How to Start Editing Your Novel: A Technique for Gaining Perspective

hey guys it's Ellen Brock novel editor today I want to start talking about developmental or big picture editing so developmental editing is what I primarily do I'm mostly a developmental editor and that means that I focus on the big picture characters structure marketability theme character arc things along those lines so these big picture elements can be very difficult to edit especially with your own work I think it's much harder as the writer coming into it as an editor I don't have the same attachment I don't have this same emotional investment in the work so it's a lot easier for me to come in and say well here are a bunch of solutions it's much harder as the writer and I think there are three main reasons that developmental editing is difficult for writers the first is that it's easy to get stuck on smaller details so it's really easy to get distracted by the wording of a sentence or the emotion not quite hitting in a scene and those smaller level issues or details can be a source of distraction because you can want to go in and fix them and make them better and convey your vision more clearly but before you have a good sense of your overarching changes that you want to make doing those smaller changes often just waste time because if you tinker with a scene and then you find out later on that actually that scene isn't really hoping it's not really contributing contributing anything maybe you just decide I just need to cut the scene entirely then the time that you spent editing it is essentially wasted it might have helped you to develop your voice a little bit or it might give you clearer vision but ultimately it's easy to get into those tinkering with little details and end up wasting a lot of time so I think that is a huge challenge another big challenge is just getting overwhelmed maybe you have a character that you hate and ten scenes that you know don't work at all the antagonist is too weak you don't feel like you have a theme or you lost the theme that you intended initially and there are just all of these things going wrong and it's so over and I really sympathize with that because I know that it's overwhelming and it and I know that it's easy as an editor to say well here's a whole bunch of things that we need to work on it's a lot harder to receive that information so identifying that for yourself is hard and having someone else identify it for you is hard just looking at that list of things that you need to tackle is really overwhelming so that's another thing that I try to alleviate a little bit with some strategies so the third challenge is not being able to see the big picture or having no way to distill the novel down into something that you can see and something you can look at without reading the whole book because you don't have the ability to read the whole book every time you want to fix an individual detail so you need some kind of way to see the big picture and to see overarching me like what am i working with what do I have to do what what am I trying to work towards and what do I already have so some sort of strategy to see the big picture is extremely helpful so I have a lot of different strategies that I recommend to different clients different writers depending on their situation depending on their writing style and how their brain works and just what type of person they are because not every strategy is going to work for everyone but today I want to talk about a strategy that's a little bit different than other strategies it's a little less about formulas or structure and a little bit more about you as the writer and what you want and what's important to you so for this strategy I recommend that you try to put aside your thoughts about the reader or about agents or about publishers so don't think about what what do other people want to read or what are other people going to think just try to connect with your own desires and your own goals for the novel so get out a piece of paper or open up a Word document and make three columns love hate and indifferent and then think about your novel and try to categorize the major elements start with the things that just pop right up into your head so maybe you love the character arc it's exactly what you wanted you're really happy with it put it in the Corie of things that you love maybe you don't really like the antagonist he didn't really turn out the way that you want you don't really think that he's scary or maybe he's not really contributing anything maybe you feeling different or maybe you actually just hate the antagonist and there's just nothing about him that you like so go ahead and put him into either indifferent or hate maybe you have a a romantic subplot that you can't connect to it all you don't hate it you don't love it you can put it in the indifferent category so go through the things that come up immediately the things that just come right up into your head I recommend at this point that you put those things in bold because those are probably going to be your biggest assets and your biggest challenges and those are probably the things that you'll want to work on first however at this point I don't recommend that you start working on those things just yet I recommend that you go through your novel and sort of comb through it for the big picture elements you don't want to get overwhelmed with small details that aren't going to assist you at this phase so try not to list out minor plot points that don't really affect anything try to stick to big plot points maybe ten plot points max on this list the major characters and the major side characters I wouldn't put characters that appear in less than two scenes it is just too much it's not necessary to focus on those details just yet so try to focus on primary characters and significant characters themes pieces of backstory the character arc I would also recommend that you categorize into the love-hate or indifferent any concepts that are significant this may be more relevant if you have a magic system say or technology that works in a particular way how that technology works how those magic systems work I think it's helpful to categorize that as well do you love the way it works are you indifferent do you hate it etc and any significant objects like medallions swords