Story Flow Editing
I recently completed what might be the initial, very rough draft of my thesis*, and while awaiting feedback from my thesis adviser, I decided that I could not sit still and do nothing.
So, I sat down with a printout of my manuscript and a red pen, and refused to line edit. Assaulting the text for grammatical and typographical errors seemed like a natural next step, and I did not want any part of it. Well, that’s not entirely true. I was happy to note any egregious errors that leapt out at me, but line editing was not my goal. I wanted to read through the manuscript to see how the story was working. Could I find any plot holes? Description gaps? Inconsistencies? Places lacking exposition? Missing beats?
In other words, I wanted to read for story flow, making notes as I went. I wanted to look at the story as a reader – as much as I could, given that I wrote it – and try to catch anything that felt off to me. I figured that I’ve read my share of books (all right, probably a few other people’s shares too), so I should know what a weakness in narrative flow looks like.
The Rules:
1) Read slowly and carefully, but keep moving. Never pause long enough to lose the flow of the story. Exception: I knew I would not have the time to complete the work in one stretch. I would have to do it over several days. So, I required myself to always end at the end of a chapter, the way a reader might. If that made me lose the flow, then I had another problem worth noting.
2) Don’t hunt. Just notice what needs noticing.
3) If inspiration strikes, start writing. When I found a glitch or place that something obvious was missing, I could feel free to write whatever came out of me about it.
4) If inspiration does not strike, note it and move on. This is critical, and goes back to #1. If something feels wrong, but what it needs doesn’t flow directly out of my head, I don’t get to sit around figuring it out. That’s for the revision itself.
5) Don’t sweat the line edits unless it can be fixed without slowing down. There will be plenty of time for line editing later.
I found exactly the sort of problems I want to fix, had a few moments of delightful inspiration in dealing with at least some of them. I hit the manuscript too hard, though. I think I looked too closely, not to the extent that it inhibited my longer view of the story, but I think I worried more over some sentences and spots of tone than I should have.
This happened, of course, because I did not have the aforementioned nice, neat set of rules to apply when I started. All I had then was a general sense of wanting to fix plot holes and inconsistencies, and to catch any other issues I spotted, without going all the way down to grammar and syntax. At least I now have those rules for next time.
I still think it worked well. I came away with the feeling that there’s a good novel lurking in this text, waiting for me to coax it out. Now I just have to hope my thesis adviser agrees.
*Sorry for the qualifiers here, but they stay in place until I hear from my thesis adviser. Consider it a way of providing myself some mental armor in case he comes back and tells me it’s only half a story, or the plot is so flawed I have to start over, or something else equally terrifying. I’m going to stop thinking about such things now.
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Submissions Update: Since my last post I have submitted to Inkspill.
