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If you’re even considering the thought of editing your own work, whether it’s a full length novel, novella, short story, flash or whatever other piece of fiction you have, go out and buy this book now. Read it cover to cover. Take notes. Read it again. Do the exercises. Relate it to your own work. Read it again. And again. And again.
This book highlights was really are some of the most obvious fallacies a writer can make and it does it in the most poignant of ways. Everything they say is in the simplest terms. No bushes are being beaten and they don’t cut any writer any slack. Chances are, your manuscript has at least three of the fatal errors outlined in this book. At the very least. More likely, it has nearly all of them. I’m unashamed to say that the latter is me, to one extent or another.
Probably one of the greatest things to come out of this book is the acronym R.U.E., Resist the Urge to Explain. This carries over in multiple chapters, from reiterating explanation in dialogue to redundant points being made and back again. I found that a common theme in many of the editing points they make boils down to over-explaining. Writers want to press the point so badly, and make sure the reader understands exactly what they’re saying that that they’ll flog the dead horse explaining it. Often the author, usually subconsciously, doesn’t trust the reader to get it so important points are reiterated at the expense of the reader’s intelligence.
I’ll be deviating from Kristin Nelson’s blog for today and visiting another blog that I read all the time and mention on here–The Bookshelf Muse. Angela highlighted some excellent points about what can stall out a story. Ironically enough, I just read those chapters today in Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, the book she mentions towards the end of the post.
I think most of it can be summed up in a lovely acronym that Renni Brown and Dave King thought up in their book–R.U.E. Resist the urge to explain. I really think that’s a major crux when it comes to writing. When writers tend to explain too much, it bogs down their pacing, you have a tendency of getting repetitive descriptions and the bane that are info dumps plagues your pages.
Less is more. Usually. Of course, right? Like everything else in life, you need to strike a balance in your writing. The best way to do this is keep your words relevant to the story you’re telling. I have a little thingy in Diamond Crier that I like, the pachta bear (the world’s version of a teddy bear). When I first set out to write the story, the doll, the fur and its uses were pretty relevant to what I had set out to write. Now that it’s written, there isn’t much of a point to keep them in there. Although I really want to.
But I must resist. Kill your darlings and all that. I love the pachta to pieces but at this point, if I keep it in, it’ll just read contrived and pretty pointless. I don’t want to force it in there so I’m slowly acclimating to the fact that it’ll just be a piece of the world that helps give it its depth but holds no place in the actual story. Although my original intentions for the next story are still kind of fitting but the first DC will be out on submission by the time I get anywhere interesting on the second story. If it’s loved enough and I have a clearer idea of what I want to do with it, I can always add it back in; sprinkle it about inconspicuously but I’ll just have to wait and see on that.
