From Cranky Rah's Cave: The Multiverse of Editing

I've been thinking a lot about editing, mainly because I've been immersed in it myself. It turns out that, astonishingly, most people don't like to edit. Writers I know talk about it as a necessary evil or tedious or painful or all three. Since I told The Three that our next step together was to work through entire pieces—including editing—they've been as silent as me on Twitter.

So why is it that my idea of a perfect day is an intense session of editing, followed by an intense session of rock climbing, capped off by an intense session of taco-eating? (Hey, I just described yesterday! Sometimes life really rocks.)

I considered that it might be my German blood enjoying bringing order to whatever craziness my Celtic blood poured all over the page—and there's probably something to that. But what it really is, I think, is the way that I started writing in the first place, writing the same characters over and over in different stories. Sometimes the characters didn't change much from story to story; sometimes a story needed them to be slightly different people; sometimes they had to be very different people.

Nine out of 10 adorable baby turtles prefer left-handers.

There's this theory in physics called the multiverse, which is the idea that there are an infinite number of universes (universi?) out there, so there are an infinite number of variations of all possible realities. In one reality, humans might not exist at all; in another, things might be exactly like they are in our universe, except that I'm right-handed instead of left-handed. (We don't like that universe.)

We only see the universe we live in; we can only deal with the reality we have right now. But characters don't have just the one life like we do; characters live in the multiverse. There's an infinite number of lives they could lead, an infinite number of variations—big or small—that affect the stories we tell about them. One life could be almost indistinguishable from another or seem absolutely unrelated.

(I say seem because there's of course always the heart, the essence of the character, and that doesn't change, regardless of which story you tell about them.)

There are those times when the story you drafted is just a starting point, when you have to throw out the middle or the end (or even the beginning). When it turns out that the journey you wrote first was really just to lead you to the journey you really need to write. It can be sad to lose paragraphs or scenes or entire groups of characters, but every time you make a change, you're just opening up another universe, another set of possibilities.

In the universe of this galaxy, the barista who makes
my flat white looks just like Hugh Jackman.

In the physics multiverse, there is no one right universe, but in the writing multiverse we eventually edit our way to a right universe.

Maybe this seems esoteric, but all this is just another way of saying: Let your characters breathe. Let them explore. Don't let them get stuck in your first vision. Think about all the decisions you've made in your life and the places you might have gone (good and bad) if you had taken a different path at any of those moments. Your characters can do that—and you don't lose anything: All the other possibilities are still out there.

That's why I love editing. There's so much possibility, so much demand for creative thinking, for following the thread of a change and seeing where it takes you. If you're standing there with Robert Frost at the two roads diverging in the wood, you only get to pick one. Your characters can go anywhere.

I Wrote What?

Cranky Rah keeps a cute little blue-jeweled frame on her desk to remind her that no matter how badly she may have written today, it can't be as bad as her best writing used to be. The frame holds four lines of dialogue exchanged between two characters in a story, written a long, long time ago, that I swear was called The Pool Boy. That should tell you all you need to know about how bad it was. But in case you need convincing, here it is:

Ouch, right? I'd like to repeat that this was a long, long time ago. See how the date is smudged? That's because it was a really really long, long time ago. Like before there were people.

Anyway, it can be good to hold onto your old stories. (Cranky Rah's are deep inside her cave in a box labeled Bad Bad Old Old Stories—Burn Upon Death.) You do this not just to make yourself feel good on those days you feel like you stink (you don't), but also to make yourself a better writer.

M was perusing some of her old writing a couple of weeks back, and she shared with The Three and me a story she wrote when she was 9 or 10. With her gracious permission, I share it here:

It was another one of those days. I went downstairs to get breakfast. Honey buns and tea again. I ate my breakfast, then turned the sign on my door to "open". I glanced at the clock. Only 5:50. I still have 50 minutes before Marisolia comes. I picked up the necklace that I was working on. It was Gold/Sapphire. I started shaping the blue gem into a square. "I just need to attach the gem to the metal part, and then I'm done!" I thought. Just then: ding! My bell rung. I checked the clock. 6:00. I went to the door. "Hi!" "Hi!" "Guess what? There's a mission-meeting going on! The troll cave!" "Cool! Are you going?" "Yes! Do you want to go?" "Sure!"

Now, this story has some good things going for it, especially coming from a 9 or 10 year old. Still, M has grown since then, of course, and so has her writing. When she read it, she remembered this story and even where it was going and thought it'd be fun to revisit it.

She started with those 127 words and a list of things she thought was wrong with them. I la-la this list (especially the sarcasm in the fourth bullet):

• No setting description at all

• No sensory inputs, not even visual descriptions

• No description (not even gender) of any characters

• Fabulous technical terms there ("the blue gem," "the metal part")

• 50 minutes passed in 4 sentences??

• I think I was trying to make there be 100 minutes in an hour and 10 hours in a day...

• You can only assume that the person who the main character started talking to was Marisolia

• The tense switches from past to present and back

• Pretty much everything but the general concept of this is bad, now that I look at it...

I think M's being kind of harsh on her nine-year-old self with that last point, but the rest are well taken. When she rewrote and expanded the story, she kept those points in mind and ended up with 1,486 words of the beginning of a story with a great setting, strong appeals to the senses, and well-developed characters (who even have genders now). She's also written some fantastic dialogue between the scene's two main characters (unattributed in her original).

Here's just a smackerel:

"You know I love diamonds," [Marisolia] replied, unabashed. "Anyway, are you going to volunteer or not?"

I grinned. "You know me," I said, picking up the sander and hanging it back on the wall. "Of course I'm going."

"Good, because I already told Trevan that we'll both be going to the meeting," Marisolia replied.

"Wait—both? You're going, too?" I asked, surprised. She raised an eyebrow.

"What, you think I'll be fine with staying home while my best friend goes off on a mission outside the kingdom? I think not."

"But—it's...it's...outside the kingdom," I finished lamely.

"That's the whole point," she said, rolling her eyes. "Adventure. Heroics. Excitement."

M's done a great job of capturing the very different personalities of Marisolia and the narrator through rhythm and word choice. The dialogue also shows the relationship between the two: close, casual and trusting. And just in this very short sample of her longer piece, you can see how she's addressed almost all of the items on her list.

The point is that editing doesn't just make bad (or unformed, in the case of your nine-year-old self) writing better. It makes good writing better and great writing better. It's awesome if you have a writing group and beta readers who can give you feedback, but you can give yourself feedback, too—and you should.

Ask yourself, like M did, what your weaknesses are, either in general or in one specific piece of writing. Look at the way you describe (or fail to) the landscape your characters inhabit (M's first two bullets). Look at how you build character through dialogue and actions (M's third bullet). Think about vocabulary (bullet four) and pacing (bullets five and six).

A cutie, but not exactly the kind
of pool boy I meant.

And more, don't be afraid of your old writing. Sure, it's bound to be worse than what you're writing now. That's good. It means you're growing as a writer. But our bad bad old old stories don't just tell us about our writing. They tell us about ourselves. The Pool Boy is awful, but I still go back and read it sometimes, in all of its glorious awfulness. Because I can see why I wrote it, and I can remember why I cared about those characters (even though one of them clearly didn't care about her dead father). And if you care about your characters and where they're going, the rest is just editing.