Transcripts
1. Class Intro: How do I increase my
writing productivity? That is really the holy
grail question for every author has a
really big question and even small gains in
efficiency can lead to big improvements in productivity
and output over time. There's a number of
different factors that go into increasing
your writing output. But for this course,
we're going to focus in on one of the most important, which is understanding
the four distinct phases of the writing process. So that you can
equip yourself to engage each phase as it
needs to be engaged. And also to find the optimal kinds of time and space in your
schedule that you're writing time can fill more of your overall schedule
and you can get more writing done in some really unexpected and
surprising places where, you know, you can do dreaming at the grocery store
and you can have your notebook out and do some organizing it in
your lunch break. And then once or
twice a week when you have a really good
dedicated writing session, you can sit down and draft and really make progress
and make tracks, get new scenes written. Then maybe you let yourself
edit for 15 or 20 min at the end of your day
after you get home from work and have finished dinner, you pull out your computer and you do a little
bit of editing for 15 or 30 min because it's a different kind
of brain energy. That rhythm, that kind of process is massively
more productive because it allows you
to redeem more kinds of time in your day and
your week than if you just had to constantly
keep waiting for these big monolithic
blocks of perfect time, which unless your life looks real different than mine and
most people that I know, those kinds of times are
few and far between. So this approach to writing hopefully will free
you up to write more, to write more often, to get more out of
your writing sessions, and to make progress
faster on finishing your story so that you can
edit it and refine it, and send it out there
into the world and then start working on your next one. I'm Justin 5k, author of ten books and
counting at this point, as well as numerous short stories that have been published in anthologies and
literary magazines. I've created several courses on here on skillshare already. And I think that
this class is gonna be a really powerful help, an asset for you as you work at improving your
writing productivity. Every single week
moving forward.
2. Overview: So let's start off
by talking about why there's more
than one phase to the writing process and
why it's important to understand that and not just think about writing
as one thing. The four stages of the
writing process are dreaming, organizing, drafting,
and editing. And if you stop and think
about it for a minute, it makes sense that each
of those components are things you need to
do in your own head. At the very least, as
part of writing a book, you need to use
your imagination to create scenes and
characters and situations. You need to organize your imagination so that
it's not just these random, disconnected or
conflicting events and moments and ideas that
it flows and make sense and has a
solid narrative arc and a good plot outline that pays off in a satisfying
conclusion so that people actually want to read the story and it's not just
a jumbled mess. You need to actually
sit down and write the story no matter how great of an idea you have in your head until
you write it down, or I guess recorded
or in some other way, you create a draft out of it. You create a version
that is sharable. You don't really have
anything worth talking about because you don't
have something that you can share with others. Then finally, we need to take the first version of
whatever you've done, which will never be perfect and polish it up and make
it as good as possible, revising it and tweaking it and refining it over
time to fix errors, both in terms of sentence by sentence like writing errors, but also larger
continuity errors. And also to improve
on possibilities are opportunities that
you might have missed to make your
writing better, to make the story
better, et cetera. So that when you're
finally done, what you have is a great book, a great story that is ready
to be shared with the world. The problem with thinking
of that process as a singular activity like writing is I sit
down and I write. But then when I sit down, I'm really trying to do
all four of those things. If you try to lump all those, all the four aspects of
writing into one session, Which one do you focus
on at any given time? We think of writing primarily as the act of
actually writing the story. But if you haven't imagined what's going to
happen yet and you have an organized it to make sure that all the
pieces actually make, at least broadly
makes sense and fit. Then the drafting part takes forever because
you'd go down one, you do a little bit of writing. You're staring at a blank
