Editing My Science Fiction-Part 1

Original Post: 11 June 2012
Posted Here: 4 December 2017

I know that my work is as good as it can be when I finally get that first draft done. Fortunately, I also know that’s a lot of bull. In fact, I can’t even get through the first draft before the editing process begins. I never finish a story or chapter in a single sitting. In order to get back into the swing of things and to remind myself what’s happening in the story, I read everything from the beginning before I pick up where I left off. Invariably, I find some typos or any of the other things that I would much rather have put off looking for until later.

Editing  takes time away from what I really want to do—write. But it’s necessary. It’s a lot of work because there are so many things that I need to look for: Here’s a partial list: typos (which includes mistyping of homonyms like “its” and “it’s), grammatical errors, unnecessary repetition of a word or phrase within the same or adjacent paragraphs, excessive use of adverbs or adjectives, unnecessary use of the “There is” construction, talking heads, telling instead of showing, “As you know, Bob…”, overuse of certain constructions (like beginning a sentence with “And” or “But”, using long sentences when action or tension would be better served by short ones, revising to improve clarity. Etc., etc., etc.

I doubt that any writer manages to get it down perfectly in the first draft. I don’t really think that a “perfectly” written story or novel even exists. All of the typos and grammatical errors may have been corrected, but a different way to say or describe something in there, somewhere, can always be found. One of the “how to write better” books that I read said something to the effect that editing is never done; you just publish the story or novel.

Eventually, thankfully, I do make it to the end of the story or chapter. My first stab at editing involves reading the story out loud. If I stumble at any point, or find that I am speaking something different than what I’ve written, I look at this text very closely. Something probably needs to be changed. As I read I’m also likely to notice items from my editing list that need to be fixed. When I get to the end, I start over again. I always find something that I missed the previous time. I’ve found that a little bit of this reading out loud goes a long way. So I save my work and forget the story for a day or so.

When I finally come back, I read the story again a time or two to find those things that I missed the previous times. Then I start to look for obvious typos. These are the ones that WordPerfect’s spell checker should have underlined (and probably did underline) in red for me. One “problem” with science fiction is the presence of alien names and terms or fictitious technologies that are not in the spell-checker’s dictionary. So an SF story is apt to have a lot of bogus red underlines. When I begin to ignore them, I find that I also ignore real errors. One way to lessen this problem is to have the word processor add these false hits to its dictionary (just be sure that the word’s spelling is the way you want it!) Now those red underlines stand out a bit better and are more likely to indicate a genuine typo.

Once the obvious typos and errors are corrected, it’s time to start looking for the real problems. As Han Solo said, “Here’s where the fun begins.” Let’s save the fun for another post.

Keep reading/keep writing – Jack