Although it’s painful to remove or change your work, it is absolutely necessary. No book is perfect after a first draft and it may take five or ten revisions to get it just right. After I finished writing Elmer Left, I thought, “This is absolutely perfect! It’s ready for the presses. I’ll just spend a week or two editing it and then, bam! It’ll be good to go.” Eight months later, I was still putting the final touches on my editing. One year later, I gave it another edit and submitted a second edition.
Additionally, I thought that I could do all the editing for Elmer Left by myself. Again, not true. I found that I was much too close to the manuscript (having labored over it for a year and nine months) and was reluctant to change or remove parts of it. Enter Jolene.
I solicited the help of Jolene, a friend with editing and writing experience who was willing to help me shape up my manuscript. She read and edited about a third of it before our first meeting and I was horrified when I saw all the red ink scrawled across the pages. Her suggestions were great, but some of them were major. I knew that I had a ton of work ahead of me if I wanted to really tighten my manuscript and strengthen the plot. When Jolene noticed my trepidation, she said something that I’ll never forget: “I know it’s difficult to chop up your manuscript and eliminate parts of it that you’ve grown to love, but sometimes you have to kill your darlings.”
Well said.
That’s exactly what you have to do when faced with a big edit or rewrite: kill your darlings. Murder the phrases you’ve come to love. Disembowel the characters who got a little too long-winded. Behead the subplots that went nowhere.
It’s painful, but no one ever claimed that a writer’s job is easy. It takes a lot of courage to slice your baby to bits and put her back together again, but in the end, it’s absolutely worth it. Your plot and characters will become stronger; your sentences will be better-crafted and to the point. No fluff or tedium.
Right now, I am faced with the monumental task of whittling a 145,000 word work down to 120,000 words (via the advice of a prospective agent). Cutting 25,000 words means eliminating approximately 60 pages of darlings and I am certainly not looking forward to the task.
How will I do it? Stay tuned next week for some advice on how to effectively edit your work. In the meantime, I’ll let you in on a secret: no amount of tricks or tips are any good without a large chunk of motivation and a steadfast belief in your writing. Writers: hang in there!
Author: KateBitters
Kate Bitters is a Minneapolis-based author and freelance writer. She is the author of Elmer Left, Ten Thousand Lines, and He Found Me. One of her proudest/nerdiest moments was when Neil Gaiman read one of her short stories on stage at the Fitzgerald Theater.