Anatomy of an Edit

It's always bothered me that there aren't more resources online regarding editing stories. There seems to be a pyramid, at the base of which are near limitless numbers of articles and resources for planning and starting fiction. There are many, but noticeably fewer resources for getting out of a stuck point int he middle and keeping on task. There are a handful of resources on wrapping everything up, and then there seem to be a scant number of available helpful guides about how to edit once you get there.

It was pointed out to me- and I think my friend is correct in this- that part of the reason it's hard to do a general guide is that every story requires something different.

That said, the following is a case study of an edit I've been working on.

Phase one: read through and identify serious structural problems. In this case I had a beginning that was very heavy on exposition, and an ending in which the characters did not have as much agency as I would have liked. I decided the beginning needed to be character driven dialogue and tweaked the end a bit so that it came because of deliberate character actions.

Phase two: I took a moment to step back and decide what kind of story I was trying to tell. The story in question was built around an image of tiny people riding war rabbits, and it kind of straddled that line between being something goofy and adorable, and being something sort of weird and dark. After thinking on it, I decided to go with the latter.

Phase three: I wrote myself a little four sentence summary of the plot, which I found helpful as a guide for pacing, since each one marked an important point in the story.

Phase four: I wrote out what I saw as the main conflicts of the story, and tried to decide what I could change to best address those. I decided to elevate a bit character as a foil to the main character in order to externalize one of the main conflicts. I wrote up a quick set of points I needed this new character to accomplish.

Phase five: I went in to rewrite the beginning and quickly realized that the pace had changed and while the middle was mostly alright, I wasn't just going to be able to tack it on. The story needed a top to bottom rewrite, which I had hoped to avoid. Still, it's a much better story now.

Phase six: More or less satisfied with the structural level, I took a long break, then came back to the story on the level of word choice, sentence structure, grammar, and style. I tweaked a lot of the dialogue to make characters stand out from each other more. Cleaned up a lot of repetition, though less than there was in the first run through, which I guess is an advantage of the rewrite.

Phase seven: going to send it off to a beta reader (is it still beta at this point?) and once I get the okay, I'll start sending it out.

This story was really more work than I was expecting. It was a lot of fun when I wrote it, and I was expecting it to stand up better to close inspection than it did. But it was the one on the list, so you do what you've got to.

Anyway, have a lovely week, all of you out there in blog land.