Thought you might like these three tips which Harry Bingham from ‘writers workshop’ said I can send you – anyone stuck with their edit, do read on!
And, stop press, a room has become free for our July memoirs week. Want to take a break from your novel writing, and tell your own story? As Wayne Dyer said “don’t die with your music still in you!” If not now, then when?
Whatever that music is, this is how you get it on paper (or online!) – the stories your precious family members will love – so they don’t have to say “I never knew that!“
Find out more here.
And here are those tips as promised!
Our June retreat is a sellout, everything is selling out at the moment.
So don’t forget to contact us about that one in July. There’s a mini memoirs one in August which has places, it’s an excellent way of starting your memoir career. Plus some brilliant tutors in September (2/3 GONE), October (Just Write retreat, some gaps), and two fabulous tutors in November although one is nearly sold out. Speak soon! Plan now 🙂 and edit edit edit!
Best wishes
Debbie Flint and team
@RetreatsForYou
Harry Bingham’s Top Three Editing Tips:
80% of editing comes down to just these three tasks:
AIM
If you don’t know what your elevator pitch is (the one that’s just for you, not for an agent or for anyone else on earth), it’s hard to check that your book is on track.
So yes, I think you need to understand your pitch before you start writing anything. But inevitably the act of writing the full text will change your understanding of that pitch, so you need to check, refine and tweak it before you get too stuck into editing. Remember the boxes, remember those imps.
SUBTRACT
Kill surplus text.
Be utterly perfectionist. Two unnecessary words in a 16-word sentence is a massive issue and those words have to go. Three descriptive sentences will in most cases be at least one too many. Figure out what the best bits of that description is and make it more compact.
Anything approaching a cliché should be treated in the same way as surplus text. It’s like a little bit of dead wood. A place where the reader’s eye is likely to skim forwards waiting for the narrative to engage properly again.
Nearly all this skimming happens on a near-microscopic level. Two or three words here. A sentence there. An underpowered image over yonder.
But those things are like plastics in the ocean or low-density cholesterols. The damn things cumulate. Slowly the poison the whole bloodstream fills / The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
Don’t let that happen to you – either the verbiage, or the cholesterols or (if you’re a porpoise) the whole sea-plastics thing.
ADD
Then figure out where your work is underweight. At key moments in your book, you need to linger to get your reader to feel the depth of what happens. What does your character think about what’s happened? What do they feel? How does this connect with other things on their mind (a husband, a loss, a quest)? What is the experience like of having this thing happen to this person in this particular setting?
The challenge here is about layering. It’s about adding relatively small amounts of text in a way that adds whole layers of depth to the passage. We had our refresher on layering last week here.
And that’s it. Aim. Subtract. Add. I’m not saying that’s all that’s involved, but it is definitely most of what’s involved.
Grr. Attaboy. Attagirl.
Those ukeleles are starting to annoy me.
Feedback Friday: Edit, Edit, Edit
From Writer’s Workshop