Editing for Flow, Part 2

Editing for Flow, Part 2

Last week, I posted a brief description of what it is to edit a piece for flow, what to look for, what to change, and why you would want to do this at this stage. What stage? This is the editing that I do in the first draft, when I'm first getting words down on paper. This is not a revision of the manuscript, it's just a slight polish of it before it's finished. Revisions come afterwards, once you know what the story arc is and what's important. At this stage, you don't know where the story is going, or what will be important. So this edit is more of a line-by-line look at the piece, a search for places where the words or sentences don't quite flow well, or well enough. A smoothing of the piece to get out some of the wrinkles.

I also gave everyone a small piece--literally one scene, and a short one for me at that--from my current work in progress. I thought perhaps everyone could take a look at the rough, rough, rough piece and look for what they might change, and then I could explain what I changed and why. Obviously, none of us will change the same things, because these changes are personal choices, things that have to do with what we personally think makes something smooth and flow well or not. Some of you emailed me with what you'd change, and that was great! I'd already made my own changes, so I got to compare what other people thought with what I changed, and question what I'd changed, and perhaps tweak things that I had changed (or not) based on what people said. Thanks for participating! The main reason I did it in this way (in two parts) was because I wanted everyone to think about this stuff on their own at first, before someone else intruded and voiced their opinion.

And I want to stress this before we get started: this is only my OPINION. I'm not saying this is the correct and only way to do this for this particular scene. This is not a lecture. This is not a writer telling everyone that this is how it's done and it's the only answer! I'm trying to use this example to show how I do it and what I look for and what I changed and why, so that you can think about my reasons and either agree or disagree with them. It's to give you an idea of what you might think about when you look at your own material for a line-by-line edit, questions you might ask yourself that perhaps you haven't asked yourself before. I certainly am not saying these are the only questions you should ask either. I'm still learning and improving, so I'm likely to miss some questions I should be asking at this stage. In fact, some of you that responded pointed out things I hadn't thought about, and I'll include those in my workup.

So now the workup. The original scene appears here if you missed it last week and would like to brush up on it, or try your hand at it, before reading the edited version. I'm going to break it down into paragraphs, talk about the changes I made, and then at the end give you the "final" scene. Obviously, the scene may change even more when I go back to it during the true revision process, but this is what I have at this point.

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( Editing )

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( Scene, Edited )

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Just to emphasize some of my earlier writing posts, notice that I'd rate this scene as "good" but not "great" because it advanced the plot (Colin now has a weapon) and it advances character (both the mother, father, and Colin to some degree), but not the setting. I did advance the setting a little--the fact that the mother is mending clothes that are not the family's clothes is important even though you don't see why here--but not significantly. I'm usually happy with "good" scene, especially ones that are this small. Most of my scenes are much longer than this, in which case I work harder to try to get in all three parts of a scene.

Anyway, I hope this was helpful. Thanks again to everyone who responded to part 1 of the post. It was great to see what people looked for! And feel free to comment on the changes I made and why I made them, either agreeing or disagreeing. Like I said, this is probably not the final version of this, but I'll leave any future changes for the revision stage of the process.

Now to go work on my novel_in_90 word count. This took longer to write up than I thought it would. And I've got appointments this afternoon, so much less time to write today.