There is an alchemy to editing.
This is Part 3 of a Four-Part Miniseries on how to PLAN, WRITE, EDIT, and PUBLISH your creative work.
My co-host for the series is Greg Larson. Greg has written and edited more than 80 books.
In Part 1 we reviewed how to PLAN your book.
In Part 2 we reviewed how to WRITE your book.
Today we’re going to review how to EDIT your book.
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Larson:
Editing is everything that comes afterwards; with writing, that, I think, it's weightlifting. It's just showing up, putting in the reps, and pounding something out. That can be done by anyone who can hit a keyboard or who can write; but editing, I don't know, man; it's a certain alchemy to it, and I have no idea.
Ben Guest:
Hi, everyone. This is Ben Guest, and today is Part 3 of my Four-Part Miniseries on How to Plan, Write, Edit, and Publish Your Book. Today, Greg Larson and I are talking editing, and specifically, strategies to look at your book with fresh eyes. That's the key in the editing process, to be able to see your book new, and make changes based on seeing it "for the first time."
Ben Guest:
Greg is the author and editor of more than 80 books, and we discuss his memoir, Clubbie, in this podcast. And we also talk a little bit about my memoir, Zen and the Art of Coaching Basketball. Enjoy the episode.
Ben Guest:
I guess there are two main components to editing. One is self-editing, and the other is working with an editor, either a trusted reader, group of readers, professional editor, et cetera. Let me start with a couple tips and tricks that I use.
Greg Larson:
Please.
Ben Guest:
And I got this from a guy named Glen Stout, who has written a number of excellent books, and was the series editor for The Best American Sports Writing, which I read growing up. It was really a seminal introduction to good writing for me. And so anyway, Glen told me, "When you get to a certain point, re-do the entire manuscript in a different font, preferably a font you don't like; and then print it out, and read it in the new font." Because there reaches a point, I think for all of us as writers, where we need to trick ourselves into being able to see the work in a fresh light, as new as we can. So tip or trick number one is, print it out in a different font, different size, et cetera. Yeah.
Greg Larson:
I love that, because that's... It's so true, man. Those little tricks, you're like, "What the... That's not going to do anything." That kind of shit really does work. You're going to look at it like it's a completely book, and you're going to see nooks and crannies that you didn't before. I'm stealing the hell out of that times. Fuck Times New Roman dude, I'm going Wing Dings on this next draft.
Ben Guest:
Comic Sans, in 14.
Greg Larson:
Particularly a font that you don't like, that you don't like. That, I think, is really key. I really like that.
Ben Guest:
It's great, isn't it?
Greg Larson:
Yeah.
Ben Guest:
And the other two, the second one is one that everybody will tell you from the beginning of time, which is to read it out loud. And reading it out loud, you can hear right away if a sentence isn't working.
Ben Guest:
And then the third one is, and I haven't tried this yet, but, and again, this was Glen recommended this; bought an older Kindle, and these ones you can put a PDF on here, and then do the read aloud function, where it reads it in that computer voice. So it's not an audio book; it's just that kind of funky computer voice that doesn't even know the correct pronunciation or grammar or anything. But by listening to it, say it's similar to printing it out in a funky font; by listening to it like that, and I haven't done this yet, but I'm going to with the memoir that I'm just finishing. Listening to it like that; again, you're hearing it in a new way.
Greg Larson:
When you said, real quick, the memoir that you're finishing; you're talking about the one you're working with, the basketball?
Ben Guest:
Oh no, sorry. I should have been clearer. So, I got... That project is, we're right in the middle of just interview, transcription, writing. The memoir is about meditation and coaching basketball. And that one is 95% done. Probably by the time, hopefully, that these podcast episodes come out, it'll be right around the time on publishing that book. So that one's just about done.
Greg Larson:
Wow.
Ben Guest:
It just needs a few more things here, and then a copy edit, and then it's good to go.
Greg Larson:
Dang, I didn't know that you were that close.
Ben Guest:
I have this phrase, "Are you 90% finished, or are you only 50% finished?" And again, it comes from my filmmaking background of doing documentary, where you just get so lost in the weeds, and you can't tell, "Am I... Is this almost?" And I'm just thinking about every last little bit or, "Eh, it's just not working. I got something, but it just needs, it's going to need a lot more."
