HOW TO EDIT

This is a free version of a document I used to send to author clients (along with a scary edit letter, marked-up manuscript and a handy Excel doc called Save the Cat (For Novels)). The best way to use this crib sheet is to have someone edit your manuscript. But failing that, put that sucker on ice for at least 6 weeks (or the length of the average pandemic lockdown?), then read it through with a ruthless eye and write yourself an edit plan. Though fresh eyes are always better (say I and the cannibals). Then follow these steps to enact editing magic…

How to edit crib sheet by Harriet Reuter Hapgood
Gather your chocolate and your tissues and your booze: you’re about to edit a book.

Supplies: highlighters, Post-its, black and red ink pens (or colours of your choice), record cards, Blu Tack, printed manuscript, Kindle or ereader (optional), edit letter (if you have one, or your own notes on what things you want/need/don’t want but have to change), Save the Cat Beat Sheet (Elizabeth Davis - Google it), notepad.

Before you begin.
Read your edit letter. Cry. Go for a walk (unless you have already used your government ration that day). Think about why your editor (or, you know, you) raised those points. Think: but I already wrote the thing that they’re telling me to add!!! Maybe you did – in your head. But it’s not on the page. (I see this a LOT. I do this a LOT. Writers tend to be so close to their story, knowing characters and settings inside and out, they kind of don’t notice that the crucial details they know off-by-heart haven’t actually made it into the text.)

Now, with your edit letter in mind, go ahead and reread your book in a new format. Wrote it in Scrivener? Read it in Word. Try it in a whole new font. You want to see it fresh, as a reader would. I do this on a Kindle, so I can’t edit as I go: I have to live with the crap writing. You want a system that makes you CRINGE and WANT to edit.

Step one: structure.
So, that Save the Cat Beat Sheet: it’s basically a chart with classic structure points, such as set-up, inciting incident, midpoint, the ‘Oh, shit’ moment’ etc, combined with clever maths to give you an idea of how many words to use for each bit. Perhaps that’s a bit paint by numbers, and God knows I’ve never hit the page/word count bang-on. But it’s a useful tool if your edit letter/notes to self are, like, ‘Oh hey, it’s page 800 and nothing… has… happened? Like Avengers Edngame? It’s just… stuff? Followed by more stuff…?’

From memory, fill out the Save the Cat Beat Sheet with your big plot moments: set-up, catalyst, midpoint, where everything goes wrong, where everything goes more wrong, resolution, etc. Add your word count and voila: the Excel spreadsheet tells you where each of these beats should land.

Compare those word counts against where they really land in your manuscript. You should be able to immediately identify any issues – major characters not mentioned until the second half of the book; no catalyst; the everything-goes-wrong moment comes too early so you’re left taking too long to resolve things to ‘balance’ the length of the book.

You might also notice that your big moments aren’t truly on the page. Catalysts are breezed past with tell instead of show; the resolution wraps up in a chapter. ‘AND THEN THEY KISSED AND IT WAS WITH TONGUE, THE END.’

Step two: rebuilding your structure.
Get out your record cards. Write down every plot point that you need to happen for each storyline, one per card. Keep it simple: Katniss volunteers as tribute to save her sister (The Hunger Games). ‘Romeo kisses Juliet’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet figure out there’s a whole Capulet/Montague problem’ are two separate record cards. Don’t think in scenes – you can have more than one plot point/record card per scene – think in terms of conveying information. What does the reader need to know to understand the book?

Many of these plot points will already be in your manuscript. But, bearing in mind your edit letter and the beat sheet, you might be adding new record cards for backstory, exposition, character introductions, things you missed or where you did tell instead of show, new info.

Arrange the cards in order to form a plot that roughly corresponds to the shape outlined in the Beat Sheet, with a set-up, catalyst, midpoint, etc. This should end up being a different order to your first draft! Blu Tack these to your wall, or make a Post-it note version and keep the cards next to your laptop. You might spy more gaps at this stage and add more cards. Your wall should look like a frenzied serial killer cave. This is an excellent time to break open that pristine packet of rainbow Sharpies from Paperchase you bought yourself in a January sale one time.

