The importance of editing

This week has been all about editing, in several different forms.  In my own work, I've been editing a novella.  And, through my involvement with local environmental project Pens of the Earth, I've both edited other people's stories, and had my own story edited.  And a couple of weeks back Havant and District Writers' Circle also had our professional editor member, Victoria Milne, give members a talk about editing first pages.  So I've had lots of how-to input, along with lots of practical experience of doing it.

I also attended the editorial meeting for Pens of the Earth.  Some of the editors are writer friends I have known for twenty years.  We know each other's work well, and have watched each other grow as writers. Another of the editors on that team is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Portsmouth University.  Discussing the submitted stories told me that I really can recognize good writing.  We only  disagreed on a few minor things, but everybody had the same idea of what was good writing and what didn't make the cut.

In editing my novella, my challenge has been deepening the story, as usual.  I'm a very action-orientated writer, so I will easily get my characters moving through a landscape, and talking to each other.  But what I usually miss out on my first pass on a story is a detailed description of that landscape, and their emotional and physical reactions to things.

I don't put myself into the sort of extreme danger some of my characters face, so sometimes I find it hard to imagine how they'd feel and react to things.  I have (thankfully) never had anyone turn a gun on me and threaten to kill me.  My characters sometimes have to face such things.

In the novella I've just finished my characters faced attack by drones, had to deal with a deadly force shield, and had to get themselves out of a locked-down ship before it blew them up.  It made for exciting action, but again I wasn't putting their emotions and physical reactions in enough.  So the edits included adding hammering hearts, sweaty palms, and lots of swearing.  I've also added the theme underlying the story through the thoughts of another character.  The story examines human overpopulation, and I wanted to talk about ethical ways to tackle that.

The last couple of weeks have been one long editing masterclass, and I have learned a lot from it.