There’s nothing I like more than getting out of the office, away from the computer, and out into the trenches where writers gather to talk writing. One such opportunity came earlier this week when I had the opportunity to do a seminar for the Santa Cruz County chapter of the Society of Southwestern Authors, one of the biggest and most active writing groups in Arizona.

The topic was self-editing but with the time for the session limited to only an hour and a half, there simply wasn’t time to do our full self-editing workshop. We typically need at least four hours to fully explore the most important principles and guidelines from TED’s own Self-Editing for Fiction Writers and so the challenge here was to quickly introduce those principles and find an angle that worked for the time we had available and still deliver something substantive. The idea I came up with was to explore a small but important aspect of the benefit of self-editing: how paying attention to mechanical fundamentals can not only improve an author's style but also help writers deepen their characters, improve their dialogue, and make their scenes more immediate and memorable.

Many of the self-editing points appear, at least on their surface, to be purely mechanical in nature--affecting prose style and readability more than anything relating to to content of what's being written. Important considerations such as how how to best handle dialogue attribution, point of view, interior monologue, and character description are important ones that are often forgotten in the revision process or overlooked entirely, so a crash course on those tips and pointers is always important in any discussion of how to edit your own manuscript. But the value of attention to these points can really go much further, and it was great to have a chance to give some undivided attention to the often-overlooked connection between the simple mechanical guidelines at the heart of self-editing and full scope of their potential impact on matters of content such as characterization, dialogue, and scene writing.

The event was was even better attended than expected, and there were lots of good questions from the audience. One thing that really seemed to resonate was the exploration of how good writing mechanics help writers keep the experience of their stories closer to the experience of real life,  and how it's the writers job to engage readers' imaginations rather than spell out every last detail in their narrative. Many of the points we discussed also serve as catalysts in the effort to show rather than tell and make good decisions about how to best convey what you want readers to understand about your characters, without laying it out explicitly. I’ll talk more about some specifics from my SSA talk in a later post but the key thing I hope anyone reading this will consider (especially if they’re already familiar with Self Editing for Fiction Writers), is that there’s much more to many of the self-editing points than meets the eye. Good writing counts for a lot in the reader’s experience of a novel, and attention to self-editing points will help your writing get better. But at the end of the day it’s really the characters who cultivate and sustain engagement and who bring meaning to a story. The lesson of the day was that good mechanics can play a small but important part in how those characters reach the page and in how readers come to know them. The points that help writers avoid explaining characters to readers are especially valuable on this front, along with those that discourage bad habits in connection to dialogue and its attribution.

 

I would have loved more time to spend on the topic, but I felt good about what we are able to cover and very much appreciated the opportunity to focus on this important aspect of the value of the self-editing process.

The Editorial Department offers a series of four different workshops on writing craft, appropriate for just about any size gathering and any kind of writers' event. Our self-editing workshop is based on Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, by TED founder Renni Browne and coauthor Dave King.  Please Contact the Tucson office if you'd like more information about the book or any of our workshops.

Original image courtesy of flikr user  Ken Lund