Ben Guest:
And so, for a long time, I was in that, "I think I'm 90% done, but I'm not sure if I'm 50% done." And actually, going back to our episode, writing, what really cracked it open for me was going back and looking at some of the journals I'd kept as a Peace Corps volunteer in Namibia, and having some I actual dialogue that I had quoted in my journal, that I could pull out and let the dialogue do the lifting, as we talked about in the writing episode. Because I was telling and not showing.
Greg Larson:
Yeah.
Ben Guest:
I was giving a laundry list of experiences that I had had, that sort of led to this epiphany of letting go of control, releasing control of trying to coach a team, and so on and so forth.
Ben Guest:
So anyway, long story short, it was by finding real-time dialogue that I had in my journal from years ago, that I could plug in that it really, "Okay. Now I'm more than 90% finished, and I just need to polish up a few things."
Greg Larson:
Yeah. So the previous version was probably a lot of summary, and not as much scene building.
Ben Guest:
Exactly. It was way too much. I've been working with Glen on this, and it was way too much... And he made the point of, "Okay, you have this background. How did you reach this point where you're letting go of the team, you're into meditation and so forth. How did you get there?" So then I wrote a chapter explaining how I got there. But it's the same thing we talked about last time, if you've got to explain that, you've already fucked up. Explaining it just made it boring. In some cases, I'm talking about being in the Peace Corps 20 years ago in Namibia; how do I make that come alive? And then fortunately, I kept some journals, and I found one of the journals, and bang, I had some dialogue in there that was perfect for what I'm trying to convey.
Greg Larson:
Backstory as exposition, was something that one of my professors in grad school really hammered in us: sprinkle in where it's necessary, but front-loading it all at the beginning, snoozefest, dude. Nonfiction memoirs in particular, I think make that mistake a lot; way too much background. "I was born in 1924." So nobody gives a shit, dude, unless you're Teddy Roosevelt or whatever.
Ben Guest:
And I'm sure we'll get into this more in future episodes, where we talk the business side of it in marketing and promoting. But you have to think about who is the audience and who is the reader?
Greg Larson:
Yeah.
Ben Guest:
And I think a lot of times, especially for first-time authors, or for people that have an interesting story to tell, they want to tell their whole life, rather than, and we talked about this before, in the planning stage, there's a point to this writing. There's something you want to communicate. And if it's not related to that, it doesn't need to be in there.
Greg Larson:
Yes. Writing is entertainment. Even if it's art, it's entertainment. And if it's not entertaining and it's not informing, then what are you doing? It's just a journal.
Ben Guest:
And why am I reading your book? So going back to the editing process, for me, that's where we're making a reduction. Right? What does that look like for you?
Greg Larson:
For the handwritten novel that I'm doing, when I finish writing it handwritten, I'm going to have to go to a computer, and I'm going to have to transcribe it. That's like a free edit, because I get to think about it as not being an edit. I'm like, "Oh, I'm just transcribing it." But inevitably, who knows? That might be one of the times where I'm most in the weeds in the book ever, where I have it here on the page, and then I'm typing it on the computer. I've not thought about this out loud, explicitly, but was like, "Oh, will I make obvious changes while I'm doing the transcription?" I think, no. I'm going to honor exactly what's on the page, and I'm just going to write comments on the side for, "Oh, this has to change, because X happens in notebook 10, that kind of thing."
Greg Larson:
And then, I'm going to let it sit for six weeks. And in that process, I'm going to write something else, something completely different, probably something comedy, funny, silly stuff. And then after six weeks, I will go back through and read it. And I don't know if I'll have a pen in my hand or not, but I'm going to print it out. Not in a funny font yet; not in Wing Dings yet. I'll do that later, but I'm going to print it out and just read it like I'm a reader, and just see what the hell I have. And then, I will go back through, and then it's slash and burn time. I will print it out, and I will cut up different sections, like on a chapter-by-chapter level; I will cut up different sections and pieces of dialogue, and move it around physically, like on the ground. That has been actually really helpful.
Ben Guest:
What does your file management look like on your computer?
Greg Larson:
I have a Google Drive with a Notes document. That's just shit I think of, that is in no order whatsoever. And that's just an ever-growing document. And then, I have a document of the actual prose; and then I have a bunch of articles, all that stuff. They're all in the same folder on Google Drive.
Ben Guest:
How often are you saving a new version of your draft?
