Editing Course: Week 1
For the first week, we will be working on the story as a whole.
Hi all,
Welcome to the first week of the editing course!
If you are able to print your manuscript, then please do have a copy of it printed near you. If you can’t print and you will be looking at your book on screen then I suggest you change your manuscript’s font to a different one from the one you write with (weird advice, but helps reading it in a new light when you can’t print) and save it as a PDF1. The reason for that is that we won’t be making changes to the manuscript just yet and this way you won’t be tempted to correct things in the document.
I’m taking you through the editing process in this way because we are starting from a first draft which will undoubtedly be flawed. We will be interrogating every aspect of your narrative choices and you will investigate whether these choices make for the most impactful way to tell your story. Once we’ve established which parts you will keep as is and which parts you will change, we can then work on a plan on how to implement the changes. If you change your narrator, it will impact on plot and characters and therefore you don’t want to be making changes to scenes you will end up having to cut. Here we are building a plan of action so that you can organise your revision in the most efficient way. I promise that more thinking now makes for fewer drafts down the line. The aim isn’t to have a high number of drafts as a badge of honour, it’s to have an efficient and effective revision process so you can get on with the editing, the sending out for feedback and the submitting.
The way I’ve organised the weeks is by layers of story. Think of writing a story as you would building a house. The heart of the story, point of view, setting, characters, plot and structure are your foundations — until these are solid, there’s no point fixing the wallpaper (beginning or ending?) or door handles (metaphors or imagery?). Your decision on what story you are telling will impact the point of view, which will then impact the characters as well as the plot and structure. All this to say, trust in the madness, there is actual method behind this.