screen a lot because you're, the reason you're staring
at a blank screen instead of typing is because your brain is actually doing the previous stages of writing, of trying to imagine an organized the story so that you have something to type. If you're worried about the actual quality of what you're writing
because you're not thinking the safety net of a one or more rounds of editing and revision
which will come later. And you're thinking of
what you're creating as the final version that will ultimately be the
quality factor, then it's really hard to have the confidence to
write anything because it's very difficult to
draft cleanly Orwell. And even the cleanest draft is still going to have room for improvement and things that
can be fixed or expanded on. Breaking down the
writing process into all four of its primary
phases essentially, allows you to be confident
that you are engaging in the necessary stage at unnecessary time and not let them step on
each other's toes. If you try to do
them all at once, they tend to all get in
their own way and you never do any of them
particularly well. And it's frustrating
and it costs a lot of time, energy
and frustration. By separating them out, you are able to zero
in on the stage that you happen to be working
on at that particular time. And then the other
stages actually begin to serve as an asset or a reinforcement to
the one that you're working on in that
particular session. The other big advantage that, that understanding and engaging this stages of writing
separately will afford you is it allows you to redeem your time a
lot more effectively. There are only certain kinds
of times and spaces in the day that worked for me to sit down and draft because
I need to have my computer. And for me, at least in
most authors that I know I need an amount of
uninterrupted space. It's the most energy intensive and creatively
intensive part of the process. So I can't do drafting
of a new chapter, let's say our new scene. If I'm sitting at the table in the dining room while
my kids are doing their homework or running
around asking for food. It's too disruptive,
it's too difficult. Which if I think of
writing as one monolith, then the amount of time or windows of time
that I might have available in my day become
a lot more limited. But there are plenty
of windows in my day when I can do
the dreaming phase. And we'll talk about
that when we get to each phase ends in specific, but by spreading out the
writing process into its component parts and knowing which part you are engaging
at any given time, it actually dramatically
increases your opportunities for writing because suddenly
you find yourself able to do writing in the shower
or riding in the car, or writing while you're
sitting by the pool, while the kids are playing or writing while you're waiting
in the checkout line. Not necessarily typing your
book, but definitely writing, working on one of
the major stages of the writing process
so that when you do have time to sit down and
work on typing your book, you're much better equipped to do that and make
the most of it. And you get more words out
and the words that you get out are more productive,
they are better. They develop your
draft a lot further. You push the ball down
the field a lot farther. Because of that. It both allows you
to, it just makes, it lets you make
the most of all of your writing time when you
have the time to write. With all that in
mind, let's take a look at each of the
four stages in turn. And we'll start off by looking
at the dreaming phase.
3. Stage One: Dreaming: So as I alluded to earlier,
the dreaming phase, the first phase of
the writing process is this sort of open, imaginative play phase
of the writing process. In many respects, for me, I find it to be the most
fun when most purely fun, because you're not really constrained by the perimeters of meeting to have what you're
dreaming about makes sense, or work, or work in light of the things
you wrote previously, the sentences don't
have to be brilliant. Really, the goal of the dreaming phase is to fully
unleash your imagination, to explore that your story, and then bring something
back that you can use later. So in order to make the most of the dreaming phase, you want
to do a couple of things. One is you want to give yourself permission to dream
about your story often. And I like using
the word dreaming because really what
I'm talking about is, is that open, imaginative space. You're not necessarily
problem-solving. You don't really need, like
if you're daydreaming or your thought process as
you're imagining your scene goes off
in a wild direction. That's fine. Because you're not committed
to including everything that you dream up in your actual
draft of your story. So give yourself permission to spend a lot of time on that and you can use and redeem a lot of what I think
