In Today’s Journal
* Chapter 9, Part 1: Cycling vs. Editing
Chapter 9: Cycling vs. Editing
This chapter doesn’t really belong in this book.
The purpose of this book is to point out mistakes, misuses, and other negative things and how to fix them.
Of course, editing is based on negatives, and even an otherwise good copyedit at the hands of an amateur—if he changes the actual content of the story—will only take what you’ve written farther from your character’s original, authentic story. So in that way I guess this chapter belongs.
But cycling is a positive technique, one that relies on the writer’s sense of self-confidence and his or her ability to trust the characters and the story they’re living.
Let’s get the negatives out of the way first.
Editing
First, I recommend you avoid “developmental” editors and “book doctors” like they’re coming for your firstborn child.
The only good and useful editors out there are copyeditors who actually
- know what they’re doing, and
- do not change the content of your story.
If you’re into traditional publishing, you’ll have to deal with the acquisitions editors at publishing houses and magazines. Acquisitions editors are palatable only because they’re a necessary evil if you want to publish through traditional houses.
When you work with them, I recommend you tread lightly and only make changes that you fully agree with in your heart of hearts. Always remember it isn’t a sin to say “No” and pull your manuscript from consideration.
Remember, editors work for you, not the other way around.
As I used to tell audiences at writers’ conferences, if there were no editors, writers would still write. But if there were no writers, what would editors do? They’d be asking questions like “You want fries with that?”
As I wrote above, editing, like revision and rewriting, is based on negatives. It’s your (or others’) conscious, critical mind second-guessing your characters, the folks who are actually living the story you’re writing.
So even self-editing is usually folly. Consider,
- Editing is a function of the conscious, critical mind, and
- Your conscious, critical mind exists for only two reasons: to learn new things, and to safeguard you. That’s why it takes every opportunity to question your free-wheeling creative subconscious.
- Any changes (revisions, rewrites, edits) the critical mind urges you to make are always based on a negative, and those changes will always push, pull, or tug you away from your characters’ authentic story. The story that they, not you, are living.
- Those changes are your conscious, critical mind trying to stop you from possibly embarrassing yourself by writing and publishing something that some reader somewhere might not like.
- On the other hand, your conscious, critical mind will never take into account all the readers who will like or love what you wrote and published. That’s a positive, and as I said, editing is based on negatives.
Cycling
Cycling, like reading and the best fiction writing, is a function of the creative subconscious. Unlike editing, cycling is always positive.
There are two kinds of cycling:
One: Readers read a story chronologically, from the first word to The End.
But fiction writers don’t have that limitation. Fiction writers are unstuck in time. Here’s an example of the first kind of cycling:
Say you’re writing along in Chapter 5 of your novel. Toward the end of the chapter, Aunt Meg is awakened at around 2 a.m. by a conspicuous sound. She dials 911, explains the situation, then gets up, quietly slips into her robe, and turns to walk into the dark living room. Bam. Chapter 5 ends on that cliffhanger.
Then Chapter 6 begins and the character surprises the writer. As she enters the living room, Aunt Meg spots a would-be burglar across the room. His back is turned to her, so he hasn’t seen or heard her yet. She jockeys for position, then pulls a revolver from the pocket of her robe and holds the thief at gunpoint until the police arrive to arrest him moments later.
The writer stops typing, sits back, and frowns. “Wait, what? I don’t remember her putting a revolver into the pocket of her robe when she got up. Did she?”
The writer cycles back to the previous chapter and reads what he wrote the first time through. “Nope. No revolver. Yet she pulled one from her pocket. Hmm….”
He reads the passage again and watches as Aunt Meg hangs up the phone, then opens the nightstand drawer. He didn’t see her do that before while he was writing the chapter. Meg reaches into the drawer, picks up her deceased husband’s revolver, and slips it into the robe of her pocket. The writer types the action, and the situation is solved.
The writer grins and returns to the white space in the next chapter again to continue writing, and a moment later red-blue-red flashes across the sheer drapes over the living room window and the cops come in and take away the bad guy. End scene.
Two: Every so often, the writer stops writing and reads back over everything he wrote during the previous session. He does this to give the characters another chance to add anything to the scene he might’ve missed before. (More on this in the next section.)
As before, the writer reads only for pleasure, not critically and not “looking for” misspellings, wrong words, sentence or paragraph structures, and so on, though he might fix something that naturally pops out at him as he’s reading.
So if he isn’t checking for errors, why is he reading over it?
Two reasons:
- Because while he’s actually writing the story, the writer is fully engaged. He’s almost inside the story with the characters. He’s racing along, trying to keep up with what happens and the characters’ reactions to what happens.
- When he’s written and cycled over the last chapter or the end of the short story, he’s written one clean draft and the short story or novel is finished. No need for any other drafts. He submits or publishes the story or novel and moves on to write the next one.
Back tomorrow with Chapter 9, Part 2. I’ll publish Chapter 10 on Tuesday.