Category Archives: Editing

Posts on editing.

Creative Writing, Editing

How to deal with info-dumping in creative writing

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While editing my current WIP (work in progress) for size, I’ve noticed a pattern when I introduce new characters. It starts with a long list of the characters, how they look, who they are, their backstory, and on and on. Then, after about a page, or three, they start acting.

Formalized, it could be a bit like this:

[[Introducing the setting]]
[[Introducing Character A]]
[[Introducing Character B]]
[[Introducing Character C]]
[[Ooops where's the POV character in all this and what are they up to?]]
[[End of info dump]]
Character A did something amazing and said: "Blah blah blah."
"No really?" said Character B.
Character C scoffed.

So, part from trimming any excess fat from any part of this first draft scene (that isn’t supposed to be great from the start anyway—Hemingway said so!) I can rearrange it in this way:

[[Introducing the setting AND where's the POV character and what are they up to?]]
[[Introducing Character A]] who did something amazing and said: "Blah blah blah."
"No really?" said Character B. [[Introducing Character B]]
[[Introducing Character C]] who scoffed.

It can still be info-dumpey, but this way the story engine gets to rev up, hopefully not even halfway down page 1 of this scene. (And yes, I know, it should rev up in the first sentence or at the very latest in the first paragraph, but I have to leave something for draft 3, 4 and 5, right?)

This becomes even more efficient if character A and B spend a page talking, and only then does character C step in. Character C doesn’t have to be introduced before that point.

A variant would be to limit the initial introductions to at most a sentence, and then add more later in the scene.

In regard to backstory, only add what is vitally important only exactly when it’s needed. So if not all backstory is vitally important, move it to the character profile document for possible use later (unless it should always stay under the surface…)

Editing, The Craft of Writing, The Writing Process

First drafts

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In short, writing a novel consists of the following steps/phases/whatever you want to call them, hurdles?:

  1. Come up with an idea, research etc. to get enough to know what to write about. Here, you may also want to polish that idea into a synopsis, snowflake or other “writing plan” (there are tons of different ideas out there on how to do this)
  2. Write the first draft.
  3. Edit the first draft. (+ likely more researching).
  4. Now we’ve reached the point where we either involve editors etc. for self-publishing or try to shop the book to an agent or publisher.
  5. More editing, more rewriting, more more until finally you push the “publish button”. I’ve also heard, breathing into paper bags might be involved in the before or after of pushing that button…

Not to mention marketing a novel or a career, regardless of if you are self-publishing or working with a publisher/agent.

Today, I’m focusing on step 2 and 3.

I’ve seen some interesting questions from people struggling with their first draft. The interesting thing about these questions is that they are seldom “first draft questions” in the sense they are questions about how to perfect the text in a time when perfection will be your enemy.

I once read a book (I think it was by Sanaya Roman) about how we avoid being successful by piling on enough hard tasks that it will be impossible to change.

Let’s say you decide to quit smoking. Your devious mind, all against change, suggests, if you really want to be healthy you need to eat better as well, and exercise, and hey, it’s healthy with social interactions, join a club or two, and that garage needs fixing too. Now that you’ve decided to become a better person, let’s add the garage and the garden to the list as well.

You quickly decide quitting smoking seems like a major task, and maybe you could postpone it a bit.

While writing a novel is hardly like quitting smoking, it is a change in its own way. You may very well fear what would happen if you became a famous bestseller and had fans chasing you down the street, or maybe more commonly nobody wanted to read what you wrote, and it was in fact crap even though it seems so great right now in your head.

Your mind will want to protect you against that change, just like any other change.

One way to do that is to claim the first draft must be PERFECT or you might as well quit right now.

Hence, all the questions about proper verb usage, dialog writing, theme, tension, style, etc. etc.

We worry about the details in order to prevent ourselves from finishing the first draft and risking realizing that it is crap and useless and no good and by no means ready for publication.

Now the hard truth. But for it to sink in properly, I give you a quote from Hemingway himself:

“The first draft of anything is shit.”

Hemingway via Arnold Samuelson

That’s a bit harsh, but what it really means is that in order to have a text ready for publication, you’ll have to edit it into shape after the first draft is finished.

Others have also said, writing is rewriting, and you can’t edit an empty page.

So, rather than worrying about the text not being perfect in the first draft (or God forbid, sending your unedited first draft to a publisher or agent assuming you’re no good when they won’t reply or send you a form mail back) you produce a first draft that stinks seven ways to Sunday, and then you edit it, rewrite it, and polish it until you’ve removed everything from that slab that wasn’t David.

Here’s another quote if you feel the above one is unkind to your newborn first draft:

“Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist.”

Jane Smiley

This, of course, is not true for the final novel, but without a first draft you have nothing to edit into a final novel.

Creative Writing, Editing

A Nod Every Second Page

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In the second draft of my current WIP, my characters nod about once every second page.