of as marginal time. This way, if you
have a long commute, start utilizing your commute
as structured dreaming time. If you know that you're
gonna be grocery shopping, put your headphones in, listened to some genre appropriate music and do some story dreaming while
you're shopping for groceries. It allows you to make
progress on your story. In times and situations
when you don't really have the option to
write your story. The second thing though,
that you wanna do in addition to really
choosing and being intentional to work on giving yourself time for
dreaming about your story. You want to dream
in a little bit of an intentional
and structured way. What I like to do is try
as much as possible to be dreaming about specific scenes
or elements of my story. One way that I'll do
this is by asking myself questions about the story that
are not resolved yet. Like how can this
thing happened? Like, I need to
get this character from this place to this place. But how can I do
that if he doesn't know that this other
character is doing this yet. So that's an unresolved
story question. Let me dream about it the next time I have a dreaming set, I'll just kinda like let my mind wander and I'll picture
the story happening, I'll picture the
characters happening, and I'll follow along
with what seems to be going on as they
interact and engage. And this is sort of the raw, imaginative process of the
author that you know, it, it might, depending
on your personality, depending on your writing style, this might come really
naturally to you, or it might feel like
a bit of a stretch. But the more you intentionally
engage with dreaming up, the can, you know, you've ever seen coming
up and you know, you're going to need to write
the big final fight between your protagonist and
her mother-in-law when they're finally
going to have it out and scream at each other. Don't just know that's the
scene you need to write. Take some time
dreaming the scene, like actually live in that scene and start hearing
what they say to each other. Where is it, what's going on? And then you can even start playing around with
the scene and start doing clever or fun little what-if scenarios like,
what if I messed with it? I was picturing it
in the living room, but what if it was
at the concert hall? Oh, what if it was actually at the concert hall but it was raining and then one
of them went up. Like, how does the
scene change if I start changing different
things about it? And do those changes start to create interesting
opportunities or new conflicts or
new perspectives on the story or the characters. That's the kinda stuff that the dreaming phase is
perfect for exploring. The third and final thing
that you wanna do to make the most of the dreaming
phase is to always have means of recording what comes up for you
in your dreaming phase. A lot of authors I
know like to carry a notebook around with
them so that you can jot some notes down
that if that doesn't always work for you or if you don't prefer to write by hand. I like using the
recording app on my phone and very
often I'll just find a little quiet corner
and record either text-to-speech or just
the audio and just say, Okay, I'm in this scene. So, and so does this and this. Oh, here's this really
cool line of dialogue. It doesn't have to
be a word for word, because again, you're not
trying to write the scene, but capture the specifics as much as you can
that have come to you. Specific lines of dialogue, specific lines of description, specific elements
of the setting that really stand out to you
or things you think. Character motivation or moments or a horse or breakthroughs, all those little pieces. When it happens in the moment, it feels so poignant and right
on the surface it's like, wow, that was so great. You feel like you'll
never forget it, but I promise you go a
few hours into your day, deal with your email, deal with a phone call, especially if you sleep
on it or time or to like, it might be another night or two before you get to a
really good writing session. You want to get the specifics that came out of your
dreaming session, not just the generalities
and the best way to do that is to make sure
as much as possible, record those ideas
for yourself so that when you come back to it
later in the next phase, you have more to work with. So find a method that works for you and have it with
you all the time. So that as you begin engaging
in that dreaming phase of the writing process in lots of different moments or situations
throughout your day, you can actually
capture that stuff and make it useful to you. Once you get some
great ideas and some good inspiration out of a good dreaming session and you've recorded it for yourself, then you are ready
to take that stuff and roll it into the
next phase of writing, which will move to
in the next video, which is all about organizing.
