May 24, 2020
Write Drunk, Edit Sober: Fiction Editing Tips and Tricks
I hate editing my fiction. I hate everything about it; the way it sucks life out of a text, the way it’s a clinical, passionless process. But you gotta do what you gotta do. In my long, sometimes painful writing career, I’ve learned a thing or two about editing. Today, I’m sharing these fiction editing tips and tricks that will hopefully spare you some frustration.
As you might remember from earlier posts, the phrase “write drunk, edit sober” is attributed to Ernest Hemingway. It’s quite probable that Hemingway never said such a thing, but that’s irrelevant. The quote is memorable, and its advice solid – though there is a twist in the plot, as we will see. You do need to write with emotion (“drunk”) and you do need to edit without it (“sober”).
Fiction editing is a diverse process, and there are more than one right ways to do it. I certainly don’t claim that my fiction editing tips are the best for you, let alone the only ones.
I’m only sharing these fiction editing tips – perhaps one day I’ll share my nonfiction editing tips, too – to inspire you and give you a head start. Take what you can use, discard the rest – there’s a meta-editing tip there, if you’re perceptive 😉
Fiction Editing Tips and Tricks: First, the Basics
The term “basics” might be misleading. Yes, they probably feel self-evident to many of you, but they surely didn’t feel that obvious to me when I was a young and naive author.
Tip 1: Understand the various kinds of editing
Editing is not the same as proofreading. Whereas proofreading basically means to replace I bought milk from the story to I bought milk from the store, or to add missing commas, editing is a more complicated process.
Moreover, editing itself can be divided into different types. We have so-called line editing, referring to editing that improves the way the text flows – for instance, by shortening sentences, or changing the syntax.
But we also have content editing – a far more complicated, holistic process, that approaches the text as a whole. Indeed, it goes beyond the sum of the parts, and sees the bigger picture.
It’s this editing I’ll be dealing with in this post, offering my fiction editing tips and tricks. Not only is this kind of editing the most complex one (proofreading or improving sentence structure are fairly straightforward, to an extent objective processes), but it’s also the kind of editing that can make or break a narrative.
Tip 2: Understand that editing is not about correcting a mistake
As we saw, proofreading is about fixing mistakes – typos, missing punctuation, etc. Line editing is perhaps also a form of correcting mistakes, albeit in some more vague way.
Content editing is not about correcting mistakes.
Content editing is about shaping the narrative, polishing the rough edges (or adding some, if needed), to facilitate the emergence of meaning.
When you do content editing on your novel, you take a step back and see the whole thing from an outside perspective. Are the characters realistic enough, are the descriptions vivid?
And so, it’s important to keep in mind that content editing is basically a continuation of the writing process, only from a less emotive perspective.
Which (surprise-surprise) somewhat complicates things.
Fiction Editing Tips and Tricks: The Advanced Stuff
Write drunk, edit sober. You must write with emotion, passion, madness even. And you also must edit as objectively as it’s humanly possible.
But how do you balance between one and the other, when – as I mentioned just before – content editing is a continuation of the writing process?
Tip 3: Understand that Literary Expression Is Fluid
What does that mean? That when you write fiction, you want to instigate an affective response, but you have little (if at all, often) control of what that response will be.
Let’s see a short example from Illiterary Fiction:
He reaches the subway station and walks down the stairs feeling the familiar hot draft of air rushing to meet him. A train is already arriving at the station and Paul instinctively runs to catch it.
Moments later, as if he changed his mind, he stops and walks calmly again, allowing the train to take on passengers and depart without him. He walks near the tracks and stands just behind the dotted yellow line. He sighs. The red-bordered white tiles on the wall behind the tracks seem old, decayed; the remnants of something ignored and forgotten. They used to be sparkling new once, beautiful and even envied.
When I wrote that scene, I had a specific set of emotions I wanted to convey. Most readers (I assume) return a similar kind of response – but the key here is to return any kind of emotive response. There are multiple possible meanings and interpretations in a narrative, remember.
This is directly related to editing, and balancing between passion and objectivity, as we’ll see right away.
Tip 4: Understand that Passion Informs Your Writing; Objectivity their Reading
In other words, writing with passion affects the emotive content you pack into a scene. If you write clinically, following your outlines and notes too blindly – instead of allowing your book to… take over – then you don’t put your full heart in the process.
