I can empathize with this! I really admire memoir writers because your stories are so personal that it only makes sense that you want to tell them properly. With fiction, I try not to be so precious about editing. Readers are going to love or hate the fundamentals of your writing (voice, style, premise), and no amount of sentence tweaking is going to change their minds on that.
I'm currently editing my third novel and following this process: re-read the entire thing and make notes to myself on what I want to fix, organize that into a story spreadsheet with the timeline and beats laid out so I can see any gaps, and then create a revision plan in a kanban board. I tag every chapter as either an easy, medium, or hard revision (color-coded by green, yellow, or red) and now I'm chipping away at the revision plan one chapter at a time.
By now I can tell when I've gotten lazy in my drafting because I tend to summarize what I need to describe in scene. I'm an underwriter, so editing for me is about adding word count. I'm *so* glad that I chose to draft 4 novels before I started to publish them because it's much easier to edit in between releases than starting from scratch. I feel like everybody's first book is always the hardest and most time-consuming, but once you get a repeatable process down, it does get easier!
Thanks for your input. Wow your process is very organized and, as always, I'm super impressed. I'm guessing your background in content/marketing has helped with this level of skill and planning?
In terms of structure, I've tried to do the big picture, zoom out, what does each chapter entail type of planning, and then I see so many holes that I get overwhelmed and unmotivated. For memoir, when there are holes to fill (i.e., Will this part satisfy the reader?) it's not like you can just make up bits... so I found myself going into the "let me reflect on this" narration. My writing teacher said not to do that so much and to be in the moment, which makes sense. Anyway, it's a process that has proved to be much harder than I thought. I still wonder if my story is interesting enough, and although my gut says yes, I still can't figure out HOW to write and structure it.
But thank you for sharing your process. It sounds like you've got a system that works for you. :)
Great article, Claire! I've tried to find hacks around "time as editing" but it truly is the best way to think through a personal essay or article. On a scene level, I generally try to abide by whether what I've written has a goal, conflict, and decision before moving onto the next, doing my best not to move into the restructuring a sentence or swapping out words. Easier said than done?!
Thanks Sophia! I think hacks around "time as editing" is a great rule to follow. It's definitely challenging though... as writers, we always want things to sound better, be more compelling, etc etc. and many times, I find myself editing something else, even though I just wanted to do a final pass at it, for example. I guess this is just one of the things that makes writing hard...
I can empathize with this! I really admire memoir writers because your stories are so personal that it only makes sense that you want to tell them properly. With fiction, I try not to be so precious about editing. Readers are going to love or hate the fundamentals of your writing (voice, style, premise), and no amount of sentence tweaking is going to change their minds on that.
I'm currently editing my third novel and following this process: re-read the entire thing and make notes to myself on what I want to fix, organize that into a story spreadsheet with the timeline and beats laid out so I can see any gaps, and then create a revision plan in a kanban board. I tag every chapter as either an easy, medium, or hard revision (color-coded by green, yellow, or red) and now I'm chipping away at the revision plan one chapter at a time.
By now I can tell when I've gotten lazy in my drafting because I tend to summarize what I need to describe in scene. I'm an underwriter, so editing for me is about adding word count. I'm *so* glad that I chose to draft 4 novels before I started to publish them because it's much easier to edit in between releases than starting from scratch. I feel like everybody's first book is always the hardest and most time-consuming, but once you get a repeatable process down, it does get easier!
Thanks for your input. Wow your process is very organized and, as always, I'm super impressed. I'm guessing your background in content/marketing has helped with this level of skill and planning?
In terms of structure, I've tried to do the big picture, zoom out, what does each chapter entail type of planning, and then I see so many holes that I get overwhelmed and unmotivated. For memoir, when there are holes to fill (i.e., Will this part satisfy the reader?) it's not like you can just make up bits... so I found myself going into the "let me reflect on this" narration. My writing teacher said not to do that so much and to be in the moment, which makes sense. Anyway, it's a process that has proved to be much harder than I thought. I still wonder if my story is interesting enough, and although my gut says yes, I still can't figure out HOW to write and structure it.
But thank you for sharing your process. It sounds like you've got a system that works for you. :)
Great article, Claire! I've tried to find hacks around "time as editing" but it truly is the best way to think through a personal essay or article. On a scene level, I generally try to abide by whether what I've written has a goal, conflict, and decision before moving onto the next, doing my best not to move into the restructuring a sentence or swapping out words. Easier said than done?!
Thanks Sophia! I think hacks around "time as editing" is a great rule to follow. It's definitely challenging though... as writers, we always want things to sound better, be more compelling, etc etc. and many times, I find myself editing something else, even though I just wanted to do a final pass at it, for example. I guess this is just one of the things that makes writing hard...