You’ve got a great story. You’ve been writing like crazy, but when you go back to edit, it just doesn’t have the zip, the spark, the sparkle you’d hoped for. How do you perk things up — give it more oomph? Here are a few helpful tips. This is going to be a bit challenging, and you’ll need the powerful desire to edit strong and edit well to tighten your writing, giving it that extra punch.
So for starters, get yourself a piece of your writing. Maybe a first chapter. You can do the editing on your computer or you can print the pages out. I personally still prefer to print it out. There’s just something about the printed page in front of you. I also usually make the print size a bit larger for this to allow lots of room for notes.
Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash
For starters, let’s get your reader into the story. Let him or her experience the emotions your characters are experiencing firsthand. Don’t distance them. For example, don’t say Amy was angry. Instead of leaving the reader with just a bunch of words and depending on them to interpret just what being ‘angry’ is, show the reader how we know Amy was angry and what form it took.
Something like –
Amy stormed into the room, slammed the door behind her, and clenched her fists at her sides.
Think Amy might be angry? So will your reader. Just think about what you might do if you were really, really mad and describe that in your scenes.
Next, remember when editing, cut, cut, cut. All of us writers pretty much naturally overwrite. We’re in love with words; we can’t help it. But, come editing time, get real. This is the time to seriously cut. It won’t make your writing worse. ,It’ll make it better. Here’s an example:
Instead of something like –
Amy took notice of the horses, scores of them, running over the uneven ground toward home.
Try –
The herd of horses thundered for the home corral.
If Amy is our point-of-view character, there’s no need for her to ‘take notice”. Doesn’t hurt to cut that sentence a bit either.
Another great trick is to skip lead-ins like “he saw”, “she saw”, “he noticed”, “they looked at”. Instead, cut right to the action.
Like this:
Instead of –
Amy watched Jack ride past on his bicycle.
Try —
Jack raced by on his bike. Or if it needs to be clear as to the action, try adding her name — Jack raced past Amy on his bike.
Using these simple tips, your reader will be more easily captured by your story and drawn in. Once that happens, they’re imagining what it would be like to be one character or another in your story, maybe even sucked into that wonderful fiction world where they can lose themselves entirely for a while, and they’ll love you for it.
Photo by Seongho Jang on Unsplash
Remember, a novel isn’t just a bunch of words where something happens. It’s a tale, a story, populated by interesting people (we hope) and beset by fascinating events, perhaps romance, mystery, and thrills. Don’t keep your readers at arm’s length, separated from the action. Draw them in. Read your favorite authors and notice how often the dialog doesn’t have an identifying tag at all or is very short, like “Amy said”, or “Amy snapped”.
You might grab a highlighting pen and go through a book you particularly like, highlighting description, action, and dialog that appeal to you, then analyze why that is. A great exercise for your writing ‘muscles’.
So what all this boils down to is write tight, cut wildly, and put your reader into the action. This is where your ‘zip’ really comes from.
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