Editing and rewriting progress

Over the last nine months, I’ve been editing my novel. I wasn’t ashamed of my first effort but, with a little “author education”, I cringed when I re-read some sections. I knew I could improve the writing. My focus was on correcting the newbie mistake of head-hopping. A few readers also challenged me about the number of characters in the story, so I re-wrote and assigned their words and actions to those characters I kept.  Finally, I eliminated all but the essential dialog tags, things like “she said” or “he argued.”

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The result is a revision which reads easier, clearer than the original. I think that’s a win for future readers. As I write this, I’m more than half-way through the revision. It’s a longer process than I thought it would be.

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The revision was slowed because I made major changes to the plot as I edited. I wanted to add more tension to enhance the development of the story. This meant I needed to delete a few subplots and streamline some sections to heighten conflict. I deleted more than 20% of the original manuscript!  When I began to replace those omitted words with new ones, my writing changed to include more showing and less telling. I wanted to encourage reader engagement with the story, have them understand what was happening without a narrator telling them about it.  

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I spent many hours planning the word and page count for each chapter. This helped me to determine if the story’s pace was appropriate. Adding descriptive sections slowed the reading speed, but too much dialog made the story read too fast without important narrative context. Frankly, it was easier to maintain a character’s point-of-view using dialog. I’ve had to revise the revision to balance it with descriptive narrative.

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My novel has four major crises. In the plot revision, I reversed the timing of two of them. This made for a better story, I think, but it had other repercussions. I had to re-read large sections to ensure characters knew only what they could’ve known after I did the re-write. Again, this meant I had to delete dialog or narrative and I loved some of those sections. It was hard to cut them out, but I was ruthless. Despite all these revisions, the story resolved in the same way as the original.

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There remained one more potential change and it was a big one. Because I’d self-published the novel under the title When the King is Evil, I have understood a traditional publisher most likely will require a new title. So, I revised the title, but I’ll not share it yet. I also changed the subtitle to hint at the genre and the story’s time period.

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I’ve written more broadly appealing blog posts but, with this entry, I wanted to write about the editing/revising process as I’ve done it. It’s been slow work and frustrating, but whenever I read over the story now, I like it even more.

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