On the other hand, editing with objectivity informs whether your audience can return any kind of emotive response at all.
Let’s unpack this a bit, because it’s crucial.
Imagine you’ve finished writing a chapter, and it went very well. You wrote with passion, your heart and soul just poured out of your fingers while you were typing, it was a mad dash that produced an emotively rich piece of text.
Then you go to sleep. You wake up the next dayThis is just a metaphor. Depending on your editing style, you might finish the entire book first, and then start editing - that’s what I do., and decide the writing was so mad that, although you feel the emotions (perhaps based on a long, complex series of subjective associations), your audience wouldn’t.
Perhaps they would need a more easily recognizable metaphor – though do remember my post on symbolism: Familiarity exists in an inversely proportional relationship with affective power.
Sometimes editing doesn’t even involve the same chapter/scene at all. Let’s say you “wake up the next day” and, seeing what you wrote, you realize that – for all its passion – the scene is realistic from your perspective of already knowing the character, but not necessarily so from the perspective of your readers, who don’t.
Whereas editing choice A would be to simply tone down the whole thing, choice B would be much more rewarding: Do… nothing, and simply remember to add some hints at a later scene that would help the audience understand the character’s motivation.
Fiction Editing Tips and Tricks: What Content Editing Is (and Isn’t)
Many writers have a flawed understanding of what editing really is. I know that from personal experience – as an author, it took me years to properly realize what editing involved.
Leaving proofreading and line editing aside, content editing – although itself should be an objective process, to the extent possible – has an impact not on objectivity but on affect; not on the what but on the how. In that sense, “edit sober” becomes a very tricky concept (more of this in a moment).
Indeed, in some cases content editing can even conflict with the proofreading/line editing part. Here’s a cool example – if I may say so myself – from my Self Versus Self project.
I was editing a short excerpt where a character describes in her diary her emotions following her first kiss. I felt there was something missing, I felt the mad passion and overwhelming unreality was missing.
How I edited it? Here’s how:
I think I ;kll pass out, I can baely tyoe right now. Brian and I came back home after shcool, as usual, and we went ot my room, and as we were listening to nusic he smiled and then kissed me! I’ve never been happier in my nentire life, I have this ridiculous msile on my gface all the time!
I introduced typos. If you’re looking for realistic characters, ask yourself: Would someone be able to type perfectly (or care about correcting typos) right after her first kiss?
In fact, there’s some nuance there, too. At first I did it mechanically, putting random typos here and there. I didn’t like it. Then I realized how it had to work: I imagined being in the character’s place and began typing the text I had in mind as fast as I could. The typos you see simply appeared naturally, as a result.
Content editing is not about making it correct, but about making it right.
Perhaps “write drunk, choose what to edit sober, edit drunk” might be an even better fiction editing tip!
And here’s another quote, attributed to Arthur Plotnik: “You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you, and we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.”
Editing is not about putting out the fire; only about removing the smoke.
8 Comments
Comments are closed for posts older than 90 days
My version is ‘write when I can, edit when tired.’ I can’t drink – makes me ill – and I only have use of my brain when the planets align, but I can FEEL my brain kicking on when it does, and I get right to work. But I take the reader’s perspective formally into account from the very beginning – and know HOW to make sure there is microtension all along.
My biggest sin is reusing word (tired-brain syndrome), so I know I will be having my editing software count all kinds of things – and I will then ask myself over and over whether it is okay to have the same words – or whether, which, and how to rewrite small sections so they don’t.
I get what you talk about – the passion – for short bursts randomly; have to use it the best I can.
Authors are unique, facing unique circumstances – which translates into unique advantages as well as obstacles to be tackled. Perhaps the most crucial element is precisely to be aware of one’s own such circumstances and plan accordingly.
As I often say in my writing tips – including this post – one should take my advice, keep what’s applicable, and discard what isn’t. One-fits-all solutions are rarely worth it, and that is especially the case for abstract concepts, such as art and writing.
Thanks for your comment!
But we all share being weird – just because we’re writers.