4. Stage Two: Organizing: So you've just come back from
the phone dreaming session. You have a bunch of ideas and possibilities swirling
around in your head. What do you do next? Well, that's where
the second phase of the writing process comes
in, which is organizing. The organizing phase is all about taking multiple
possibilities and disconnected
ideas and beginning to cohere them or structure
them into a single story. A lot of the things
you will think of in the process of brainstorming
possibilities for your story either won't
necessarily work or they won't work in the exact original way that you
had thought of them. A lot of times you'll
have an idea for a particular scene
or some dialogue. But every time you make
a change to your story, there's always like a
cascading series of changes. That then implies if you change something about a
character's backstory, that might then change something
about their motivation, which then changes
something about the way they would act
in a particular scene, maybe even a scene
you've already written. So keeping track of that
kind of stuff as you're going along and keeping track of the through line of your overall story is really
important and it takes work, giving it its own sort of phase, its own dedicated
time and attention really helps ensure that
when you're drafting, you have room to actually have something to write and
not be constantly going away. What, what am I doing? Where am I? What's
happening the next? How does this relate
to that? And also make sure that when
you're dreaming, you aren't handcuffed
and missing out on cool possibilities or potential interesting
ideas because you're spending so much time stressing about how what you're
dreaming about might fit into your story
that you hem yourself in. The organizing phase is
that connective step in the process that takes the loose ideas and
begins to give them, put them on the shelf in the
right place in your story. There's three main
types of content that you want to keep track of as you are
organizing your story. The first is character arcs. For each major character
in your story. The progression of
that character, the major scenes
that they are in, and also the ways that
they change and any important roles or effects that they're going to
have on the story. If you want more information
about character arcs, actually have a whole course on writing great characters
here on Skillshare, which you can find
on my teacher page. And one of the main sections of that course gets into character
arcs because it's really, really important to understand how to tie all the
pieces together. But for our purposes now, we're just going to focus
on the idea that you want to track that information. Some of the stuff
that's going to come out of your
dreaming sessions, we'll have to do with
your characters. And so keeping track of that as elements
that are relevant to a character arc or different
people's character arcs is one thing that you're
going to be organizing. How is this character
growing and evolving and progressing
and effecting the story? The second thing you want to be tracking in your organization is your main
narrative structure. The main beats, the main moments of narrative
progression and story change that are kind of the tent poles or the
skeleton of your story. Again, if you want more
information about this, I have a class that I have
filmed on Skillshare, all about narrative arcs and the 15 primary beats of a
great narrative structure. So you can watch that if you want to go in depth on
what that looks like. But as you are organizing
your information, keeping track of what
are my main story beats. What are the main moments where the story movement shifts or the story tone shifts or significant character
progression or development has happened. What are those scenes or sets of scenes that I have planned out? Then, then how is
my dreaming stuff? Cool, new ideas or my
changes that are coming up? How does that slot into effect? Because if you change
your first effort, then that's probably
going to change, have implications for how you change your inciting
incident or if you have, if you change your idea for how the climax is going to happen, that might require
some further setup. Like, Oh, I had this great idea that just came to me and
my dreaming session. She can use the knife
that's on the wall. That's how it'll
resolve the climax. Okay, well then
you may need to go back and foreground that by including setup
and foreshadowing information in previous
scenes in your story. So that's the kind of thing
that you want to keep track of when you're working on
your organizing phase. Again, you're not drafting because you're not
really trying to write the scene itself. But you're also not
dreaming because the organizing phase
is all about asking those tough questions
of how does this story fit
together coherently? How does it create a pleasant and engaging
and engrossing sequence of experiences for the
reader that one leads off to the next without any
obvious gaps or breaks. Those are the kinds of questions
that you wrestle with. Questions of continuity,
questions of consistency, all that other kind of stuff. So I find that just like The dreaming phase
sort of naturally fits into those marginal Windows when you have some time