Step three: get your house in order.
Have a look at JK Rowling’s plot spreadsheet for Order of the Phoenix. Yes, she’s problematic now, but the lady can’t half plot.

Make your own! Think about those record cards and figure them out into scenes and chapters. Then, for each chapter (or scene, if you have really long scenes), you need to know:

TIME What day/week/month/timeline it is. Maybe your book takes place over a year, but the weather/sunset/activities are always the same. Or maybe you’ve front-loaded loads of action into a week and then have to do a half-hearted ‘yeah so three months pass by with not much happening, world locked down, you know’. Your copy-editor will notice that it’s always Wednesday! That’s only OK if your book is called 3,000 Wednesdays, a Groundhog Day-style erotic novella about a gogo girl called Wednesday who duplicates herself to win the heart of the boynext-door, Pacey.

WHO Chapter title or narrator. Maybe this isn’t relevant for you, it’s all first person. But maybe you’re doing multiple POVs, or multiple timelines, or have a complicated chapter title system.

PLOT What’s happening in each plot strand and with each major character. It’s OK if some subplots or characters take some downtime in certain chapters! Not everything happens at once (unless your plot mimics IRL circa March/April 2020! Lol jks etc) Basically you’re going to have column headings like: The love story / The heist / The dead mum / The wacky best friend / Mr Groats / The Whoopsie Coin / Running Joke Thing, plus a Time column, and any Narrator / POV / Chapter Title columns, and a list of numbers down the side, and make a big grid, and fill it in like a big nerd, and that’s practically a book in itself.

Step four: planning your new draft.
Using your cards, Beat Sheet and timeline, start marking up your printed manuscript. Shuffle those pages! Scribble out scenes! Add Post-its for new ones. Write notes all over that thing. Your beautiful manuscript should look like a shitheap by the end. No word left unturned.

Finally, you use this marked-up manuscript to edit your Word document, moving stuff around so it’s in the rough order you want it, deleting chunks, typing in placeholders. I like to use square brackets for placeholders, like [Exposition brooding hot YA dude here]. Or [oh god a kissing scene I’m so bad at these, blah blah he sticks the tongue in]. (Nb. It is miles easier to do this in Scrivener then, if you’re like me and unable to write in Scrivener, export it to Word once it’s in the rough new order.)

Step five: now you’re ready to rewrite.
Your Word doc probably now looks sad and terrible, with a gutted word count, missing scenes, and transitions don’t work because you’ve moved scenes around. It’s OK, because you’re going to rewrite it from page one.

Bear in mind the show not tell guideline. A little tell is OK: if two weeks or five days have passed, definitely tell your readers instead of banging on! My No1 pet peeve is Twitter writing advice nonsense that says you can’t ever tell, you have to show. No, thank you! Lots of life is really boring, like for instance if you’re on an extended global lockdown and the highlight of your day is going to the kitchen for your ninth snack. Skiiiip that shit. And also, tell can be interesting, funny, clever. Jandy Nelson does great tell. So does Mhairi McFarlane. And Sarah Dessen is the QUEEN of great tell. Tell can be voicey af.

Use your judgement. If your plot is about planning a heist, show us the scenes where they plan it. Here’s a (really stupid) quick example.

Tell
Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte spent two weeks planning the heist on the Dior shop. They researched the floorplans, flirted with security guards, purchased masks and weapons. Then, at last, they were ready.

Show
‘Bad news, ladies,’ Carrie announced, posing in the doorway of their secret lair in a new-season Prada dress. A little attention-seeking for a thief, but she couldn’t resist the stripes. ‘The head of security at Dior has retired. And worse… his replacement is gay.’
     ‘Hey!’ Charlotte objected, slamming her hands on the table. The movement wafted the floorplan layouts they stole in the last scene. ‘We marched in Pride, it’s good to be gay.’
     ‘Honey, relax.’ Samantha rolled her eyes, fanning her face with a wad of counterfeit $100s. Inspired by the ‘Chanell’ bags sold down on Canal Street, they’d discovered bribery came cheaper if you faked it. ‘It just means we can’t flirt our way to the passwords we need.’
     ‘Did you just slam your hands down to show off your new engagement ring?’ Miranda asked. She was bent over a laptop, studying scenes from Ocean’s Eleven to see how the boys robbed that Vegas casino so smoothly. Without looking up, she added, ‘Because you know I’m an unqualified lesbian.’