Statistics

I found this out by looking at statistics in Scrivener. The second draft is 233k words (yes huge, I’m working on getting it down to somewhere closer to 150k right now). Of those, about 575 words are nods of different types. Nodding is in fact the most common word in the WIP.

However, this is statistics. How bad is it really on the page? For me, having been around the text for years, that may be hard to figure out. For a beta reader, they may get irritated by the text without really understanding why.

It is, nevertheless, important to separate statistics from the actual experience of the text. Maybe this is no problem at all? Or is it a subconscious showstopper? Maybe every person reading the text will see nothing but the nods. And heads will be rolling? (Pun intended…)

Regardless, looking into fixing some of these nods should improve the text, even if not taking care of them at all might not kill the text.

So how do we take care of the nods?

Fixing Repeated Words

The simple answer to getting rid of all the nods is, of course, to replace them with other actions, and to replace with many different actions.

That’s simpler said than done, of course, but there are help out there.

I mulled this over for some months and realized I already had the resource to fix this on my computer.

My solution is spelled, “The Emotion Thesaurus,” by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. There may be other resources like it out there, but this is invaluable for this problem.

However, and there is an important however, you need the PDF-version to make this work. (Though the PDF-version is really cheap—$7 as of this writing—so I suggest you get it).

You need the PDF-version because my solution to this problem is to search for “nod” (or whatever other thing your characters do) and work backwards to find synonym actions. More about this below.

The Emotion Thesaurus

The Emotion Thesaurus is a list of emotions (anger, fear, happiness) defined by their corresponding physical signals and behaviors, internal sensations and mental responses. There are also sections on long-term responses and signs the emotion is being suppressed. Among a few other things.

Replacing Nodding

As I stated above, in order to come up with alternatives to nodding, I searched my PDF-copy of the Emotion Thesaurus for “nod” and a list of sections (emotions) came up.

There seems to be a use for “nodding” in a large proportion of emotions, so the next step is to try to determine what the character is really feeling in every scene where there is nodding.

In one scene, my POV-character comes back from a negotiation, having to tell her boss (the president of a far future sci-fi nation) that they didn’t get all they bargained for, and he’d been pretty mad about that before, even calling them traitors. So here’s the original:

He pressed his lips together but then nodded. "We knew it was a tough starting bid."

Things that seem to fit in this scene are:

  • Acceptance
  • Determination
  • Indifference
  • Resignation

I did a first, quick filtering out of things like admiration, gratitude and self-loathing since it was not at all what the character felt at that moment. Then checked each potential entry for what it was about (not being a native English speaker sometimes require some effort on that front) and how the nod was being used to figure out if it was a good replacement or not.

Nodding Because of Acceptance

In my case, I decided the best emotion was acceptance. The thesaurus had just “nodding” as one physical behavior for acceptance.

The president was accepting that the bid didn’t get through, deciding it wasn’t really that big a deal. My POV-character thought as much, and she too was happy to see him giving up that notion.

The text had already been down the road of the president getting pissed on the negotiations, and besides, he had other things on his mind in this scene, so… acceptance seemed to be the best emotion.

For acceptance, there are a number of possible physical actions that could replace nodding:

  • One’s shoulders and torso loosening slightly as tension ebbs
  • Taking in a cleansing breath
  • A smile that grows
  • A light tone of voice
  • Open body posture (arms away from the body, legs slightly apart, chest out, etc.)

I picked the first one but shortened it down to the person just relaxing.

He pressed his lips together but then relaxed. "We knew it was a tough starting bid."

The text already contains a piece of dialog equivalent to the character accepting the situation, so the nod was only there from the start to add some body to dialog. Now I get the same result with another type of physical response instead.

Sidenote: Yes, that sentence actually shows and then tells, in a way. Maybe in a future round of editing, I’ll decide to change the dialog to something else. I’ve come to realize, doing editing, that my texts will likely always have issues even if they get printed. I think I’m suffering from perfectionism…

POV-Characters

If the person nodding is a POV-character, there are also internal sensations like the chest loosening or feeling lighter and mental responses like being cautiously optimistic.

Of course, had this been a POV-character, I might also have used a thought or two on the matter. Without thoughts or dialog, things would otherwise have become pretty confusing. But also adding a physical response adds to the section and for a non POV-character dialog, action or body language is pretty much all there is.

Final Words

Finally, I’d like to add that right now I am not editing the WIP for nods. In fact, I am working on its size.

Editing for word usage will, in my current plan of editing (that I hope to be able to post about some day) be the final step of polishing among several steps going from an overall analysis of the text (is it even readable?) through the structure of the text (distribution of acts and plot points) and characters to looking at scenes and finally details like paragraphs, sentences and words in the very end (where I may have had to remove both scenes, plots and characters because they didn’t work—it’s easier to kill a darling if you haven’t spent months coddling it…)