#developmental edits

This is one of the biggest things I’ve been dealing with as I go into my first round of developmental edits. In some cases, there may be something that you think won’t be too hard to take out, but then you find that your characters refer to it all the fricken time, or it had lasting effects that can’t just be explained away without that context. 

Anyway, here are some things I’ve discovered to help take out story elements that just didn’t make the cut, in no particular order. 

Think about why you added The Thing in the first place. Was it a motivator? Something you just thought was cool? Worldbuilding that used to be relevant, but now isn’t? This will give you a starting place on what ripples you might expect. For example, if The Thing is a primary motivator, your characters might not have a reason to progress through the plot. Using this, also think about what aspects of The Thing you can give to parts of your story that did make the cut, and/or what scenes you may have to add to fulfill the purpose. For example, in my story, there was a secret resistance group that had to get cut - which also meant that my main character didn’t have any reason to think anything was amiss, so I made one of her fellow Agents snap, solving this, and emphasizing just how difficult training is.

When thinking about scenes that will have to be added/cut due to this ripple effect, refer to an outline as opposed to your whole manuscript. An outline will give you the overview of the story much more effectively, and the distance helps to make more objective decisions. If you are a pantser, I highly reccomend going through your manuscript and building an outline of what you have. (This is also very useful for gauging plot structure and other issues.)

Go through your manuscript scene by scene and cut all references to The Thing.

If you’re replacing The Thing with something else, do that before editing references to it. This will help in terms of specificity (ie, if a character says a particular line of dialogue, reactions might be different than if they had said a different line, etc). This will also help make sure it’s more integrated into your story.

Make sure that The Thing is the most pressing edit for your story, ie it’s the one that will cause the most ripples. You want to get these out of the way first, as there’s no use dealing with smaller ripples, only to have to overturn or undo that work later. 

When it comes to individual scenes, there’s a number of routes you can take with editing. Some involve smaller changes - rewriting pieces here and there to help patch up characterization issues or awkward flow. Others involve completely rewriting the scene to account for larger changes made elsewhere in the story. 

The first steps in my method involve looking at my outline; figuring out what the scene’s coming before and after, and what it needs to accomplish. Oftentimes I’ll have written out notes regarding more scene-specific details I need to pay attention to, so I review those.

Then comes what I like to call the pre-edit. This is where I go through the scene as it appeared in my first draft and mark it up with notes to refer to when I’m editing the scene. Common notes include: 

Cut - for anything ranging from paragraphs to sentences to even an entire page

Clean up - basically if there’s paragraphs that are just hard to read, I’ll keep in mind for the rewrite that I need to make that section a little more streamlined. Sometimes it’s awkward wording or weird grammar, other times it’s meandering paragraphs or places where I just loop back around and around the same ideas multiple times.

NO - this is usually accompanied by something a bit more specific, but it’s usually if something is blatantly wrong in the context it’s being used, it’s melodramatic, or it’s out of character.

Show ___ - for anything I sort of glossed over in the first draft that needs to be dramatized. 

Keep - I usually reserve this for at most a sentence or two, but it’s for when I’ve got a visual or metaphor that I really like and think I can make work in the new version of my scene.

Voice - for places where a character speaks in a way they really shouldn’t, or if my narrative voice slipped into something weird.

Formatting - I often see places where I have weird sentences or I need to make paragraph breaks or I spelled something wrong. For the developmental edit, these aren’t of much consequence, but if I come across something, I’ll make a note of it and move on rather than blatantly ignore it (it just kinda feels weird to me). This is one of those notes where you could completely skip it for now and you’d be fine. 

While pre-editing the whole manuscript in one go (as opposed to flipping between rewriting scenes and doing pre-edits) could be faster, I find that it’s easier to do pre-edits with the context of my newly rewritten scenes. Also, breaking it into chunks means I view the scenes in a much more fluid nature. Aka, I can rearrange pieces of several individual scenes in and amongst each other far more easily. Experiment with what works best for you :)

Next step: rewrite the scene. Depending on how clean your drafts are, you may not have to do this. However, since I had a major learning curve over the course of writing my first draft, a lot of the writing comes off as amateurish enough that I’ve rewritten all (save for one) of my scenes, at least during my first pass. Rewriting means I’m a lot more inclined to really get into the character’s heads and write them more accurately, and I don’t have much of an excuse for not changing little things as I pass them. I find I can get much more substantial changes this way. Basically, for rewrites, have either a printed copy of your scene, or go split-screen and write the scene while constantly going over your pre-edit notes. 

Most people have a general idea of the plot holes in their story, but many can have a hard time figuring out how to fix them. 

The main thing to know about plot holes is that they are inconsistancies in your story. Something is established in one way, and then manifests in a way that is not explained, or is made to seem like it’s been that way all along. 

When you boil it down like that, the problem becomes a lot more straight-forward to solve; you just have to figure out what the inconsistancies are and make them consistant!

Thing is, figuring that out can be fairly challenging. The first thing I like to do is write down what the plot hole is, and be specific.

