Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself Into Print

by Renni Browne

In scenes, events are seen as they happen rather than described after the fact. Even flashbacks show events as they unfold, although they have unfolded in the past within the context of the story.

To write exposition at length—describing your characters’ pasts or events that happened before the story began or any information your readers might need to understand your plot—is to engage your readers’ intellects. What you want to do is to engage their emotions.

Narrative summary has its uses, the main one being to vary the rhythm and texture of your writing. Scenes are immediate and engaging, but scene after scene without a break can become relentless and exhausting, especially if you tend to write brief, intense scenes. Every once in a while you will want to slow things down to give your readers a chance to catch their breath, and narrative summary can be a good way to do this.

You don’t want to give your readers information. You want to give them experiences.

So when you come across an explanation of a character’s emotion, simply cut the explanation. If the emotion is still shown, then the explanation wasn’t needed. If the emotion isn’t shown, rewrite the passage so that it is.

If your characters actually act the way your summaries say they will, the summaries aren’t needed. If they don’t, the summaries are misleading. Either way, your fiction is likely to be much more effective without the character summary.

Someone once asked Leonard Nimoy how he came to develop the complex relationship between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock that was one of the chief strengths of the old Star Trek series. How had he gone about working out such a deep and authentic friendship beforehand? Nimoy simply said that he hadn’t—and in fact couldn’t have—worked it out in advance. Had he consciously mapped out Spock’s relationship with Kirk, that relationship would never have been any deeper than the plan he had worked out. Instead he played the character intuitively, and there was no limit to the depth the relationship could attain.

A good rule of thumb is to give your readers only as much background information, or history, or characterization, as they need at any given time.

Note that with the omniscient voice what you gain in perspective you lose in intimacy.

Then there is the third person. If the first person invites intimacy and the omniscient narrator allows for perspective, the third person strikes a balance between the two. Actually, it can strike any number of balances—it’s the attempt to define precisely these various degrees of intimacy versus perspective that leads the obsessive to describe twenty-six different flavors of point of view. It’s much less complicated simply to treat the third-person point of view as a continuum, running from narrative intimacy to narrative distance.

When you describe your settings and action using only words from your viewpoint character’s vocabulary, you’re not only telling your readers the facts, you’re running those facts through your viewpoint character’s history and sensibility. On the other hand, when the voice of your descriptions is more sophisticated, more verbose, perhaps more acutely observant than your viewpoint character can manage, you’ve put distance between the two.

So what degree of narrative distance is right for you? Broadly speaking, the more intimate the point of view, the better. One of the most vital and difficult tasks facing a writer is creating believable and engaging characters, and an intimate point of view is a terrific way to do this.

Allowing your characters’ emotions to steep into your descriptions also lets you use description more freely. When your descriptions simply convey information to your readers, they interrupt the story and slow the pace down. To avoid this, many writers pare description down to a bare minimum, often leaving their writing sterile and their pace overly uniform. When description also conveys a character’s personality or mood, you can use it to vary your pace or add texture without interrupting the flow. The description itself advances the story.

The emotions have to go somewhere, and the language of your descriptions is a good place for them.

The most important thing is to maintain control of your narrative distance, to use it deliberately to do what you need to do in a given scene.

The reason this works better than the Markey example above or the Lonesome Dove example at the beginning of the chapter is that Hoffman maintains considerable narrative distance for much of the scene, even when in a character’s head. The voice describing Gillian’s lonely and dissolute life is as articulate and well organized as that describing Sally’s suburban existence. Readers aren’t moving from an intimate connection with one character to an intimate connection with another, as they do with McMurtry. It makes the jumps less jarring.

The key element in Hoffman’s scene is the way the two sisters’ lives collide at this moment, and for that to work, Hoffman needs to create a genuine sense of what each sister’s life is truly like. She can’t do this from a single point of view, since at this stage in the story each sister seriously misunderstands the other. She can’t write brief, separate scenes from the two points of view, since that wouldn’t let her build to the climax of Jimmy’s body. She has to jump from head to head.

If most of what you enjoyed doesn’t obviously advance your plot, then maybe you need to change your plot. Clearly you’re trying to write a story around the elements that grab you the least, and that’s not going to work. It’s far better to rewrite your story in a way that makes use of the good stuff than to simply to use your story as an excuse for writing the good stuff.

In fact, allowing your viewpoint character’s interest of the moment to control your descriptive detail is another way of writing from an intimate point of view.

Said, on the other hand, isn’t even read the way other verbs are read. It is, and should be, an almost purely mechanical device—more like a punctuation mark than a verb.

The dialogue you’re trying to create has to be much more compressed, much more focused than real speech. In effect, dialogue is an artificial creation that sounds natural when you read it.

Whenever you’re writing from a single point of view—as you will be ninety percent of the time—you can simply jettison thinker attributions. Your readers will know who’s doing the thinking.

Another technique for setting off interior monologue sharply is to write it in the first person (often in italics) when your narrative is in the third, a technique that is most effective when the passage of interior monologue is a self-conscious, internal thought—interior dialogue, in effect.

unless you are deliberately writing with narrative distance, there is no reason to cast your interior monologue in the first person. After all, if your interior monologue is in first person and your narrative is in third, it naturally creates a sense that the narrator and the thinker are not the same. If they are—if you are using the same voice for narrative and for interior monologue—your readers will have a subtle, almost subliminal sense of something wrong that could drive them right out of the story. It’s far easier simply to cast the interior monologue into the third person, dispensing with any thinker attributions along the way.

And whether or not you are writing with narrative distance, it’s not a good idea to cast all of your interior monologue in italics. Since long passages in italics (or, indeed, any unusual typeface) are a pain to read, you can only use this technique effectively for passages no longer than a short sentence or two.

