Pro prose
Explore some advanced ‘microediting’ techniques with practical examples from author and lecturer James McCreet as he revisits his novel-in-progress
James McCreet
I’ll be honest: I’m a terrible editor. I hate to re-read my writing because I can’t help comparing myself to literary heroes and realising how woefully I fall short of their standard. Moreover, my day job as a copywriter is one in which deadlines usually prevent thoughtful editing. I’m used to writing one-shot, single-draft prose that I’ll never have to see again.
For these reasons (and also impatience, laziness, frustration) I’ve never been an assiduous editor of my fiction. I’ve always been content with ‘good enough’. When you’re playing with 100,000 words, perfection is pretty difficult to achieve. Maybe a poem can approach perfection, but not a novel.
My latest book is different. I’m aware that it might be the best thing I’ve ever written and I’ve started to feel some responsibility to make it as good as I can. Following my usual singlesweep edit to find errors and tidy up grammatical confusion, I’ve found myself returning to the manuscript again and again to examine random pages for improvement. In the last two months, I’ve made hundreds of tiny changes.
My planning process means that not a single chapter, paragraph or sentence has changed position (though the odd line has been deleted). The story itself is fine. Rather, I’ve been changing things that most readers may never have noticed in the original version. Guiding my efforts have been the following editorial ideas. I’m calling it microediting because that sounds kind of cool:
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May 2017
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