This month, we’ll be wrapping up “The Journey of a Book” that I started last January, our last theme being editing. Some writers love it, some hate it, but a writer must use this invaluable tool if he or she wants to share their story with the public. You can approach editing in about as many ways as you can approach writing because your writing style = your editing style.
Forget Planners and Pantsers
When I write about writing style, I don’t mean whether you’re a planner and have a dossier on every character and an outline for every scene in your boo, or a pantser, or discovery writer, who plunges into writing with a minimum of planning.
The writing style I refer to is your system for completing a manuscript. Do you write the first draft, from beginning to end, before you review any of it? Do you write scenes out of sequence and stitch them together later? Once you understand how you work when it comes to finishing a book, you’ll realize how to get the editing done.
The Bridge Method of Writing
Never heard of the Bridge Method of Writing? Good. I hope you haven’t because I just invented it. No, not really invented it. Just named it. It’s the way I write, and I figured it sounded it better to give it a name, rather then just cal it “my goofy writing style”.
I’ve tried to change how I finish a manuscript and have bowed to the way I’m wired. After doing some initial planning, I sit down and write four to six chapters. I quit when I feel unsafe, like walking out on a bridge until I feel the floorboards bend under my weight. I’m not sure if my beginning chapters can support anymore of my story without a review. I return to the bridgehead–the first chapter– and edit. At this point, I polish just enough to see if these beginning chapters are worth anything. I’ll go into more details about the different kinds of editing later in the month.
When I’m confident that these chapters are a good enough foundation to lengthen the bridge, I write the next four to six chapters. Again, when I feel like my writing is growing aimless or clunky, I switch to editing and shore up my the next set of chapters, so I can extend the bridge–story–further. By the time, I’m finished, the beginning chapters should be in great shape and only need tweaked to fit with the rest of the book. Because I’ve been seesawing between first draft and editing, I don’t have a lot of editing to do once I’ve written the ending. I focus on the last chapters because they’ve had the lead attention.
Writers, do you love editing or hate it? How does your writing style = your editing style?
For more information on editing, check out this post on The Write Conversation. For my other posts on editing, look here.