The Edit-As-You-Go Method by Randy Ingermanson | Advanced Fiction Writing

The Edit-As-You-Go Method

 

by Randy Ingermanson 

 

Advanced Fiction Writing

 

Finishing your first draft is an essential milestone on the way to publishing your novel. If you don’t finish that first draft, you probably won’t finish the second, or third, and you probably won’t ever get a polished final draft.

And how do you write your first draft? There’s no one right answer. Different writers are different, and what works for one writer doesn’t work for another. Here are four options that have worked for large numbers of writers:

• Writing by the seat of your pants—you just start typing with no planning.
• Writing to an outline—you create a detailed outline and use it to write your first draft.
• The Snowflake Method—the 10-step method I invented to plan your novel’s plot and characters, starting simple and expanding out the details bit by bit.
• Editing as you go—you type the first scene as if you were writing by the seat of your pants, but then you polish it until it’s perfect before moving on to the next scene. You repeat this until you’re done.

And of course many writers mix and match elements from these methods. The right way for you is the one that works.

I created the Snowflake Method, so naturally I’ve talked about it a lot in this e-zine over the years.

In this article, I’d like to focus on the Edit-As-You-Go approach, because I think it hasn’t gotten as much airtime as it deserves. My understanding is that Dean Koontz uses the Edit-As-You-Go method, and that gives it all the credibility it needs.

Why Edit As You Go?

Why might you decide to give the EAYG method a try?

One very good reason to try it is that you resonate with the idea. If you’ve read the short descriptions of the methods above and EAYG has emotional appeal for you, then your instincts are telling you something. I think it’s always smart to listen to your instincts. They might be wrong, but very often, they’re right.

Another good reason to try EAYG is that you’ve tried the other methods, and none of them have clicked for you. That doesn’t make you a bad writer or a defective human. It just means you tried things that didn’t click for you. That’s all it means. If you try EAYG, it’ll either click for you or it won’t. If it doesn’t click, then you’re no worse off than before. But if it does click, then that’s a win. A big win. There’s just no downside to experimenting.

A third reason to try EAYG is when your story and characters are only partly formed in your mind, and you need a lab for trying out different ideas to get them to gel. The novel I’m currently writing is a historical novel in which history records a number of disconnected events, but we don’t know the exact order of the events, and we don’t know the character motivations. The story is unclear, and my job is to find the story. So I’ve found EAYG useful as a lab. I can write a scene in which I audition characters and plot ideas. If they don’t seem to be right, I can edit them again and again and again, until they ooze into focus. Then I can move on. This is not my preferred way to write, but I’ll do what it takes to find my story.

This is Not Complicated

Unlike outlining or the Snowflake Method, the EAYG approach has very few moving parts. You type a scene. Then you edit it once or many times, until you’re happy with it. Then you repeat until done.

So there’s not a lot to say here. Either you like the idea or you don’t. If you hate it, then move on; life is short. But if you love it, give it a whirl and see if you like it as much in practice as you do in theory.

The acid test of any kind of writing is this question: Are you having fun? This matters, because we novelists spend thousands of hours writing fiction. For most novelists, the writing is not super profitable. So it had better be fun, or what’s the point?

 

About The Author

Randy Ingermanson is a theoretical physicist and the award-winning author of six novels. He has taught at numerous writing conferences over the years and publishes the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

 

 Randy Ingermanson Books at Amazon

 

More Advanced Fiction Writing

 

How to Edit and Proofread Content

How to Edit and Proofread Content

Use Effective Time Management & Beware of the Grammar Check Trap

Before you turn in any manuscript, you must take the time to proofread and edit the document carefully. Merely using Spelling and Grammar Check through Microsoft Word will not get the job done. Instead of rushing to proofread ten minutes before the paper is due, you need to take proofreading seriously and allot a substantial amount of time for the activity.

Once you've finished writing a manuscript, it's a good idea to "let the paper rest" for a while and come back to proofread it later. It's easier to see grammatical and stylistic glitches if the paper isn't fresh in your mind. Focus on the style, grammar, and spelling in every single sentence.

If you only rely on Spelling and Grammar Check, it's highly probable that you'll still have many errors in your paper. Spellcheckers miss all kinds of usage errors (they're vs. there vs. their, for example) and other grammatical problems. These simple errors hurt the readability of the document by distracting your reader, which in turn damages the paper's credibility.

Read the Paper Out Loud 

Reading a document aloud is a common technique used by both beginning and professional writers. Reading a paper out loud slowly will help you catch phrases that don't "sound right" and will let you focus on what's there on the paper, not what you meant to say. You can also use any program that reads aloud; this is what works best for me.

Read the Paper Backwards 

Another helpful technique used by professional writers is reading a paper backward. What this means is that a writer starts by proofreading the last sentence. You read that sentence, making sure there were no misspellings or mechanical errors. Then you move on to the next-to-last sentence, and so on. Writers do this because reading a document backwards takes it out of context. You're able to isolate the sentences and their grammatical issues by reading it backwards.

Read the Paper Out Loud and Backwards

 Use this hybrid method by incorporating both techniques provided above.

Use the Pencil or Ruler Method 

Some writers use a pencil or ruler as a guide to focus on each individual sentence as they proofread. This technique stops a person from getting ahead and helps one concentrate on the sentence at hand.

Use the Each Sentence As Its Own Paragraph Method

One helpful method for focusing on both sentence variety in your writing and grammatical/mechanical errors within paragraphs is to reformat your document by making each sentence its own paragraph. Instead of using double spacing with sizeable paragraphs, convert your document to single spacing to examine each sentence in a line-by-line fashion. You format the paper by taking every sentence and placing it on one line by itself to look for grammatical errors, unnecessary repetition, and places where you can vary the lengths and types of sentences used in your prose. Since sentence variety ~ using different types and varying lengths of sentences ~ creates strong cohesion (a.k.a. "flow"), writers use this method to look for ways to make the document stylistically stronger.

 *For example, if I were to present the paragraph above, here is what it would look like using the "each sentence as its own paragraph" method: 

One helpful method for focusing on both sentence variety in your writing and grammatical or mechanical errors within paragraphs is to reformat your document by making each sentence its own paragraph. Instead of using double spacing with sizeable paragraphs, convert your document to single spacing to examine each sentence in a line-by-line fashion. You format the paper by taking every sentence and placing it on one line by itself to look for grammatical errors, unnecessary repetition, and places where you can vary the lengths and types of sentences used in your prose. Since sentence variety (using different types and varying lengths of sentences) creates strong cohesion (a.k.a. "flow"), writers use this method to look for ways to make the document stylistically stronger.

*For example, if I were to present the paragraph above, here is what it would look like using the "each sentence as its own paragraph" method:

One helpful method for focusing on both sentence variety in your writing and grammatical or mechanical errors within paragraphs is to reformat your document by making each sentence its own paragraph. Instead of using double spacing with sizeable paragraphs, convert your document to single spacing to examine each sentence in a line-by-line fashion. You format the paper by taking every sentence and placing it on one line by itself to look for grammatical errors, unnecessary repetition, and places where you can vary the lengths and types of sentences used in your prose. 

Since sentence variety (using different types and varying lengths of sentences) creates strong cohesion (a.k.a. "flow"), writers use this method to look for ways to make the document stylistically stronger.

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