and space to think. But maybe you're
doing something else, like maybe you're
doing the dishes or maybe you're
driving somewhere. For me, the organizational
phase needs a little bit more structure than that because organizing isn't that useful unless you're
taking good notes about it and updating your overall
ecosystem for your booklet, you, the notes that you've
taken for your book, you're seeing notes or your
character arc notes or your narrative structure
notes, those kinds of things. So you need to have
access to that material, which very often means
you probably want your computer or tablet. But it's also not necessarily, it doesn't have the same
kind of creative weight and energy requirement as drafting does because you're still
not writing sentences. You're still not writing,
you're not writing dialogue. You're not writing
the description of the scene and you're having
to wrestle with like, Does this sound stupid? Or are people going
to get what I mean, or any of
that kind of stuff? You're still just organizing the components of your story
into a coherent framework. So I find that a lot of times that's the kind
of activity that is easier for me to do in writing sessions that are maybe not optimally time like I can. If I have maybe 30 min
during my lunch break, the perfect time
for me to sit down, condense all my notes from my dreaming session and do
a little bit of organizing. Make sure I am adequately tracking how
these new ideas are, these new pieces with
this cool idea for a scene or this
interaction or this, or this, this would
be a cool way for the relationship between these characters to be
more interesting. All that stuff actually gets tracked and tracked in a way that when I'm
writing this scene, I have what I need available. So that leads us to the
third kind of thing that you're going to want to be
doing when you're organizing, which is getting
down to the level of what I call laying track, laying track for your scenes. So every time, for every scene
or chapter that I write, I always start with at
least one paragraph, but often it ends up being multiple paragraphs
of kinda like descriptive writing for myself about the chapter
before I write it. So that will often
look like something like my main character's
name is charity. Charity walks into the tavern. She sees this, it makes her mad. In response, she says
something snarky, sarcastic about the thing and then has the brilliant
idea to do this. So she and her friends
go to this place and don't forget when
you're doing this. Remember that So-and-so
character has the secret that she hasn't found out about yet,
but they know it. So see if you can work
that into their behavior. Also, don't forget to include the first time
when the reader is sees this thing which will
become relevant at the end of the story like this is the
place to introduce that. So it's never texts that a reader would
get anything out of. It's like I'm describing to myself the key things
about writing that scene. Spending some time
on that before you sit down for drafting time
makes your drafting so much more efficient and so much more enjoyable because you've already like mentally
wrestled with the, the scene as a whole and you've given yourself
time to make sure that you've you've blocked out
the main movements of the scene and touched
on any critical things, emotional cues or
moments, pauses, or a really important story
details that you want to, you don't want to have all
of that just purely in your head trying to remember
everything all at once. Because a lot of times when
you're drafting you get into the weeds of the moment and sometimes you don't
remember to include that. Someone mentioned that. So and so's off, you're
doing this thing because that's gonna be important
later or whatever. So giving yourself those cues so that as you're writing the scene later when you're drafting time, then you can refer back to
your track that you've laid. And it's more about just driving the train along the track and doing the work to write
the actual words. But you've prepped
yourself for that, that round of the
organizational phase in terms of tracking major
movements like character arcs, major movements like
narrative beats. But also getting into the
level where you begin to prepare the ground for the
scenes you're going to write. And again, what's
nice about that is that is a perfect way for you to take advantage of in
harness your inspiration. Even if it's about something you're not ready to write yet, if you have a great
idea for some dialogue, a really cool mall, that the protagonist
and the antagonist will do well on the edge of a cliff
and it'll look like this. Capture it, and put it in your scene notes
for that scene, even if it's ten
chapters before you get there and you're
writing chronologically. It's not the one
you're working on now. Very often, those little bursts of inspiration create
great moments, are great content
for your story. So capture them in
your organizing phase and start seeding your story all the
way through with everything that you're
going to need to write that scene
when you get to it. And that way when
you do get to it, which we'll talk about
in the next video as we get into the
drafting phase, your job will be
much, much easier.
