Editing your WIP: Making it look like you knew what you were doing all along

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last writing update and I am well and truly in the editing fog. I thought finishing my first draft would be the real challenge, getting everything down on one document, in one place, all the concepts and characters flowing into one story. I always believed that would be the fanfare moment and the editing would be the easy part.

I hate being proved wrong.

Editing is such a strange process. You aren’t just rereading your work in progress (WIP) or changing aspects of it, you are actively trying to find mistakes, you’re actively trying to correct plot holes, you are actively scrutinising something you have poured your heart and soul into and ripping it apart. It turns out that I write a lot of fluffy and intricate passages that don’t go anywhere. I think I used to convince myself I wrote these little bits to “build character” and for “world building” but now I know that they are just unnecessary padding.

At times it can be a bit soul destroying. But I’m my own worst critic.

I’ve edited just over 100 pages of A Better Crown (there are about 550 in total) and have so far cut out about 10,000 words. My original manuscript exceeded 220,000 words but I want it to sit somewhere between 170,000 and 200,00. I can hope, right? I spend most of my time wondering if what I’ve written is any good because I have to change it so much. Surely it can’t be that good if I have to cover each page in black ink, crossing out lines of text?

Anyway, I’m working through it. I’ve already had to sacrifice quite a few scenes, along with several minor characters and point of view chapters, all of them victims of the editing game. Everyday I feel like the plot makes more and more sense, the decisions of the characters are more justified, each chapter flows into the next. It is getting better, I think.

I’ve just kept one piece advice in my head, one mantra that I fixate on and has become the focal point of my editing. It’s something I heard Neil Gaiman say about editing: “the second draft is about making it look like you knew what you were doing all along.” It’s those few words that are getting me through right now.

But enough about A Better Crown.

In other news you can check out my new short story: Freaks. This is the longest short story I have ever written. When I was putting pen to paper I felt like I had the time and words to give it a bit of body. A lot of my other short story projects come between 2,000 and 3,000 words but this one was more like 6,000. I really don’t know where the inspiration came from, only that I kept picturing children in theses red, KKK-esque hoods. I’ve always been into dystopian literature but never had the brains or the legs to carry any ideas into a full length novel so this was a good substitute. For some reason I imagine the kids being from the American mid-west, right out of a Stephen King novel. If you can keep that in mind when you read the dialogue then I will have pulled off the right tone.

That’s enough prattling on from me. Make sure you check out Freaks and my other short stories, as well as the preview of my debut fantasy novel A Better Crown.

Stay safe, and I hope lockdown isn’t being too rough on you all.

Stay strong, keep reading, keep writing.