Also, since generations of hacks have used italics to punch up otherwise weak dialogue (“I have just about had it up to here with your get-rich-quick schemes!”), frequent italics have come to signal weak writing. So you should never resort to them unless they are the only practical choice, as with the kind of self-conscious internal dialogue shown above or an occasional emphasis. Unless you really need italics they’re just plain irritating, aren’t they?!!!

But if italics, first person, or separate paragraphs are to be used rarely, what’s the norm? How do you set off your interior monologue when you’re writing with narrative intimacy? Quite simply, you don’t. One of the signs that you are writing from an intimate point of view is that the line between your descriptions and your interior monologue begins to blur.

Some first-person novels are written with the narrator looking back on events that took place in his or her past, often because a more mature narrative voice can provide a worldly-wise perspective on the story. At times, it’s necessary for such a narrator to distinguish between what he or she is thinking in the narrative present and what he or she thought at the time of the story.

Remember, beats allow your readers to picture your dialogue taking place. As with other forms of description, you want to give your readers enough detail to jump-start their imaginations and enough leeway for their imaginations to work. You want to define the action without overdefining it.

How many beats you need depends on the rhythm of your dialogue. Like a piece of good music, good dialogue has an ebb and flow to it. Where you want the tension high, as with the confrontation scene that opens this chapter, pare the beats down to a bare minimum. If you’ve just had two high-tension scenes in a row, let your readers relax a bit in the next one with some quiet conversation interspersed with pauses (signified by beats).

One situation that almost always requires a beat is when your dialogue changes emotional direction—when your character drops a pretense, say, or has a sudden realization in the middle of a line.

The best way to fine-tune the rhythm of your dialogue, of course, is to read it aloud. Listen for the pauses as you read, and if you find yourself pausing between two consecutive lines, consider inserting a beat at that point.

Beats do more than control the rhythm of your dialogue. They are also a powerful way to convey your characters. Any good actor knows the importance of body language in projecting a character, and the same holds true in fiction.

Do your beats help illuminate your characters? Are they individual or general actions anyone might do under just about any circumstances?

That rhythm should not be unvaried. Some writers tend to fall into a rut—like the one mentioned in chapter 1, whose scenes were all about five minutes long. And in some cases, the steady rhythm of similarly sized scenes or chapters can reinforce a story’s steady forward momentum. But if the scene or chapter length remains steady while the tension of the story varies considerably, you are passing up the chance to reinforce the tension your story depends on. You are failing to use one of the simplest of storytelling tools.

Most writers already know to edit out places where they have literally repeated a word or phrase. But the repetition of an effect can be just as problematic. Whether it’s two sentences that convey the same information, two paragraphs that establish the same personality trait, or two characters who fill the same role in the plot, repetition can rob your writing of its power.

When you try to accomplish the same effect twice, the weaker attempt is likely to undermine the power of the stronger one. Inspired by a very gifted novelist-client who is also a gifted writing instructor, we often write a formula in the margin of manuscripts: 1 + 1 = ½.

Another reason to avoid the as and -ing constructions is that they can give rise to physical impossibilities. We once worked on the autobiography of a behavioral biologist who, in the process of describing her field work, wrote, “Disappearing into my tent, I changed into fresh jeans.” The -ing construction forced simultaneity on two actions that can’t be simultaneous.

And given the choice between an as or -ing construction and a belabored, artificial alternative, you’re well advised to use the as or -ing.

For instance, “Pulling off her gloves, she turned to face him” could easily be changed to “She pulled off her gloves and turned to face him,” or even “She pulled off her gloves, turned to face him.” Or you can make an -ing phrase less conspicuous by moving it to the middle of the sentence rather than the beginning, where it seems particularly amateurish.

But even where the adverbs aren’t the product of lazy writing, they can still look like lazy writing, just because -ly adverbs have been used so often by so many hacks in the past.

Then there are the stylistic devices that make a writer look insecure, the most notable offenders being exclamation points and italics. Exclamation points are visually distracting and, if overused, are an irritation to readers.

The surest sign that you are achieving literary sophistication is when your writing begins to seem effortless. Not that it will be effortless, of course—crafting good prose is hard work. We often guide writers through four drafts before we see the novel published, even though the first draft we see may not be the first one the writer wrote.

It’s perfectly understandable that a new writer could fall in love with the work of a brilliant literary figure (William Faulkner, say, or William Burroughs) and then try to emulate that literary voice. But when an amateur tries deliberately for the sort of mature voice found in seasoned professionals, the result is likely to be pretentious and largely unreadable.

Style and voice are not interchangeable. If you think about it, you can see that every writer has or can have a literary style, but by no means does every writer have a literary voice.

Remember, your primary purpose as a writer of fiction is to engage your readers in your story the best way you can. When your style starts to overshadow your story, it’s defeating that purpose.

If you have a poetic turn of mind, you can let it out of its cage from time to time. You just need to remember the other principles we’ve talked about, such as proportion. When you take the time and energy to capture precisely a particular state of mind, make sure it’s a state of mind that’s worth capturing—a turning point in your main character’s life, a moment of realization that defines his or her entire existence. If you expend your literary gifts on a character’s passing fancy or fit of pique, your readers are going to feel manipulated and you’ll get in the way of your story.

Very often a character’s voice will develop as much or more in the revision process as in the first draft.

The greatest advantage of self-editing—including the highlighting we’ve recommended in this chapter—is the kind of attention you have to pay to your own work while you’re doing the self-editing. It demands that you revise again and again until what you’ve written rings true. Until you can believe it. It invites you to listen to your work. Do that job of listening carefully enough, lovingly enough, and you will start to hear your own writing voice.