For example, “The mayor of the town established when he met the hero that the dragon has been harrassing the town for over a decade, and both the villagers and the town show evidence of this. But the hero also showed that the dragon was easy to kill and escaped without getting injured. The village should have done something already given the wreckage left by the dragon.”

Yes, it’s kind of long, but it’s easier to brainstorm solutions when the essence of the plot hole is stripped to it’s bare essentials. Now, you can brainstorm solutions that make things line up. For example, maybe the mayor says the dragon just came and it’s first and only raid was devestating. Maybe there’s some kind of spell on the dragon that only the hero can bypass and that’s why they were chosen. 

(more details below the break)

So. I'm writing a sci-fi, and one of the biggest things about sci-fi's is the worldbuilding. Yes, it's going to be grounded in reality, but there's going to be stuff that's hightened. This means there's probably going to be the impulse is to include anything and everything that you think of that seems cool. The problem with this is that it creates a bit of a mess of a world, where you have different things all serving the same purpose, oryou just have too much for a reader to reasonably be able to keep track of. 

Since I believe strongly in helping with developmental edits (this one being a smaller dev edit), I figured I'd help break down a little bit about cleaning up that worldbuilding. 

The first thing to do is read through your story and make a note of what sci-fi elements show up, where they show up, and what their purpose was. What you may discover is that you have some elements that show up a lot in the beginning and barely appear later in the story, or vice versa. You may also discover places where the function/abilities of things are inconsistant, or where you have two elements that serve almost the exact same purpose.

The main thing to consider is consistancy. If you've got worldbuilding elements that are inconsistant throughout your story, that opens up worlds of opportunity for plot holes to crop up. For places where you have the same thing that operates in different ways, figure out which version you're going to keep, or if you're going to cut the thing alltogether. 

The next thing to look at are places where an element only shows up for a short time. If something only shows up when you need it to, it tends to come across as sloppy worldbuilding. For this, look at what would happen if you cut the element all together. Are there any other elements you could put in it's place? Would you be able to restructure the scene so that you wouldn't have to use it? If the answer is yes, it's often a good idea to go ahead and do that. It's easier for your worldbuilding to have more of an impact on your readers and be more impressive if they can actually remember what each thing is.

What to do if you can't feasibly cut a sci-fi element but it doesn't show up often? The first thing is to make sure it shows up more than once, either in dialogue/exposition, or even physically. If you get a situation where it's like "oh no! we're in trouble! Good thing we have this thing that's never even been mentioned before!" It will read as a deus ex machina, which is.... not ideal. Consider weaving the thing into more of the narrative, or if you can't - at least not much - introduce it relatively early on, even if it's just in passing, so that it's not coming out of the blue when it's used at its most intensive.

Kill your darlings is in full force here, because I was surprised to learn that the faeries were only 20,000 words (roughly) of the manuscript. I kept a few of the scenes in that I could with pretty minimal effort refit to make a James and Seelie scene instead of a Liir and Seelie scene (such as the opera) and this isn't a precise breakdown.

But given what scenes I want to add, that 20,000 words will likely be built right back up. There was also a chapter that I cut in this version of the manuscript that just needs to go because it is world building fluff. Maybe I'll figure out where to put some of it.

And I'm not quite giving up on the faeries yet, as I still think that they fit well into the world and the aesthetic--they just may be reworked a little and regaled to sequel content (and ironically some of my ideas for a sequel might be brought to bring the manuscript back up instead).

tag list | @annlillyjose @despoinacoco

When I was researching for the querying process, I learned that batches are one of the better ways to do so. The sizing varies, but I've decided at about 20 rejections so far, with only 1 partial request, that even though I have some outstanding queries right now, that it's time to stop and revise the manuscript.

Luckily, the rejection to my partial gave me some feedback--mainly in that it confirms what my growing suspicion was with the material.

The main problems I identified from writing the query letters/synopsis and the sample are this: the faerie plot and the thieves are too disparate in their current state, and over 50 pages in/12,000 words out of 83,000 (roughly 15% of the novel if we round up) and we still haven't met our main LI!

That's really bad for a romantasy!

Aside from that, I realize that I don't think the Liir/Seelie/James love triangle is going to be particularly compelling to anyone who isn't me in its current state and that really more of that page time needs to go to developing Seelie and James.

Additional feedback from my partial rejection is that while my characters were memorable and my hook compelling (opening with a funeral will do that) there's too much exposition.

I already can say that knocking out an early chapter would do a lot to getting to the LI a lot faster and still maintaining that opening hook.

The other idea I have is to start maybe around where Chapter 8 is right now, with the beginning of the case?

Definitely something I'm considering.

But the other big structural wall I need to figure out how to knock out is Liir. I believe this is where the common advice to kill one's darlings comes into play. Furthermore, James and the Phantom Thieves need to be tied into the faerie plot more heavily. I have a few thoughts on how to manage that--but those are a little spoilery.