This One Trick for Editing Will Amaze You!

 

Editing has made me realize something I've always been reluctant to admit. To explain what I mean, let me tell you what I'm doing right now.

I'm working on Book 11 of The Unfinished Song: Flute.

The title references the infamous Bone Flute that when played by someone with all six Chromas of magic, forces everyone else to dance to his tune.

I have a strong draft of Flute, but it's one that I wrote before I revised Book 10, Sworn, the book right before this in the series.

For a long series like this, it's essential to work form an outline.

But what do you do when the outline changes?

Or when you read the scenes of you draft and realize they aren't as strong as they could be?

In my case, the outline itself isn't so wrong, but I feel as if many of the scenes just aren't doing enough work. This, I can see, is going to drag out the story too long, and I'll have the same problem in this book as I did with Sworn, fighting to keep my wordcount at a reasonable limit.

Rather than give myself the headache of reverse engineer a bloated draft, I'm going to try to tighten this boat before I set to sea.

That brings me to face that truth I've always tried to wriggle out of... Sometimes the best way to edit a scene is to simply re-write it from scratch.

Even if it's the same scene.

Here's why. A scene is never simply a scene. It's always a scene that is part of a novel. (This is what makes it different than a short story, after all.) So every word and every sentence in that scene is carefully chosen to reflect where the characters are in the overarching story. 

A scene that takes place right after a huge secret is reveled is going to be written much differently than if it take place before a huge secret is revealed... even if every action beat is exactly the same.

If I have already written a scene, I always struggle to save as much as possible, under the delusion that this will be "faster." But the truth is, if a scene is subtly wrong, then trying to find all the word-choices, settings, emotions and what-not that fit a slightly different iteration of the story... well, it often takes longer to do all that than simply read the old version, fix in my mind what I keep, and then rewrite a fresh scene with the new emotional arc, setting, word-choices etc.

So, yeah.

I'm doing that right now.