Editing My Novels for a Decade, Part 3

This is what the hell I am doing, editing my novels for a decade.

In the last entry, I covered how I edit the storyline and the acts. In this entry, I cover how I edit chapters, beats, scenes, paragraphs, and sentences.

EDIT THE CHAPTERS

I rewrote an entire first chapter of Smarthome Rebel nine years after I wrote the novel. That’s rare for me. 

I’ve done that one other time (Summer Clubbing) but for different reasons. I rewrote the first chapter of Smarthome to ease the reader into a futuristic world. The rest of the novel stayed the same. I rewrote the first chapter of SC because I hadn’t yet cracked the code of the story.

The trickiest thing about rewriting a whole chapter years after writing the first draft is that I have to be sure to write in the same style.

My style may have changed. I may have just written a new novel in a tough-guy noir style, but I’m going back to an old manuscript that’s written from the perspective of a middle-school boy. I have to be careful I don’t start imposing a new style on an old novel. I have to stay within the prose style established for the story. 

Sometimes I don’t have to worry about rewriting in the same style because I’m cutting whole sections. I once deleted a running conversation, spanning the whole story, from the novel Let’s Not Do Maybe Again. My wife didn’t like the conversation. My brother didn’t like it. I had fun writing it, and it was necessary scaffolding during the construction of the novel, but it wasn’t necessary. I deleted all 3,000 words of it and felt no loss at all. 

Now, here’s a thing about the ten novels I’ve written since 2015. My storylines are chronological. I do not experiment with rearranging chapters out of chronological order. There is no jumping around in time. Characters live life the way life is lived.

I’m not prescribing a rule here. You write your novel however you want. I’m just saying that because I haven’t messed with time in my books, I don’t have to worry about the order in which my chapters appear. If you have an out-of-order story or one that jumps between decades or eras, you may have occasion to move your chapters around for maximum dramatic effect.

In this period of my creative life, I work on the structure of the storyline so that I don’t have to mess with time to entertain the reader. It doesn’t mean I won’t do this in a future novel. Writing novels in my forties and fifties, I’ve been enjoying chronological storylines in which dramatic change occurs over linear time. I like the challenge and reward of putting a world in motion in the mind of the reader. Characters change over time based on tough decisions made in the moment. 

What if you mess with time in your novel? What should you look out for? Moving backward and forward in time unhinges a dramatic moment from its place in human experience and puts the reader in hover mode. We are in an omniscient god-like point of view watching events plucked out of time and placed out of order. It’s a point of view that can undercut the drama of any particular moment. 

If you get loopy with the structure—put a middle chapter first, out of order—there is a pulling-backward feeling. The reader gets a teaser chapter of what’s to come, goes back in time to catch up, and then feels a kind of tedium until we’re back in the progressing storyline. 

These techniques are hard to handle because they can undermine dramatic tension by answering dramatic questions too soon. We already know he lives. We already know she’s the mole. We already know they got divorced. We already know he made the decision to leave. We already know . . . whatever. So as a novelist playing with time, you have to build dramatic tension in other ways.

EDIT THE BIG BEATS

I tend to edit the big beats early on. I may return to a novel, years after writing the first draft, and discover I can draw out a fight or an argument a little longer, but that’s rare because I would’ve already done that the first year or two after writing the draft.

However, there is always the chance that I’ll reread a beat chapter (the midpoint, for example) and realize that it falls flat. I may have had more in my imagination for the midpoint sequence than I actually put down in words. 

That’s the thing about editing your own work: you have so much more in your imagination than what is on the page. You have to let the words generate the world, the way that it would happen for a reader. You have to fight against remembering the world you built in your head. 

And so that’s what I do when I revisit the big-beat chapters. Is the catalyst personally directed to the hero? Does the hero struggle enough with the dilemma in the first act? Does the hero clearly do something to enter the second act? Is the milestone in the second act big enough to drive us onward to the midpoint? 

Does the midpoint function as a giant catalyst spurring us forward, raising the stakes, impressing urgency upon the hero, and so on? Is the Death Moment death-y enough? Is the Tower Surprise surprise-y enough? Is the resurrection beat inspiring enough? (See “Save the Cat.”)

Am I feeling emotions when I reread my work, or am I unmoved?

I may think I’ve done a decent job on all these beats, but rereading the novel with a cold, critical eye (and mind) two or three years later enables me to verify that, in fact, I have done enough or that, no, I have just skated by on an assumption of adequacy.

EDIT THE SCENES

I let the words build the scenes in my head. 

Is the action clear? Has the character expressed their intent, acted on their intent, processed the unforeseen consequences, and found a way to keep working toward their goal in the scene?

Can I reduce a string of descriptive actions to a single verb? For example, maybe I can rewrite “he placed his foot on the first rung of the ladder and grimaced as he put his weight on his bad knee” to “he groaned his way up the ladder.”

Can I envision the environment? I find it helpful to think of close, medium, and wide camera shots. Am I describing everything too closely? Am I mentioning hair, eyes, hands, and feet too often? Is everything rendered in a repetitive medium shot? Do I need a wide shot of the environment to help the reader envision this scene? 

Do I feel tension? If I don’t, it’s not often because I haven’t written enough action. It’s because I haven’t expressed a character’s initial intent and expectation in the scene. If I don’t know what the character wants to do and expects to happen when they do it, then I feel no tension when they fail to get what they want.