Greg Larson:
I was just looking this up. I started writing prose in the middle of May, 2016, and I finished writing that first draft on September 1st, I believe. And so, I had a rough draft that included stuff that just said, notes, if you need seen here of what you look like. I left that alone in that document, copied it and pasted it to a new document.
Greg Larson:
So it is basically, I will start a new document once I've made one pass at the full manuscript; and then I'll just move on from there. I think for Clubbie, I did four heavy duty edits, and then the tweaking proofreading stuff, that who knows how to quantify that. I have no idea.
Ben Guest:
Yeah. I feel like I don't save enough new drafts. Now I know that I can always go back and find something, but I feel like I probably make a new draft once a week as I'm going through it. But probably need to do it more, just because you have a nice turn of phrase, and then you change it a little bit and then, "Ah, damn. What was that again? I can't remember it exactly."
Greg Larson:
Yeah. And doing it by a timeline like that, you're... It's arbitrary.
Ben Guest:
Yeah. Okay. So you said something earlier, that is the most important part of the editing process, which is, with the new book, you're going to put it in a drawer for six weeks, and then pick it up again. And so, those three tips and tricks about seeing the book in a new way that I gave at the beginning, basically, they're all variations of the process of letting it alone until you can see it with new eyes, with fresh eyes again. The author, Peter Olson, I interviewed him a couple months ago, and I asked him, I said, "How long do you like to let a draft sit?" And he said, "However long I let it sit, it's never long enough." And I thought that was the exact right answer. You want to just forget it. You want to forget what you wrote, so you can see it new again.
Greg Larson:
Yes. I look forward to that a lot, that feeling of... just that feeling of having those notebooks written, and letting it sit in a drawer, and just know that it's complete; the hard part is complete. There's other hard parts, but wow. It exists. Now, it's just a matter of polishing it up, and I'm not going to look at it. It's like waiting for Christmas. The way Stephen King described it, "You're reading something that was written by a soul twin. It feels that you can barely remember it, but it's like somebody who is you, but not you wrote it."
Greg Larson:
I've been doing yoga a lot lately, and at the end of you have the Shavasana, where you're in the corpse pose, and you're basically unwinding after all of the work of the last hour. I don't know what exactly, but there's something analogous there of, the work is complete; at least this phase, the work is complete. And I get to look back and see what the hell it is that I just created. It's kind of scary.
Ben Guest:
It's leaving $20 for yourself in your winter coat. And you're going to find it again six months from now. For me, the hardest part, although still fun, is the writing. Once it gets to the editing phase, the absolute hardest part is done. So, in addition to forgetting and then looking forward to what it is you wrote, it's also, this is the easier phase for me. So I can't wait to forget it, so I can rediscover it, and almost pat myself on the back a little bit for doing this well or doing that well. Even though I'm going to be critical about things, it is very much, you look forward to rediscovering your soul twin's work.
Greg Larson:
Yeah. You can surprise yourself; even us doing the breakdown in the last episode of the revision process for that piece I wrote for Clubbie; even there, I feel a pleasant surprise of, "Oh. I didn't even realize that I did that. That's pretty good." Because I can get really hard on myself, I think, like most authors. Just, "God, I have no idea what I'm doing." And then have to remember, "Nope. Not knowing what you're doing is the most important part of the process."
Ben Guest:
So, for the self-editing phase, the things we've talked about so far are, putting it in a drawer and letting it sit.
Greg Larson:
Yeah.
Ben Guest:
Print it in a different font, read it out loud, let your computer read it out to you. And for me, generally, in the self-editing phase, in addition into just reducing as much as possible, trying to get into the scene as quickly as possible, get out of the scene into the chapter, out of the chapter as quickly as possible. It's also going back to what we were saying earlier, of show, don't tell. Maybe it was the last episode; show, don't tell. I want to be mindful of, "Am I explaining to the audience what it is they should be feeling?" And any time I'm doing that, or nine times out of 10, if I'm doing that, I need to cut it.
Greg Larson:
Yeah. I talked about what I'm going to do with this handwritten draft; but I just realized going back through these old versions of Clubbie, that when I was banging out a first draft on Google Docs, what I would do immediately when I finished the first draft, once I let it sit for a bit and I went through it, I did the spell check tool. Yes. Spelling and grammar, spelling and grammar check. And I just accepted everything it told me. So then, all of a sudden I have this garbled mess. And when I accept everything it tells me, boom, all of a sudden it's like a new draft. And then I formatted it, and it's boom, it's like a new draft. And without doing any cognitive work whatsoever, I just gave myself a revision; and it felt like a free step-up. That was all... I had forgotten that I did that until I looked back.
