LUMICRON CAPTURE | BATTLEFIELD ECHO 762
“If this is my last hour, let me have one good deed.”
—Unidentified Krey Soldier, Final Transmission
I’ve always said the hardest drafts are the first and last, and now, we’re going to take a look at the last one. It’s the fifth draft that’s the last stop before the editor. The brimstones are calling for no mercy, just blood, and we’ve got to feed them.
When it comes to writing a story, I focus on different things in each draft, honing in on separate goals. I have a very systematic and structured approach, and it stems from years of wading through the unknown. The first major problem as a writer, at least from my experience, is not knowing how to edit.
For ten-plus years, I edited my first manuscript, and that was just going back through and adding and taking away. There was no structure, no systematic approach, and I didn’t even know what the hell I was doing. I’d clip a line of dialogue, then add in another sentence about what color the flower was, because God forbid you thought it was red like a rose, or orange like the fruit. No, it had to be that in-between color we don’t have a word for, or if we do, it’s very esoteric. No, you had to know the specific hue I’m talking about in great detail.
That’s not editing. That’s nitpicking. That’s obsessive. What about filler words, or adverbs, or dialogue tags? Maybe there are redundancies within, and no one tells you about it. You never consider it because you just don’t know. I’ll give you an example.
She sat down in the chair. <—There’s redundancy there. The first three words: She sat down. Well, when you sit, it’s a downward movement—usually—so we don’t need the down part of that sentence. It should be: She sat in the chair. While that’s a small thing to agonize over, extrapolate that to a quarter of a million words with other, stealthier redundancies. It’s a nightmare.
So, let’s take that journey now, and you’ll have a better understanding of all the nitty-gritty details I go through.