wands anything that plays a significant role in this story that is an object I would also categorize so at this point you will have a pretty extensive list the things that are most important the things you thought of immediately will be in bold but you should be able to see now the things that you love the things that you hate and the things that you're indifferent about at this point I recommend that you add a fourth category and that is lost or whatever word makes sense to you I like lost things that didn't make it into the book things I got lost along the way so these men have been themes that were really important to you characters or scenes that you really wanted to include ideas anything at all it really doesn't matter don't try to judge the value of the thing just be honest with yourself what were the things you wanted to include in this novel and what of what didn't make it because I think it's extremely important to look at not just what we have but what we wanted to have in a novel what we wanted the novel to be because you're never going to be happy with the way it turns out if you're not being honest with yourself about what you wanted the end result to be or if you allow yourself to just abandon those details because they didn't fit in easily and so you've just written them off so I recommend that you add a lost category for some people this could be one thing it could be no things or for some people it could be dozens of things it really depends on what your thoughts were going into the novel how much preparation you did and just the type of person you are or the type of writer you are so once you've done this exercise and you have these columns what does it tell you so the first thing that it tells you is the things that you definitely want to keep the things that you love so often in editing you have the option of choosing between two different things that are incompatible if you aren't sure about what you want with a novel this becomes a lot more difficult so having a list of things that you love helps you to know that you want to bend the things you don't like to accommodate the things you love rather than the other way around so you don't want to throw away a character arc that you love to accommodate a subplot that you hate instead you want to maybe drop that subplot or change the subplot to accommodate the character arc because the thing that you love the second thing it tells you is what you would need to change to love your novel and probably these are the same things you would need to change for other people to love your novel I think writers can often get really hung up on what readers will think or what agents want to read or what publishers want to publish and that can be really overwhelming a lot of the time the thing that you love is going to be the best option because it's going to convey that love to the reader to the agent to the publisher etc and that will really ring so much truer than trying to accommodate what other people want or what you think other people expect from you so this will tell you what you will need to change for you to love the novel and those are probably the same things that you would need to change for other people to love it as well number three is that it will show you the things that you need to improve on as a writer so if every single character is in your in different category or in your hate category then you know that characterization is probably not as strong suit for you and that's probably something that you need to work on if all of your major plot points are are indifferent or hate then you probably need to either spend more time planning your novel in advance so plotting and structuring before you start writing at this point now that you've already written it that's more something that you could use for next time that you write your novel but it also might indicate that you need to spend some time learning about structure or understanding how scenes work and how the different elements of the plot work together so it can be helpful to use this exercise to identify not just what can be improved about this novel specifically but what can be improved about you as a writer or what areas you can strengthen number four is that it will show you some obvious places to make cuts it will help you to identify things that you don't like and that you don't even want to change things that you just want to get rid of entirely and as difficult as it can be to get rid of things it's extremely helpful to distill your ideas and your elements down to as few things as possible because keeping a bunch of junk in your novel that you don't want to be there just makes it harder to edit it it just makes it more difficult to problem-solve so identifying things that you know that you don't want it's gonna make it so much easier for you number five is that it will reveal placeholder elements so things that you stuck in just to get through the writing of the first draft or whatever draft you're on so it's pretty common and natural for writers to add in things that they know need to be there for example you might add in scenes that transition between scenes that you really like and those transitional scenes are really just placeholders because nothing of real value happens you might even have whole characters that are just placeholders you know that your character needs a best friend but you really just stuck something in that you don't really feel that strongly about one way or the other because you needed something to be there so that you could get through the process of writing the first draft and that works really really well to get you through that process but this exercise can help you to identify those things and I think they tend to be in the neutral category they might be in the hate category if you feel really strongly that these elements that you put in as placeholders are just awful but I tend to find more often you just will feel neutral about them and that will help you to identify that those are things that you need to replace with better versions things that are improved and that are really an asset to your novel and number six is that it will show you where you got lost along the way where you abandon ideas that were important to you where you lost track of your theme maybe the character arc was super important