Will I ever be able to edit my own work? Editing others, my creative writing dearly advised, that’s easy and fun. But touching my own stones to make them gems? Hard as heck. In my defense, most readers claim my texts (first drafts) are perfect, or close to that. A few adverbs, etc., that’s normal. But I never did any overhaul. Fiction actually takes some time to spring forth from my insides. When it does, ’tis like a film, I just have to put pen to paper and watch it unfold. Actually, because it is short stories I write the most, I’d say it is more akin to film trailers. And just like trailers, they carry such an emotion, such an affection on the reader (even myself as a reader) because of what is 𝘯𝘰𝘵 written, what is 𝘯𝘰𝘵 there in the text (and nowhere really). This has always amused me, how eliminating text, compressing some information and making it just a little cryptic can empower one’s emotional response to the text so much. Silence is so powerful.
Your comment on how emotional response lies not in what you read but in what you don’t – not in what is there but in what isn’t – is extremely perceptive. I’ve been mentioning that very often here. Take a look at my post on Narrative Antagonists, scrolling down to a couple of examples I mention to indicate where narrative tension arises from. Here’s one:
and here’s another:
As I mention in a little note: “Notice how the feeling of tension arises primarily because the text reveals only implicitly what is going to happen, allowing the reader to figure out what ‘And then she/he met Nick/Anna’ connotes”. I wish authors realized how damaging over-explaining is. You’ve got to leave room for the reader to squeeze in and create their own interpretations and meaning – because, ultimately, it all boils down to emotive response.
Parenthetically, this is also how skillful Gothic/horror fiction operates. It’s not about trick-or-treat devils, shadow-lurking vampires, and what not. It’s about leaving a blank, forcing your readers’ minds to enter a flat spin, subconsciously terrified by their own shortcomings. The lasting impact of The Exorcist, to name one example, isn’t simply a result of its gory aesthetics or its convincing people there are demons. Rather, I’d argue (and others have, before me), it’s because it alludes to child abuse (not to mentione its linkage to the church, well before any such revelations – no pun intended – were made public)
Oh, I’ve read most posts on this blog, just had not anything worthy to say.
Your entry on Narrative Antagonists helped me tenfold when advising a sci-fi novelist. I’m still advising him and just recently he noticed how the protagonist is its own antagonist (more like a blurred line between opponent and antagonist, using your six archetypes from the Narrative Nods app, which, by the way, is invaluable, it saves me tons of work).
Taking over-explaining off his path remains a challenge, because he grew up on anime and fantasy novels. I mean, the cheap ones.
Speaking of anime, if you like Gothic, I’d love to see your take on Boogiepop Phantom. It is an original creation using the fictional universe of the Boogiepop series of light novels. An animated adaptation of the first six stories in the novel series was released last year called Boogiepop Wa Warawanai (Boogiepop and Others, which is the title of the compiled book with said stories). It is a lovely, poetic story. Phantom is a lot harsher, darker and more mature, curiously, both are deeply philosophical, but using different approaches.
I could send you the English translations of the light novels in .epub format, but I would like to see your comments on audiovisual media for once (your take on that vampire film was great).
Ah, sadly I’m not at all familiar with Boogiepop — though do feel free to send them as .epub, sounds interesting! For some reason, your descriptions referring to Phantom being harsher, darker, and more mature, tangentially reminded me of the concept of the grotesque. Two aspects — the carnival and the menacing — both co-existing in presenting the complete picture. Curiously, they also act as what David Bohm would’ve perhaps referred to as holographic in nature: Each facet, though partial, still reflects the whole.
OK, this was a very tangential comment 🙂
Curiously, to hang myself on the tangent’s slope, that shortened definition of the holographic is very similar to medieval Aristotelian-esque optics treatises’ definition of the specular/speculation (the image as reflected on a mirror). I mean, Argentinian novelist Juan José Saer defined fiction as “anthropological speculation”, referring to Joyce, Faulkner, Kafka, Eco and himself (by the way, I’ll send some Saer too, top-notch Latin-American literary fiction).
Curiously and not so tangential, Bohm was not only extremely influential and original, he also contributed a hell of a lot AND, when persecuted due to his communist affiliations, became a Brazilian citizen (as far as my info goes, he worked at the University of São Paulo aka USP). This is meaningful, considering all I’ve commented recently on other posts. I do think all this is related in some way or another.
On the topic of Boogiepop, I wish you’d watch the anime Boogiepop Phantom, but ok, I will send you the e-books (alongside Saer).