Tag Archives: edit

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‘Just Cut the Whole Damn Thing’

On Wednesday, I finished editing my manuscript for Baby Grand. The third edit. And hopefully the last — at least for the time being.

The book is now 330 pages and just over 93,000 words (my original draft was 277 pages).

If you would have told me on Monday that I would be finished by Wednesday, I wouldn’t have believed you. That’s because throughout this entire process, I had planned on adding a chapter at the very end of my book — a chapter that would help clear up some ambiguity. On Monday, it was time to write that chapter, and I was clueless. For the past few months, I’d written a bunch of notes, and lines, for it, things I wanted to include. But things weren’t clicking. I was writing and writing and feeling like I was going nowhere. Not a good sign for a thriller. But I thought that perhaps if I kept writing, something would come to me, and then I’d be able to zero in on it, and cut out all the rest.

I was in bed Tuesday morning, unable to sleep, and it hit me: Why not just cut the whole damn thing?

Not the content of the ending, but trim the way I was telling it. Stop blabbering on and on. Shortening it might make it more impactful.

Hmmm… I wondered if I was suggesting this, because I was being lazy. Or perhaps I’d had enough and needed a break. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my ending could be more powerful if I took elements that I really liked from my last chapter, the one that I had, and shoved them into my second to last chapter, and made that my ending.

Would it work? I gave it a try, and I think it does. For the past couple of days, I’ve been opening up the manuscript to take a peek at the ending, hoping that I would still be happy with it. And each time I read it, I am.

One of my earlier writing tips (Writing Tip #9) is to “omit unnecessary words.” That’s certainly what I did with my ending, although it took me a while, over a year, to realize I had to.

I joked on my Facebook page that all the recent Facebook changes reminded me of the editing of my novel: Things keep changing, but I’m not sure anything is getting better. But the truth is I think my novel is far better having gone through three revisions. Even though I groaned my way through all of them.

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Writing Tip #34

Typos are inexcusable. Yesterday, I stopped by L.M. Stull’s latest post, Edit, Edit and Then Edit Some More, in which she discussed the importance of having others read your work if only to get rid of those pesky typos. As I wrote in her comments, I totally agree. It gets to the point that you’ve read your own book so many times that you can recite it, all 300 pages of it, as if it were the Pledge of Allegiance, so you need different sets of fresh eyes to find those mistakes.

Remember:

  • If you are an author looking to be traditionally published, typos will turn off agents and editors. I’ve heard more than one writer say to me, “Oh, if the book is interesting enough, typos don’t matter” or “Oh, they’ll fix those later for me.” Not so.
  • If you are an author looking to self-publish, typos will turn off readers. I’m one of those unforgiving readers, probably because I’m a professional editor, but if I see too many grammatical or punctuation mistakes, I will close the book. Typos are like bees buzzing around my ear; they are distracting and take me out of the story.

So when you’ve finished your manuscript and you are absolutely sure that it’s perfect and pristine, spellchecked and all, it’s a good idea that you have someone — beta readers, professional editors, your choice — take one more look-see. As I wrote on L.M.’s post, while opinions may differ about story lines and character development, typos are inexcusable and need to be found and fixed.