Putting theory into practice

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

Let’s say you have a skilled and trusted reader or two to help you edit your work. Now comes the hard part: taking their advice. It’s hard to edit someone else’s writing—to figure out where its weaknesses lie and suggest fixes. But when you are the writer getting critiqued, implementing that advice is even more difficult, on both emotional and intellectual levels.

Brian and I are currently in the middle of an editing project for a writer who is refreshingly open to suggestions and quite adept at revising, which I guess is what brought this issue to mind. If you’ve ever taught English or writing or participated in any kind of workshop or critique group, you know how rare it is to find writers, like the one we’re fortunate to be working with now, who are able to use constructive criticism to really improve their work.

Let’s talk about the simple, intellectual side of this issue first and leave the sticky emotional part till later. There’s no doubt about it: big-picture fixes are hard to implement. Completely changing a character’s motivation or reordering a series of events in your story or correcting a logistical error with a plotline are all far easier said than done. Your ‘fix’ may end up being less effective than the original version or may cause unforeseen problems with the story later on, making your whole house of cards collapse.

Brian has a good trick to circumvent that problem: whenever he’s planning a big revision, he also keeps the older version of the file intact in case he decides to reverse the changes later on. Thanks to the computer, this is pretty easy to do. Now I don’t suggest making a different version of your file every single time you revise, only when you’re undertaking major surgery. Keeping more than two or three versions of a file can get too confusing.

Once your big-picture problems are out of the way, though, even the small-scale fixes can be tricky to make. Just entering line edits can be tedious and creates opportunities for even more typos to sneak their way into your work.

Revising your work will probably take even more time and energy than writing the first draft did, so be prepared to give it all the care and patience it needs during the polishing phase.