I wrote two weeks ago about editing Under Shōko’s Bed.  It has taken only a few weeks, but has been a very difficult process as I cut and cut and cut some more.  The 7th draft was 107,700 words.  The latest is 98,200.

For cuts this difficult, I found it helped to print out the chapters and make the edits with a pen rather than working on the computer.  The edits felt less final that way; each was just a “maybe.”  With a whole chapter’s worth of edits, I went into the text in Scrivener, thought through the changes again, and made the ones that I still felt were good.  In my last post, I mentioned Stephen King’s counsel that you have to be willing to “kill your darlings,” and this edit was exactly that.  It hurt.  And using a pen at first decreased the pain enough that I could make the cuts that much deeper.

Once I was done with all of the changes from my editor, Fran Lebowitz, (draft 8.0) I focused on shortening and worked with my live-in editor, Wallis.  I have mentioned her editing skill before (The Decision to Self-Publish), but I saw it on full display once again.  She is much better than I am at judging pacing.  Her help was invaluable in making tech and art sections less didactic.  She also has a gift for slashing unnecessary words.  She used a blue pen, I used a red one, and the pages got pretty colorful.

Once Wallis was done, I went through William Strunk Jr.’s The Elements of Style and followed most of his prescriptions.  I deleted scores of instances of “very.”  I also deleted hundreds of adverbs.  “Alright” became “all right.”  I fixed “compared to” and “compared with,” “can” and “may,” and “like” and “as.”  Then I went through the text to turn ellipses and em-dashes into commas, etc.  That completed draft 8.1.

There are still a few things I need to check that will require a full read through.  I doubt that I have split infinitives, but I should be sure.  I need to examine my use of participles for verbal nouns.  I need to read to see that participial phrases at the beginning of sentences refer to the grammatical subjects (Strunk’s rule 7), and that I have expressed coordinate ideas in similar form (Strunk’s rule 15) and kept related words together (Strunk’s rule 16), among other rules.  That will be draft 8.2, but while that is in process, a few friends will read draft 8.1 and give feedback.  

The editing is nearly done!