Cutting 'The Cut'

Editing is a special and essential skill for a fiction writer, as I discovered when revising my crime novel, The Cut. And what’s more, it is a skill that requires a lot of practice to develop. In essence, you are learning to look dispassionately at what you’ve written and to think about it forensically. You have to ask yourself a series of difficult questions about your writing. And find the answers that are going to make your book better. Editing is also a very immersive experience. You are focusing on the fine detail of your writing and how well it fits into the overall story. This was very welcome during my long wait for the results of my recent cancer surveillance scan. Editing the manuscript was the only thing that managed to divert my mind from worrying about the threat of recurrence for a few hours. So I did a lot of it. Draft two did work much better than draft one, and ended up being 35,000 words shorter. I then submitted this draft to a professional editor for feedback.

This, however, was another source of anxiety. I felt sure that the editor would be critical of my writing and find many flaws. After all, he was an experienced author with several prize-winning novels to his name. But when the report came, it was quite the opposite. He told me that much of what I’d written worked extremely well. He was very complimentary about the voice and character of my narrator, the relationships between the characters, the witty and believable dialogue and the richly realized setting. I felt a glow of pride as I read on. Then he got to a series of suggestions for improving the book. He felt that the motivations of the characters weren’t consistent in places. He also felt that the book would work better if certain scenes were altered and moved to different positions in the narrative. The final problem he saw was that the book was still too long and needed to be at least 10,000 words shorter.

So I started work on draft three. I began with the structural changes that the editor recommended. These also involved adding several scenes. The main job is now to condense the overall narrative. This means going through the draft again, scene by scene, and cutting out all but the essential elements. Then asking yourself, does the scene work a lot better after these changes? Could it still be improved? How well does it fit with the scenes that precede and follow it? Is the tone consistent with the development of the characters that are in the scene? Are there any continuity problems with the content of the scene? And so on.

I’ve certainly become better at editing. And the draft is improving all of the time. But places where I can cut text are getting harder to find. I’m still a bit away on my word count. So I’ll have to get whittling. And perhaps a little more ruthless.