Lisa Hill: The Editing Process

Visit the RNA Facebook group or browse on social media and one of the most talked about topics amongst writers is – editing! We all have our favourite ways to write and edit our work and it can be interesting to find other views and perhaps use a snippet or two to help with our own writing. Today on the RNA blog we welcome author, Lisa Hill. Here Lisa explains her experiences with the editing process. Welcome, Lisa.

For those of you who know me, you’ll know I’ve not long graduated from the NWS. I was a member

of the scheme from 2010 – 2016 and in that time benefited from some thorough reports full of useful advice. What they didn’t contain, however, is a hand to hold with my downfall; the editing process. Having undergone the process with a professional editor in the past year, I thought it would be helpful to give those, like me, who struggle with editing an insight into perfecting your manuscript:

1. Take yourself out of the manuscript

Your first draft is your creation. It’s where you get to have all the conversations you want your characters to have with each other, let them go off on their adventures, really let your imagination flow. Now it’s time to get a grip on reality and that inevitably means getting tough. You might have the funniest scene which you absolutely love but if it has no relevance to moving the story forward, do you really need it?

2. Start a Novel Log

For me, a novel log was a revelation and I actually started using one from the beginning in my latest novel. Using a log you can diarise what’s happening in your novel and it’s so useful to refer back to. I use a page for each of the following:

·      Main Characters, including mini-bios of their age, appearance, main motivation etc.

·      Cast of Characters, including every character which has a name. This is most useful to look back on, for example, if you have a waitress that gets an odd mention and you can’t remember what you’ve called her.

·      A list of house, restaurants, pubs, shops etc, fictional and actual places.

·      A list of geographical places, again both fictional and actually in existence.

·      A list of songs, films, books and trade names.

·      A time-line. Probably the most important of all in the editing process; if you keep a note of dates and what occurs during your novel on these days, not only will it help you in remaining consistent, it will also assist you in deciding if you need to add time (e.g. are your hero and heroine ‘getting it on’ too quickly?) or condense.

3. Don’t try to edit everything at once

Something I was very guilty of. It might seem like a laborious task, however, the more times you read through your novel, the more times you will pick up errors. I had a manuscript where I had revealed twice (very dramatically) to the anti-hero that one of my heroines was dying! I now break my edits down into the following revisions:

·      Rewriting: The first round of editing is to go through your manuscript and identify what you can do without, what needs adding in (to reinforce your characters’ motivations) or where the sequence of events needs moving around.

·      Editing: On the second round, focus on actual scenes; where you need to cut a conversation short and lose words or lengthen one to add words and create tension.

·      Grammar & Spelling:  Often known as line edits, your final round of edits should be to comb through for grammar and spelling mistakes and to properly polish.

One final tip is that I find uploading my manuscript to my kindle for a final read helps me to identify any left-over niggles. Although if you are like me (and it is probably the creative in all of us) I am usually still agonising over certain lines in crucial scenes.

I wish you luck in getting your manuscript to the next level of publication and please don’t hesitate to drop me a line if you have anything you’d like to ask about my blog post.

About Lisa:

Lisa grew up in the village of Bussage, in the Cotswolds until she returned to Cheltenham as a teen.  She is married to her very own hero, Matt, and has three sons, Hamish, Archie and Laurence.  Her first encounter of a romance author was chats over the garden wall between her father, Godfrey, and Mrs Cooper from the neighbouring village of Bisley.  It came as a surprise in later life to find that Mrs Cooper was in fact Jilly Cooper!  Lisa’s writing inspiration now comes from other Cotswolds authors including Jill Mansell and Katie Fforde.

Lisa writes contemporary romance with a light-hearted tone.  What interests her most is people, their interactions, emotions and relationships. Lisa is a graduate of the Romantic Novelists’ Association New Writers’ Scheme and attributes this supportive and informative scheme to her winning the Choc Lit Search for a Star competition 2016 with her debut novel Meet Me at Number Five.

Links:

Blog

Facebook

Twitter: @lisahillie

Amazon

Thank you Lisa and good luck with your book. 

If you would like to write for the RNA blog contract us on elaineeverest@aol.com

Editing: What do authors' miss?

Today we welcome jay Dixon to the blog. jay is well known to us all as Honorary Secretary of the RNA. Today she writes about editing.

As an editor with some 40 years’ experience I am still surprised by what writers miss in their manuscripts. Perhaps I shouldn’t be. It is notoriously difficult to edit your own work. But there are some tricks which can make it easier to spot errors. For instance, to avoid having two characters with the same name, which I have often found, all you need to do is list in alphabetical order all the characters’ names, with a short note about them – e.g. brown hair, chemist assistant – and then check the list for any duplications.

Something many authors find difficult to keep track of is the timeline – I once edited a ms where the heroine was pregnant for over a year! Problems with timelines are easily seen if, at the editing stage, you write down on a separate sheet of paper the chapter number and note the day (either with the actual day or just as day/week/month 1, 2 etc.) beside it and then under it you write a very short description of what happens in that chapter – just the action (e.g. villain kills dog) as an aide memoire and underline or put in bold any foreshadowing (e.g. will go to hairdressers on Saturday). Then when Saturday arrives, you know that character should be at the hairdresser’s, and not gallivanting round the countryside.

Noting down the action also helps with inconsistencies in plot. You know what you want to convey, but you may not have put it down on the page. Watch that event B arises out of event A, and that there is no disparity in the event being described. For instance, if the heroine has told the hero she loves him on p.100, make sure she does not then think to herself, ‘I love him’, as if it is a revelation she has only just realised, on p. 150.

Note descriptions – the aide memoire of hair and eye colour I mentioned above keeps characters’ characteristics straight, but I have edited mss where e.g. the hero’s flat was described in two very different ways a few chapters apart.

Check your facts. It is all very well getting carried away with a story, but could your character have done that journey in that way in that time? There was a historical novel I edited where the main secondary character was a real person – a quick wiki search yielded information about him that indicated he was of a very different character than the villain depicted by the author. OK, a dead person can’t sue, but readers need to be respected and as much as possible descriptions of character as well as place etc. should be right.

And don’t forget tension. Have you put in enough questions to keep the reader reading? By this I don’t mean actual questions necessarily, but ones that arise in the reader’s mind, e.g. will the heroine reach the hero in time? This can take a few chapters to answer. Or a more minor one, answered more or less immediately, e.g. will she buy the handbag she yearns after? And then the overarching one, answered at the end, e.g. will true love conquer all?

Then do the rewrites.

And finally do the copyediting. Yes, spell check is helpful, but be aware it does not pick up e.g. that for than. In order to see errors more easily, print the ms out and go through it with a ruler or sheet of paper under the line, reading for the sense and rhythm of the sentence, and for errors of spelling and grammar.

Once the ms is the best you can make it – and don’t overthink this, you have to let it go sometime! – send it off and wait for the inevitable rewrites your editor will request!

jay Dixon is a freelance  editor specialising in women’s and historical fiction.

Thank you, jay for your most useful post.

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