Riding Shotgun

So, you’ve found you pony. Good. Now to dig him out and give him a good polish.

That is, you’ve decided what you want to express with this story and now it’s the time to clean it up and make it shine.

Again, let me make this very clear: editing, this type of structural editing is not proof reading. You can do a final pass for wrong words or words that are repeated, or out of place punctuation, nothatIeverdothat, of course.

Also, cutting is not editing. Cutting might be needed as part of editing, but if you just go in and cut everything – unless you are on a word limit and you’ve greatly exceeded it, and even then I’d advise you to just try recasting the story or writing something completely different. If you have to cut more than half of a story, you’ll be maiming it, and you might not even be aware of it, because to you this story is not fresh, and you don’t know if you’re missing important parts.

As a secondary recommendation, if you’re going to be cutting that deeply, DO make sure some readers read your cut version and listen/watch very carefully for their reaction.

Now, as part of your editing, you might need to cut, but you also might need to grow some parts.

Think of it as gardening. If your approach to gardening is to go out and cut everything, from rose bushes to lawn to about an inch high, your garden will look like mine. (Not that I do that, but I have the touch of death for plants.)

No, clearly, you will trim what must be trimmed, fertilize what must be fertilized, support what must be supported, which are actually rather apt analogies.

But first, of course, we must know what you’re trying to say, right.

This is always difficult for me, since I often don’t know what the “message” is till I’ve thought about it. But once the story is done, you should have some idea what you’re trying to say. It could be as profound as “all men are flawed” or as simple as “little girls like pink way too much.”

The first thing you need to understand, before you start this editing is that your reader isn’t reading your story for the “moral.” Oh, sure, if you’re writing some sort of “lesson” for a version of a Victorian “book for good girls” (grandma had one) maybe. Although one could argue that sort of book is not chosen or bought by the people who would read it. In this they share the more modern tracts of political correctness, where the work is consumed for the “good feels” of what it says and not the ludic experience involved in reading.

If you’re writing for either of those moralizing purposes, more power to you. Figure out what you’re trying to say and make your story a just so story.

But if you’re writing to entertain, to hold the reader’s attention and to make the reader look for more of your stuff, you have to aim differently.

First you have to look at your story and realize you’re not going to be “saying” this moral or this idea. No. You’re going to be causing the reader to experience it.

What I mean is, a fiction piece is an encapsulated bit of experience that differs from reality only by being coherent and making sense.

So, what you want is for your reader to experience the emotional highs and lows along with the character. Your read will in fact be riding shotgun with the character.

In this, fiction has an advantage over movies or other forms of visual entertainment, where you can to a certain degree empathize with the character, but truly it’s more that you’re looking at someone else live the experience.

You know that whole “show, don’t tell?” it’s a misnomer. It should be “live, don’t tell.”

What does this mean in practicality. Say you want to tell the story – as so many of us do – of a character who suffers and triumphs and your moral is “Great love inspires character to survive.”

You want to highlight the parts that show the character has great love for someone, and then you want to make his survival very, very difficult, but you want him to keep ticking through it.

In the course of a short story, the part where he shows his great love (and remember to make it interesting, not just his saying it) would take maybe a third, and the trials most of the remaining two thirds, with the climax taking maybe 10% of the story, if that.

That is, give greater emphasis to the parts that have the greater emotional load. Yeah, your character can go out shopping, but that should take proportionally little room, unless the frustrations of shopping are the trials of your story.

More room in the story should be given to your character longing and striving towards what he might or might not be able to get. Because that is the core of emotion of your story.

Other structural edits, once you get that sorted out, are minor. They’re stuff like “do both your arguments in the story take place in the pastry shop? Unless there’s a reason for this, move one of them to as different a setting as possible. Say the bedroom. Or the garage.” And does your character drink too much coffee? Find another bit of stage business for him to do. Stuffing envelopes, or knitting or painting walls, or something.

And I’m running too long on this, without going into a revision of the structure, so we’ll do that next week in “The part of the first part, making sure you have all the parts of a functional story on paper, and not just in your head.”