to you but somehow it never made it into the novel identifying those things can really help you to end up with a final product that you'll be happy with so after you've done this exercise you'll end up with a really great checklist of things that you need to strengthen cut or improve to make your novel better so at this point what I recommend you do is to start by figuring out the core of your novel use the things you love and maybe some of the things that you lost that really meant a lot for you and come up with a paragraph or a few sentences that identify to you why you want to write this novel why does it matter to you what what drove you to write it in the first place don't put a value judgment on this it can be as deep or as shallow as you want for some writers there might be ten different things that are all equally important that all are extremely valuable to them as to why they want to write this novel for some people it might as simple as you made up a really cool fantasy world and you want to share it with people it might be something extremely deep that you want to have some sort of cathartic experience for yourself or maybe you want to express a pain that you've gone through and help other people to understand it so this can be deep it can be shallow it doesn't matter just identify for yourself why you want to write this what is the core of this story to you why is this something that you want to spend time on and something that you want to put your heart into once you have a really good sense of what matters to you about this novel try to go through your list of things you hate and that you're indifferent about and figure out if there are any that are just completely incompatible with your vision so an example might be if you have a character arc that is the most important thing to you this is what you really really want to express in this novel you love this element and it requires that the character come to trust other characters by the end but you also sort of lost that idea along the way and you have a climax in which the character still demonstrates a lack of trust so they didn't have this arc that you wanted and that was so meaningful to you those are incompatible elements so you know that you're going to have to cut out this climax and replace it with something else hopefully you won't have too many things that fall into this category but it does sometimes happen at half the novel could fall into this category it really depends on how much you lost your original vision in the process of writing the first draft or whatever draft you're on so try at this time to not get too overwhelmed about what it's going to mean and how hard it's going to be to improve the novel or to change those elements I find that it can be helpful for writers and its might not work for you but I think it can be helpful for some people to imagine you have a magic button and if you press that button the novel immediately becomes whatever you want it to be the best version that it could possibly be and you didn't have to do any of the work or any of the research or figure anything out it's just immediately the most perfect version that it could possibly be what would that be what would that look like don't think about the work don't think about the effort don't think about what goes into it or whether you're capable of doing it or whether it's outside of your comfort zone or outside of what you feel that you're capable just think about what it would be what would it look like use that idea and get rid of things that you know are incompatible with your vision because like I mentioned earlier if you can get rid of extraneous details and extraneous elements it's gonna make it way easier because the fewer elements and details that you're trying to juggle at once the better because it's really difficult if you have incompatible concepts or ideas or themes it's characters whatever it's gonna make it so much harder so much harder so I recommend that that's where you start throw out the things that are incompatible that you don't like and you don't care about you can always save those things for another book down the road if there's something that you really like and it's entirely possible that you like the idea of exploring someone who maybe does become more trusting of other people and maybe you also like the idea of someone who doesn't have that arc who never learned to trust people maybe those are just two different stories and that's okay but identifying that they are contradictory is going to help you tremendously because then you can focus on what you really want to get out of the story and what you really want to tell the reader and what you really want to express there's no right or wrong when it comes to this phase of editing when it comes to your vision and it comes to the things that are incompatible it really isn't about if it's the right way to edit or the wrong way to edit there are almost infinite ways of fixing problems some of them are going to be way more dramatic than others and often a simple easy version of fixing a problem isn't going to be the one that's compatible with your vision it's probably going to be the one that throws out things that are hard to convey so if for example you have a subplot that's really complicated or really unusual or maybe you have a character arc that's really abstract or really dark or really deep it's probably gonna be easier to throw that out than to throw out the other elements that are incompatible with it because those other incompatible elements are probably simpler plot points or simpler characters or simpler ideas so sometimes it does mean that you gonna be doing the harder work and the harder thing but it will pay off in the end so now that you have your columns you have your thesis statement or your core story or the things the thing or things that matter to you the most and you've eliminated things that you know are contradictory to your goals or things that just aren't helping you at all now is when you can get into the more nitty-gritty details so at this point I recommend that you start making notes to yourself not necessarily about actual tangible solutions but just notes to yourself about the type of solution that you're going for so for example I recommend that you use parentheses to me this is just easy obviously