5. Stage Three: Drafting: So with some dreaming and
comprehensive organizing out of the way in the first two phases of our
writing process, we're now ready to get
to the third phase, which is the drafting phase. Why do I call it the drafting phase and not the writing phase? Well again, we tend to think of writing as this big monolith. And this phase is
what we usually mean or what we usually imagine
when we say writing. It's an author sitting
down at her keyboard to write sentences
of dazzling pros and witty dialogue and incredible story turns and
actually write the story, which it is like. This is the phase
where we sit down and we write something readable. We write an actual scene or paragraphs and
sentences and combine them together in a thing that
another person could read to experience the story that has up until now
been in our head. Great. But it's really important to still give yourself
the space when you are going from a blank Word document or software editing page with a little blinking cursor
and just an infinite sea of white yawning back at
you to finished prose. Everything now you
can do to make that process easier and
more or less full of friction and frustration
and concern and thought and doubt and critique
and so on and so forth. Everything you can
do to make that better is something that
is worth your time to do. So, giving yourself
permission to think of this stage of the writing
process as drafting, not finishing remit,
always remembering that whatever you write in
this phase is a first go. I like to think about it. If you think about how artists work, they start with a canvas
and in almost all cases, they will use some pencil
or some something to block out the rough outline of the picture they're
going to draw or paint. So they don't just
go straight into the fine details in exactly
like that comes later. First, you block
out the painting. Drafting is a lot like that. You have to have
something to work with to turn it into that awesome
finished product. And it needs to be more than just the loose
organization of like, well, in this scene,
this will happen. And here's the things that
will matter for that. Great. But no one can read that you have to write
something that people can read. But giving yourself the space
to know that you're just drafting and no one needs
to read this or if they do, it's only going to
be for the purposes of constructive
editing, critique, giving yourself the
iterative permission to write your book in drafts, write your scenes in drafts, and know that the first
round when you sit down, your goal is just to write
something that is complete, something that is finished, a scene that starts
a certain way, and then it ends and there's
words in the middle. If you have done a good job
dreaming and then organizing, this process should be easier because you're not trying to guess what to write
and then write it as much as possible. Focus your energy on the already difficult
enough process of writing coherently
and writing clearly as you go along so that you
have a finished scene or a finished chapter
and you're that much further on in telling
your whole story. A few tips for doing this. The first one is writing
is more important, like writing anything is more important than writing it well, as you are drafting whenever you find
yourself stalling out, get in motion by giving
yourself permission to write stupid sentences. I remind myself of
this all the time. It's okay to write down,
like write something that isn't good so that
you get it down. And then the editing is when
you make it good and you can absolutely edit and
make something amazing. Don't, this is not the
stage to obsess about the quality of your prose or the brilliance of
your description, or how great your metaphors are, or whether you've used that
word four times already. This is just the stage to make progress and make progress
quickly, write it down. So give yourself
permission to do that and don't laugh at
yourself if you need to, but don't try not to think
about how good it is. The only measure of success in the drafting phase
is forward movement. One of the tools
I really like to use for this that I
learned from Sean Coyne, who is Steven Pressfield editor. And he has a bunch of
really great content and a really great book
called The Story Grid, which I highly recommend. But one of the things
he talked about in a podcast that I listened to is using an
editorial technique as you're writing where if you aren't sure exactly
what to put for something rather than stalling
out and wasting a bunch of time trying to come up with the perfect name
for a character, with a perfect name for
the town they're going to, or this perfect line of
dialogue that just sings, just put in brackets the thing and then the
capital letters TK, which is an editing mark that I forget exactly how he
explained why it is that way, but it means yet to come
like character named TK, if you're not sure what
their name is going to be, instead of wasting any energy
and losing your momentum, just character name
TK in brackets. Because when you get
to editing later, you can find search
for that specifically. And it'll find all the places in your manuscript where you put that little tag in brackets, then you can just find
and replace all of it. So in this scene, all my character
named TK is I've decided that her name
is gonna be whatever. And then I'm just
going to find and replace and all those places. Oh, the name of
small town name TK. Great. That's what
