The forest and the trees

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 18

Last week, I said writers might find it helpful to have separate readers for higher-order and lower-order concerns. Brian and I have worked a handful of times on editing jobs for other writers, and that’s exactly how we operate.

Brian is excellent at the higher-order stuff: honing in on issues of pacing, structure, dialogue, characterization, and so forth. He’s also great at suggesting ways to fix big-picture level problems. I can often sense when something’s amiss on this level but am not good at knowing exactly how to fix it.

On the other hand, I have become a pretty good line editor over the years. I try to pay attention to tiny details, like noticing if a character’s eyes are brown on page 10 and blue on page 200, or keeping up with how much story time elapses between plot points, what season it’s supposed to be, and so on. Comma and spelling errors tend to jump out at me now as if lighted by neon.

With me holding my magnifying lens up to the tree bark, Brian is free to concentrate on the forest--although truth be told, he also picks up a lot of grammar errors. We tend to edit on our own, then consolidate all the marks onto one copy, and I always feel validated when we both mark the same errors.

Of course, when it comes to higher- and lower-order concerns, sequence is important. You really don’t need to be worrying too much about minutiae until your later revisions. There’s no point agonizing over every punctuation mark when entire chapters may need to be cut or completely rewritten in order to fix a higher-order concern. Always revise with an eye toward the big picture first.