward yourself.
I like that one.
Something I did while working on my upcoming book, book two, was I laid out a bunch of M&Ms and after I finished going through the problem words in each chapter, I ate an M&M as a reward.
Another thing you can do is shake it up as you edit. It can actually get pretty grindy when you have to go through your story, start to bottom, in million times editing.
Hop around your story so it stays fresh for you. How much editing should I do before I hand it over to my publisher or editor?
It never hurts to go over the three smaller things I mentioned before you hand it over it. So go through and look into your voice, action beats, and crutch filler and filter words.
Well, where's a good place to start with editing? I'm feeling overwhelmed.
Start with the basics we already mentioned, go through the three things to level up your story and examine your story.
Also, clearly look for any possible plot holes, which can be hard when it is in your own writing.
Just overall look through your work with an impartial eye as if you were editing it for a friend.
Thank you so much, Ken, for helping us understand the basics of self-editing better. And we hope today's episode was helpful.
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And until next time, I've been Ken Mears.
And I've been Melissa Fales with Writers World.
And keep on writing.