it is for now. And then I decided
it's losers Berg. And now I'll just find
them replace that into all the places where
I had put the placeholder. Because again, what that
does for you is it frees you up from trying to obsess about whether it's
just right or perfect. And it allows you
to keep moving. It allows you to creep
describing the scene. In fact, sometimes if
you really want to, you can even use this for dialogue or even whole
blocks of your scene. Like sometimes I will do, like I remember when I was writing the third book
in the varchar Chronicles, a part of the resolution
of that book hinges on the main character coming up with a brilliant
plan for that, for the break-in that
they have to do to save one of them members of their group is
gonna be executed. Problem is, it's hard to come
up with a brilliant plan. So instead of getting stuck, I just put in brackets, charity comes up with
a brilliant plan. She tells everyone
else they think it's amazing, they go to do it. Boom. In the very first time when
I was drafting that scene. Then later in my dreaming and my organizing, it
was a lot of work. I actually zeroed
it into like, oh, that's actually a great planet, pulls on all of the skills and abilities of the other
characters in the group. That makes a lot of sense. Now I have it in place. Then when I went back
and I edited that scene, I had the little marker to remind myself exactly
where it went. And I put that in there and I wrote a couple of paragraphs of interaction and dialogue around her presenting the plan. If I had allowed myself
to get stuck because I didn't really know what
it was going to be yet. I don't know how much
time I would have lost grinding my gears
until I figured it out, but it would have been a
lot more than I did lose, which was exactly how
long it took me to put it in brackets
and keep moving. So some tips like that
can be really useful. But the bottom line is the
mindset that drafting can be, can and should be messy and
a little bit free form. It's not about writing
perfect prose. It's about writing the
guts of your story, getting it all blocked out into your scenes and into
your chapters so that you have
something to work with when you're ready to
move to the final phase, which we'll get to in the
fourth video of this, which is all about editing.
6. Stage Four: Editing: With your dreaming and
organizing phases, having a equipped you to draft
a great chapter or seen. Now ready for the
fourth and final stage of the writing process,
which is editing. When I first started
out and trying to write my very first book, I resented the editing process and try to avoid it
as much as possible because for some reason I
still had it in my head that like a good writer just
writes and that's it. Thankfully, some friends and a lot of great books and
other resources finally, disabused me of that notion. And I was able to get better
and better at understanding that the editing phase
is not just necessary. It's actually really fun and satisfying because it's
the phase of the process where you get to take
your raw material and really clean it
up and make it sing. This is the part where you can really get into the weeds and
care about word choice and grammar and pros to make your writing serve
the story that you have already
done a good job of telling up to that point
and makes sure that the writing that carries the story is as
good as it can be. Kinda two levels that
I think are worth talking about when it comes
to editing and revisions. The first is scene by scene or line-by-line
like line editing, where you're going through
and doing that process of making your actual prose
as good as it can be. This is where you want to think about things like word choice. I have always said
and will maintain. Everything, should
have at least two sets of eyes on it before
it goes public. So you should absolutely
hire an editor, but you're going to get much better results from
working with an editor. If you have already done a thorough job of
editing for yourself. And it also, editing your own work is one of
the best ways to learn and get better in your natural instinctive
writing talent to begin with, because you're editing
will help you realize what your natural trends are, what your strengths are,
what your weaknesses are, what your foibles,
our et cetera. So it's really
important to take that line-by-line time and basically you're just working
through your scene. I think the most
effective form of editing is to read what you have
written out loud to yourself. Because when your ear hears it, your brain doesn't
skip over or fill in gaps the way it does when you're just
reading with your eyes. So take the time
and sometimes that means you've got
to find somewhere where you're not being observed. So you don't feel
like a weirdo, but read out loud to yourself. Anytime if I'm doing
serious editing, I always print out,
print out what I'm editing because I like
to mark up the page. But you can do it in
your computer program, that's fine too,
whatever works for you. But that one level of
editing is like the scene by scene and line by line
level, where you're just, you're just trying to
make the raw material of your draft better and
make it read better. So you want to think
about it from, I think about it as like from the surface and from
underneath the surface. From the surface is all of the technical aspects of your sentences and
your paragraphs. So word like I've
said, word selection, gram, or pacing,
that kind of thing. But from beneath the
