To a layman, editing usually means reading something over and catching a few typos. But for more serious writers, be they fiction, educational, technical or non-fiction, know that sometimes editing means taking the whole thing apart, moving things around, hacking parts out entirely and totally rebuilding whole parts.

You can find yourself looking at a part that just doesn’t work and, like a mad scientist, cracking your knuckles and claiming, “We can rebuild it!” as lightning cracks in the background. But taking out your editing scalpel is itself an act of blind faith. Will you really improve your creation with your tinkering or will you end up with a horrifying mess of a creature, something that people run screaming from like old Square-Head Bolts-in-Neck? Sometimes you hack the whole story apart only to realize you’ve made it worse.

In my current work in progress, there is a scene that doesn’t seem much at first glance. It’s a relatively calm passage compared to the rest of the action but it has a very important role of setting up everything to follow. In this scene, my main character gets 3 pieces of bad news. Would it be better, I realized while editing, if she got each piece of bad news separately instead? It would make each set-back more powerful and dramatic. So I’d make the events of that one scene play out over several scenes instead.

I liked this idea, even though it would mean a lot of rewriting work. Never one to shy away from the editing by weed hacker method, I started hacking the whole section apart and then rewrote it completely. It’s better in a ton of ways. Tighter. More dramatic. There’s just one problem.

I left out something huge and important. Like, very plot necessary. It’s like I took apart the skeleton to see how the bones looked as a different animal and, when I stepped back, I tripped over the bones I had left over and ended up flat on my butt. Crud, this skull has to go somewhere, doesn’t it?

So I have to rewrite what I rewrote to figure out how to fit the important bits back in. But I only ended up in this situation because I forgot to follow my own golden rules for editing and rewriting. Let me share them with you so you don’t end up in the same boat as I did.

Hillary’s Tips for Rewriting and Rearranging Continue Reading »