Editing – Where Do You Start?

You’ve finished writing your story and if you are anything like me, you feel like doing a few fist pumps in the air, and taking a victory lap. Walking on air, you’re bursting with pride. You finished. What an accomplishment!

Then, the reality starts to set in. The creative process is finished, but the race is not yet run. Looming in your future is the arduous task of editing your masterpiece or as I call it at this point, my monstrosity. Where do you start? What can you look for?

With my own writing, during the creative process, I try to write without editing what is going down on the page. The resulting manuscript requires some serious editing. I like to start with tightening up the writing. What are some areas that you can attack to help tighten up your work? One major area that tends to afflict most writers is the use of repetitive words.

If you are writing a beginning reader book, repetitive words are good, and part of your focus would be on controlling the total number of unique words as well as the length, complexity, and number of syllables. Other than the beginning reader books, you want to make sure that you don’t overuse certain words. During the writing of Nowhere Feels Like Home, the sequel to Misfit McCabe, in the first draft manuscript, I used the word that 1,096 times. Common words like that are easy to over-utilize.

How do you identify the repetitive words in your manuscript? Before computers, it was a much harder process, because it was up to you to find all the instances and recognize in printed pages where you had overused words. Now though, there are programs that help you analyze your writing for word or phrase frequency. But, rather than spend some money on software that needs to be installed on the computer, I found websites that allows you to paste your manuscript into a box and click a button for no cost. The results then display and you have a list to review. One such free word frequency counters is on the Write Words website. They also have a frequent phrase tool to help identify overused phrases.

So, once the repetitive words and phrases have been identified, what do you do to reduce the number? The word program that I use has a find feature, as most do, and I search for the oft repeated words, using a find all function and highlight them for easy identification. It certainly beats the hunt and peck method. I highlight each overused word or phrase in a different color, and then I go to work. My manuscript now looks like someone has either thrown ink all over it, or melted confetti into each page. I now have my focus points to go through the manuscript and review each usage of the word or phrase.

One other common type of over usage is passive verbs such as was. It is always a good idea to look at sentences using the word was to see whether or not you can use a more active verb. Remember, your reader will become more involved in your story the more action words you use. If you are writing in first person, the number of instances of the word I will be high. This may or may not be an area to target. You will want to focus on the number of sentences which start with the word I, or if writing in third person, watch the number of sentences starting with he or she.

Here are some examples from the beginning of Nowhere Feels Like Home to illustrate how focusing on repetitive words in your manuscript can help force you to tighten up your work and make it cleaner. The following is the before passage:

Muffled voices fluttered in and out of my consciousness. It was like I was underwater and could hear words when my head broke free, but then I would sink back under and hear nothing again. The river was swelling and I couldn’t find the edge. I had to get to the side and get out or I would drown. Panic began to fill me. But someone was near. I could hear someone talking. The sounds kept buzzing around my head like a bee, but I couldn’t make out the words. Why didn’t they help me?
Suddenly, I was out of the water and ants crawled over my foot and up my leg. I kicked my foot out to try and shake the ants off. Something was holding my leg down, so I kicked out harder. My heart was pounding because I couldn’t get away from the army of ants that was crawling all over me.
Mamma stroked my hair. “You need to lay still, Katie.” With her touch, the tension trickled out of me and my heart slowed down. The sound of her voice soothed me and the world went silent once more.
“How is she doing?” At the sound of my Daddy’s voice, I struggled to open my eyes. My lids were so heavy I could only open them for a flash. It felt like they were swollen shut. Daddy stood by the bed, watching over me.
The ants were back, only this time they were biting. My foot felt like it was on fire and it started to throb. The bites must be poisonous because the pain was becoming unbearable. Why didn’t Daddy do something? Why was he letting the ants swarm all over me and bite me?
“The ants!” My voice only came out in a whisper. “Daddy, make them stop.” My mouth was so dry it felt like I had eaten a plateful of sand.

In the above passage, you can see there were quite of few instances of the word was, a few its, and one that. I started using the word that much more prominently in the remainder of the manuscript, so it is a target repetitive word to focus on, although only a single instance in this passage. Notice how I highlighted every single instance of the target words to help give me a visual of the areas that I wanted to focus on. The word was is simply too passive to be used this frequently, and is a common word to focus the editing process on. I have reduced the number of highlighted words by rewriting the passage in a more active voice, let’s take a look at the results.

Muffled voices fluttered in and out of my consciousness. I had the feeling of being underwater and could hear words when my head broke free, but then I sank back under and heard nothing again. Thoughts of being underwater swirled around until I found myself in the middle of a river. The river swelled as the current flowed rapidly past and I couldn’t find the edge. I had to get to the side and get out or I would drown. Panic began to fill me. Nearby, I could still hear talking. The sounds kept buzzing around my head like a bee. I couldn’t make out the words. Why didn’t they help me?
Suddenly out of the water, ants crawled over my foot and up my leg. I kicked my foot out to shake the ants off. Something held my leg down. An edge of panic crept into my throat, so I kicked out harder to get loose. My heart pounded because I couldn’t get away from the army of ants crawling all over me.
Mamma stroked my hair. “You need to lay still, Katie.” With her touch, the tension flowed out of me and my heart slowed down. Her voice soothed me and the world went silent once more.
“How is she doing?” At the sound of my Daddy’s voice, I struggled to open my eyes. My lids were so heavy I could only open them for a flash. They felt swollen shut. Daddy stood by the bed, watching over me.
The ants were back, only this time they were biting. My foot felt on fire and started to throb. The bites must be poisonous because the pain was becoming unbearable. Why didn’t Daddy do something? Why did he let the ants swarm all over me and bite me?
“The ants!” My voice only came out in a whisper. “Daddy, make them stop.” Mouth so dry I felt like I had eaten a plateful of sand, I tried to swallow, but felt like I couldn’t.

You will notice that all of the instances of the word it are gone, and so is the that, and there is only one instance of the word was. Read both passages. Which one is better? The passage is still conveying the same exact scene, but one tells you what Katie is experiencing, and the other allows you to experience the sensations right along side of Katie.

Am I done with editing this passage? Absolutely not. There are things even now briefly re-reading that are jumping off the page, such as, “Why did he let the ants swarm all over me and bite me?” Is the word me repetitious in this context? Can I change the sentence to make it better? The answer to both of those questions is probably yes. Will I leave the lone was alone and let the sentence stand as is? Probably not. I definitely want to rewrite that sentence as well, but haven’t figured out how I want to rephrase it yet.

Now that you have a couple of items to focus on in the editing process, it’s time to get your environment ready, block out the rest of the world, and dive in and start ripping apart your manuscript.