surface is this is also the time when you want to think about the flow of the reader experience
of your scene, are you describing
enough of the scene or are you describing too much at the scene and you
want to pair it down? Does the reader have a
good understanding of the emotional inner world of your character
in that moment? Or were you just making
some assumptions and you realize when you're
actually looking at it, that you're not giving
enough cues about their current emotional
state or there are other characters at the
nature of their relationship. It was too mechanical. You want to take some
time, slow it down, get into their head
a little bit more, or is there for paragraphs and a row of pure brain dialogue, inner, inner monologue
that is going on. And your character is just thinking about how
they feel about a thing and it's
dragged on too long. And you need to go in and find places where you can interject. Seen level action, all
of that stuff, writing, craft level stuff
from the outside in and from the inside out. That's the stuff you work on
at that level of editing. But the second
level of editing is more of what I think
of as revision, which is where you're thinking about all the scenes
of your story as a coherent whole and the arc or the flow of your story
working at that level. This is again where you work
at some of those elements of payoff or consistency
or continuity. So I don't think I'd ever finished a book where I haven't, by the end of the book, written some things that
I realized I need to go back and incorporate into previous chapters or
scenes in the book for that pay off to make
sense like in order for the moment when the
two characters like overcome their differences in
it for that to have punch, I need to do a better job in four or five other places of them fighting and
having their differences. Like I didn't I wasn't tracking that as I wrote those scenes. Now that I get to the
end, I realized that's actually really important and it makes for this great payoffs. So that's fine. Go back and do seem
level editing at different places along the way in order to make that
pay off makes sense. This is one of the
great parts of being an author is that you kinda
get to make the rules. And if you come up with a
great idea for something, you can totally go back and tweak the previous things
that you've written. Something, another
character set or an object that they saw
or gained earlier on, like anything that you need in order for your story
to work later. You can have it earlier, but this is the time
when you want to think about those
elements so that you don't have weird plot threads
or holes falling apart. Or that you don't have sudden an unsatisfying payoffs
where it's like, Oh, that felt cheap. Like there was no
buildup to that. They just suddenly decided
they were in love and I didn't see it happening
along the way. Okay, well, it's
fine if you realize these two characters are
gonna be in love because I'm writing this scene and
it just works great. But then that's the time to go back in your revisions and
think about how you're going to set that up
across the course of the whole story so that
the path has punch. So as you're working
at the editing level, this is when you get to really
take the time to roll up your sleeves and have your perfectionist
tendencies kick in and care about the details. And again, if you separate
this out and think of giving yourself I'm dedicated time and space for exactly that
part of the process. Then it makes drafting
easier, which, and it makes organizing
easier and it makes dreaming easier because you have this as, I think I've come to
think of editing as the safety net that keeps you from giving crappy writing
to other people to read. But you don't have to
worry if your draft has some dumb dialogue or not
amazing descriptions, it's fine because you're going to fix it when
you're editing. And knowing that you
have that safety net there gives you the
confidence to move faster in the other kinds of writing stages that you have
that you set aside time for. Final thing I'll
say about editing that I think is really
helpful is it's a very different kind of
wavelength for your brain. It's a different kind. It's not really the same
kind of creative energy. It's more of a constructive
or critique kind of energy, which means that
oftentimes you can find windows in your day that work for you to do
editing that might not work for you to do
drafting like e.g. I. Have a really hard time doing good-quality creative
draft writing after about 04:00 P.M. because
by about 04:00 P.M. My kids are home from school and I've had a long full day. So even if by 730 or
eight, Everybody's in bed, if I say I'm going to
spend an hour writing, I tried to sit down
and draft a new scene. I'm probably not going
to do very well. It will certainly be more
costly at an energy level, and the output of it
probably isn't gonna be as good as I would like
it to be necessarily. But I have found that I have an easier time
editing in that space. So again, this by compartmentalizing
the writing process into these different phases and giving yourself a
separate kind of designated time for editing
your finished work. A lot of times you can find
times and your schedule in your days and weeks where
you can work on editing, but you might not
necessarily be able to work on writing
in that kind of timeframe and continuing to find different types
of time in your day.
Justin Fike, Author and Writing Nerd
