Thoughts on Editing

Editing has been a big part of my writing life this year. For starters, I sold my debut novel in January. (EEK! Yep, still excited about it.) One of the many thrills of my first deal has been working with my editor and getting to participate in the publication process. I’m committed to polishing the manuscript to perfection, and it has been lovely to spend even more time with my characters, knowing they’ll get to meet readers soon.

This year I’m also a first-time PitchWars mentor. (I can’t reveal my wish-list yet, but I can say I’m mentoring adult fiction.) I’m so looking forward to meeting my mentee -- and her or his novel! -- and being part of helping that book to grow through edits and structural critiques.

In my former life, before pursuing writing full-time, I worked in the editorial field for 7+ years. As associate managing editor for several magazines, part of my job was to edit, polish, and help present articles in the best possible way. It was great training on the technical and business side of editing, and I loved it. From markups to inputting changes to tweaking word choices, I found the whole process to be very satisfying.

Of course, editing is even more fun when I’m working with my favorite material: novels and short stories. With creative editing I can break a few rules. I can play with sound and structure and disrupt things to give life to the language. It’s delightful.

When editing a novel, I make several passes (and each of these more than once). There’s the full read for content, structure, and plot; then chapter reads for flow and scenes; then page reads for dialogue and poetics. The final type of read is the one I love best: once the book as a whole is formed and working, I can settle into the individual paragraphs and phrases. This is where poetry lives in prose. An essay I often return to at this stage of editing is Gary Lutz’s “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” a fantastic piece on the way sounds and grammar and echoes can make individual sentences remarkable.

I prefer to edit on paper, and I have a rotating stable of pens and highlighters to keep notes organized. I find it helpful to make a color key: one color for each type of edit to save time. Types of edits might include “fact check” (when I’m not sure if a detail is historically accurate), “w/c” (word choice -- not water closet! -- if a word’s not sitting well for me and I want to revisit its poetics), “repeated” (if I see a particular word cropping up several times on a page or in a chapter), and “dialogue” (if a line of speech sounds clunky or unlike that character). Once I have a color key, I can simply circle the offending word or phrase in that color without having to constantly write “w/c” or “repeated” or whatnot.

Do you have favorite editing techniques, resources, or habits? And how do you answer the controversial question of what is more fun: editing vs. drafting?