Oh, happy Friday the 13th… don’t walk under that ladder, or let that black cat cross your path… or… let superstitions run your life.
Where were we? Oh, yeah… the final step of editing. At least for me. You’re more than welcome to do it any way you wish. For this last step, I break out the detail for our sculpture. Add in features like the fine lines that define the hair… the smoothing of the lips and nostrils to bring them into definition… make sure it looks exactly the way I intend before displaying it to the public.
You’re probably wondering what I mean about the detail when I’m discussing a story. Well, I’m talking about changing things… meanings… descriptions of items and places… adding those little bits of texture to make you feel like you’re there. For example:
Daniel walked over to the commons building in the cold.
It’s a sentence. Solid… correct… and, there. But in this final edit (notice that I never mentioned changing the meaning of sentences in any of the previous editing steps), we’re adding detail and texture to the story. (I think this is why my stories grow so much after I edit.) So, it would change to:
Shivering slightly from the snowflakes lightly dusting the back of his neck, Daniel crunched through the crispy leaves littering the sidewalk on the way to the commons building.
A little more verbose, but very much more descriptive than the first. My goal isn’t to do this to every sentence in the story… just to the ones that need that extra little punch of detail… the bit that helps the reader ‘be’ there.
And once that process is done, (this is the one that seems to take forever… but is the most fun for me) I hand it to my beta readers. I want to give them the opportunity to look at the story… not grammar errors and spelling mistakes.
So far, that’s been my process. After handing it to beta readers, I’ve bumped up against the odd math problem or missing bit of info, but haven’t really had to do much beyond that. If I need to restructure the story, or move things around, it’s usually just as easy as dragging and dropping a chapter into place.
What do you think of this process? Willing to give it a try? I know it’s not for everyone, but isn’t it what gets us to the end that matters?
I’m probably gonna try reading backwards at some point. A little tedious, but worth a try!
A LOT tedious… but it gets results.