Obviously this is terrible and took me two minutes, but hopefully you can see the difference between telling your readers your scenes, and showing them! However, if your plot is not about the heist per se, go with the tell version. Go with your gut. I don’t make the rules. (There are no rules. Except spelling. Spell things correctly.)

As you rewrite each scene and add new ones, take notes as you go. E.g. ‘return to the first kiss scene and up the romance’. ‘Remember to mention the Spacehopper early on.’ Many, many drafts of The Square Root of Summer went by with the note ‘delete the goat’. It went on bloody submission with the goat. One of my editor’s first notes? Lose the goat. Bye-bye, goat. Always delete the goat.

Step six: you’re almost there, I promise.
When you hit the end, take a break. Like, a few days! Eat some chocolate, revisit the real world (ahahahaha Zoom it, these days), say hi to your cats/boyfriend/girlfriend/significant life partner, shower.

When you go back to the book, follow the notes you made and flesh out any scenes and information that you thought needed extra work. At this point, you can also go through the comments I/you/your editor made on the original manuscript and tick off every single one. You don’t have to agree with my/your/your editor’s points or follow my/your own/your editor’s exact solution, but you do need to think about why that comment was made. It’s not because I’m thick or a bitch (though both those things are true!)

Step seven: do a pass on all major plots and characters.
Go through the manuscript from start to finish, focusing on ONE plot or ONE character at a time. This means looking at every single Hermione scene and mention in Harry Potter, in order, to make sure her characterisation is consistent and she has a story arc. Do this for every character and every plot. At the end your fingers should feel like claws! Cry, cry now if you feel like it. You’re almost home dry.

Step eight: the penis joke draft.
Aka, polishing time. Structurally, you’re all set. So now you’re looking for zhoozh, pizzazz, sparkle, the ol’ razzle-dazzle, making every line the best it can be. Which doesn’t mean every line has to have a killer metaphor and clever language: sometimes ‘pass the pizza’ can just be ‘pass the pizza’, not ‘segue the cheese-covered triangular goodness’. And if you do have killer metaphors or similes, don’t overegg the pudding – one per sentence is probably too much, like that awful dude you went on a date with once who just did joke after joke after joke without pause.

Can you clean up that sentence? Make the dialogue sharper? Add more jokes? Dial down the jokes? Is the emotion coming through? Can you see, touch, smell, taste, hear this scene? (On the other hand, keep plot in mind. As the writer Jess Vallance once said to me, ‘The sky is blue, move on’.)

Step nine: tiny details.
The end is in sight! By now, you should know which words you overuse – you’ve read the manuscript often enough. (My culprits are: bloom, magic, gorgeous, extraordinary, gargantuan, hunched [my heroes have the WORST posture!], splattered.) Go through and hit ‘find’ for your go-to culprits (and look for the word ‘just’ while you’re at it).

Also search for nods, eye rolls, shrugs, glances – whatever your characters do too much of. How many lip bites? Is anyone letting out a breath they didn’t know they were holding? Watch those crooked smiles!

Clean up any sub heads, section dividers, page breaks, indents, chapter headers, bolding, italics, fonts, etc.

Step ten: the end.
Spellcheck that bad boy and you’re good to go!

More editing tips

The genius that is Non Pratt: https://authorallsorts.wordpress.com/2015/09/28/getting-your-edit-on/

Excellence from Holly Black: http://blackholly.com/for-writers/writing-advice/

And a much quicker method than mine from Holly Lisle: https://hollylisle.com/one-pass-manuscript-revision-from-first-draft-to-last-in-one-cycle/ (Only if your prose is already TIGHT)