you can do whatever you want I'm only offering suggestions that make sense to my brain do what make sense for you it could be color coding it could be parentheses or dashes or index cards it really doesn't matter I'm just trying to convey something that's hopefully helpful and sometimes brains just do not work the same way and the more that I edit the more experience I have in that the more that I've learned that people do not think in the same way and what makes sense to me you might make absolutely no sense to you but what makes sense to me to do is to use parentheses go down the list and put into parentheses cut on things that you want to cut you don't really need to add any explanation but if you want to add an explanation you can put cut colon because it's irrelevant or because it's contradictory whatever you need to do to make it make sense to you I also recommend that you use parentheses and include strengthen on things you know you want to keep but that aren't currently as strong as they need to be and again some sort of explanation strengthen because it's inconsistent with the character arc or strengthen because I think that seem to be more entertaining or strengthened because I don't like the direction that I took with this character etc so I also recommend that you use replace for things that you know you have sort of a one-for-one replacement for so for example with the character arc you're not just going to cut out the character arc entirely you want to replace it with something that works better so you might use a parentheses input replace colon with something that's more compatible to my vision or with something that works better with the climb or whatever the case may be so if you get lost in the process of doing this and you start to feel like you really don't know what the solution is you have things in the hate category or in the indifferent category but you don't know what to do about it start to think about what you would need for you to move that into the love category I think that can be often a better way to get to the core issue or the core problem so if there's a character that you hate what would you need to do to move them into the love category do you just need to understand them better would you need to cut out a personality trait or add a personality trait maybe shift their character arc maybe strengthen their dialogue try to figure out what it is specifically that you would need to move that into the love category because that's probably the thing that's going wrong so hopefully at the end of doing this exercise you'll end up with a really great checklist of things that you need to work on before you start editing your novel so these are all the problems that need to be solved before you can really get in there with the novel and fix them and make them better so you'll have a list of things that you want to cut a list of things that you want to strengthen or improve and a list of things you want to replace you'll also have a really good sense of your core feelings about the story what the backbone of the story is to you what really matters to you and that will help you significantly in making sure that as you edit you're always editing towards your vision and that you're never leaning out of or away from your vision another benefit of this technique is that if you do decide to hire an editor or work with a beta reader or a critique partner you will be able to tell them exactly what matters to you and where you're not willing to change where there isn't wiggle room because the things that you love and the things that are in line with your vision or the things that you don't want to change and there are so many ways to change a novel and to improve it and there's never just one solution or one right way there's never a right way and it's not intentional by any means but it's very easy for readers beta readers critique partners or editors to miss your point or to not see what your vision is and to make suggestions that aren't compatible with what you want so doing this exercise can also help with that it'll help you to communicate what really matters to you and what does it matter because what doesn't matter is also really helpful because you can tell that to the other person you know I really don't care about this character or this character really isn't interesting to me and you might get some interesting feedback that way and I think it can be extremely helpful to have that knowledge before you start working with someone else from here my recommendation is that you start trying to fix those problems and then use an outline or a seen list to start tinkering around with possible changes ways to restructure and ways to improve the novel I recommend this over working directly into the novel because I just think that it can create so much potential for losing perspective and it can make the process a lot harder and I think it's a lot easier to challenge your changes by putting them up against each other when you can see them on a simple list or piece of paper because if you know you're going to change the structure in this way and you're gonna change the character arc in this way you can take those two elements and pit them against each other and ask yourself do these make sense with each other are they compatible with each other and that's a lot harder to do when you're working directly into the manuscript and making those changes to the story itself I do have a video about using outlines or seemless to edit your novel so I will link that below so you can watch that if you think it would be helpful I personally find that to be very helpful but like I said everyone's brain works differently and what works for me and what works for other writers might not work for you so you have to figure out the process that works best for you alright guys so Toby has joined me now he is quite done with hearing me talk so hopefully you guys found this video helpful if you have any questions about this or any other writing or editing techniques concepts etc just let me know in the comments I'm always looking for new video ideas so thanks for watching and happy writing guys you have anything to add

Channel: Ellen Brock

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Length: 24min 17sec (1457 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 06 2019