Is there subtext in the dialogue? This is tricky. It’s worth its own entry, obviously. But I do forget sometimes, in my effort to make everything clear for the reader, that I need to write dialogue that is not so on the nose, that reveals a character’s unstated assumptions, and that allows the reader the fun of interpreting what a character really means.

EDIT THE PARAGRAPHS

A dramatic paragraph, to me, is a house built out of the bricks of sentences.

I reread dramatic paragraphs to make sure a house is built in the reader’s mind.

In fiction, I’m looking to make sure movements are conveyed in an order that makes it possible for the reader to imagine what’s going on.

Ducking behind the car, the jogger was startled by gunfire. 

Ugh. No good. Action and reaction are out of order. Try:

A burst of gunfire startled the jogger. The jogger ducked behind a car.

It’s easy to mix up sequences of action and reaction when your story is so clear in your own mind. But it’s not clear in the reader’s mind. You have to build that house carefully, with sentences of action and reaction, description and motivation, one brick at a time. 

I once read a sentence in a published novel that went something like this: “Pouring herself a glass of wine, she set the bottle on the table.” 

I know what the author meant: she poured herself a glass of wine, and then she set the bottle on the table. The actions are clear in the imagination, but expressed in words, the actions got jumbled up. As written, she’s still pouring the wine as she sets the bottle on the table, which is funny to imagine. 

I recently read this paragraph on page 5 of Playground, a 2024 novel by Richard Powers.

Ina Aroita went down to the beach on a Saturday morning to look for pretty materials. She took her seven-year-old Hariti with her. They left Afa and Rafi at the house, playing on the floor with toy transforming robots. The beach was only a short walk down from their bungalow near the hamlet of Moumu, on the shallow rise between the cliffs and the sea on the eastern coast of the island of Makatea, in the Tuamotu Archipelago in French Polynesia, as far from any continent as habitable land could get—a speck of green confetti, as the French called these atolls, lost on an endless field of blue.

I was struck, when I first read it, by how much I was yanked around in my imagination. I was there for the first sentence: I saw Ina walk down a trail of some kind to the beach. I was on the beach with her as she looked for “pretty materials.” So far, so good. But then I have to reimagine the scene because Ina was not alone. She’d taken her daughter with her. So I have to back up and reimagine the scene: Ina and her daughter walk on a trail, and the two of them comb the beach. In the third sentence, we backtrack yet again, back to the beginning, where Ina and her daughter have “left Afa and Rafi at the house,” before they took their walk to the beach. 

From here, we learn more about the trail they took, and we back up radically in perspective until we are high above the entire archipelago. For some reason, we do not return to Ina and her daughter on the beach for another five paragraphs.

If I’d written this paragraph, I’d edit it to make it easier for the reader to imagine the scene. I might start high and zoom in, or I might start close and zoom out. Either way, I’d try not to do what those first three sentences did, which was to force the reader to reimagine a very simple scene three times. 

These examples are more proof of why editing your own work takes so long. You have to return to your work with an empty mind and allow the words (not your memory) to build the images.

Another thing I do for paragraphs is I often break up long paragraphs into shorter paragraphs in order to give the reader time to imagine the events.

For paragraphs that are not dramatic but are argumentative, thematic, or expositional, I edit for clarity and concision: short and sweet. 

I try not to have the character think anything they are not supposed to be thinking at this stage. I keep thematic musing to a minimum (the reader should be gleaning themes from character choice, action, and consequence). And I use the least amount of exposition possible: enough to allow the reader to imagine what’s important in the scene.

To keep things short and sweet, I look to see if I’ve said the same thing in three consecutive sentences in a paragraph. Maybe I don’t like any of the expressions in particular. With the detachment of a year or three, I’m able to write one solid sentence, and I can cut the other three.

EDIT THE SENTENCES

I read aloud. I read aloud. I read aloud.

This is the main thing I do when I reread a novel years after writing the first draft.

I read it aloud.

I’m always surprised by how hard it is, sometimes, to read the words aloud. I imagine I’m reading the novel to an audience, or I’m the person who has to read the text for the audiobook. So I really want to make reading aloud a smooth experience.

Am I tripping up on my own words? Am I getting tongue-tied? Am I rereading the same sentence three times because it’s so clunky or awkward? Am I messing up the rhythm? 

I cut sentences. I rewrite sentences. I change words. I simplify or swap out. I make these minor changes in an effort to make reading aloud a better experience.

This is grunt work, but it’s necessary. 

I may have used big words when simple words will do. I may have relied on habitual phrases of expression. I may have put words together that are very difficult to say in that order. I may have repeated the same verb six times in a chapter. 

Instead of running, for example, maybe the hero can fly, dash, charge, cut, lumber, stumble, stagger, jog, teeter, trot, limp, trip, veer, wend, race, or bound.

I look at grammar and spelling and make sure my modifiers are close to what they modify, but after a few years, I’ve fixed all that stuff. So I’m reading aloud to catch any phrase, clause, or sentence that’s just downright hard to say. 

So what am I doing, editing my novels for a decade?

I’m reading them aloud, over and over, trying not to worry that, after ten years, I may seem like a crazy person mumbling to himself in the corner.

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