Greg Larson:
But that was a really cheap way of getting a pat on the back for, "Oh, I already did a revision." And then I try to keep it to global stuff. If I get, even in the first revision, if I get too in the weeds of... If I get too into polishing weeds of every single word in the sentence, I will get lost. So I try to keep it global content edits first, of, "Oh shit, I have a placeholder for content here. Let me just bang something out real quick." I try to do that, and then I try to do a full pass of content restructuring, organizing. And then when I go back through, then it's, "Okay. Now we're deep into polishing by sentence and word." And that takes who knows how many passes; a half dozen passes, maybe more sometimes.
Ben Guest:
Hi, everyone. Ben here with a quick commercial break, which is for Greg's company.
Greg Larson:
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Greg Larson:
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Ben Guest:
So that polishing phase, that refining every sentence, shaving syllables. What does that look like for you?
Greg Larson:
That's the point at which I start reading out loud. I don't read out loud until then. That's when I start reading out loud, and I just try to listen for things that get stuck in my throat; just for things that on a gut level, if I find myself trying to read past it too quickly, that's indicative of me trying to shoo something away from work. That's the only thing I know, dude. It's hard.
Ben Guest:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I can spend two minutes on, "Da, da, da, said Greg."
Greg Larson:
Right.
Ben Guest:
Versus, "Da, da, da, Greg said."
Greg Larson:
Yes.
Ben Guest:
And so, for me, it's just... And actually, this probably goes back to being an English teacher. I don't want to repeat words, especially in a paragraph. I want to have a nice rhythm. And then the icing on the cake, is if I can have a little bit of alliteration or assonance in there, I'm going to sprinkle that in there. But it's that spooky process of, you're 1/3 aware of what you're doing, and 2/3 unaware.
Greg Larson:
This is the spookiest part of the process, the most unexplainable part of what exactly are you doing when you're doing those final polishes?
Ben Guest:
Yep. And so, another thing that I do, and I'm just going to open it on my computer so I can tell everybody. So I... Your computer has a dictionary. And I did this years ago. I uploaded Webster's dictionary from like 1910. So you can find the file, and upload it to your computer dictionary.
Greg Larson:
Huh.
Ben Guest:
You can upload any dictionary that's out there. And so, it's this great old-time dictionary, that if I get stuck, if I need a synonym, I'll punch a word into the dictionary, and see what comes up. So for example, in this autobiography that I'm working on with a retired NBA player, he played college at the University of North Carolina. And Dean Smith, his college coach, is sort of the hero of the book. And so, I'm working on the chapter about freshman year, University of North Carolina, and I'm going online and looking at photos of Chapel Hill, and trying to figure out how to describe it.
Ben Guest:
It's got Georgian architecture. And so, I just put Georgian in the dictionary, and stately comes up. And so now, stately, "Oh, that's a great word. I never would've thought of that." Now I put stately in there, and it's majestic. And then, in this Webster's dictionary, it gives you a famous quote. So it's a Shakespeare quote. "Here is a stately style, indeed." Shakespeare was always using alliteration.
Ben Guest:
So now, the stately campus of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, majestic and grand. I got it all from... It started with Georgian architecture, punched it into the old-timey dictionary, came up with stately, and then definition of stately included majestic and grand. Now I have my words that are a little bit different than I would have used if I'm just trying to come up with it on my own.
Greg Larson:
You're using the Mac, the home dictionary, the utilities dictionary that comes with the operating system?
Ben Guest:
Yeah. The way that I heard about this, is the famous author and writing teacher, John McPhee had a dictionary that he used. And actually, John McPhee published a book about three or four years ago called Draft No. Four, where he goes into this whole process. And it was in one of those articles that he mentioned this dictionary. So, let me see... So, the dictionary that comes with your computer, if you're on a Mac, is the New Oxford American Dictionary. Right? So this is my screen, and this is the New... If I click on dictionary, this is the New Oxford Dictionary.
Greg Larson:
Yeah.
Ben Guest:
But I added Webster's, and I got it from John McPhee, Webster's Revised, Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
Greg Larson:
I like to use Desk Dictionary.
Ben Guest:
What's that? Tell me about that.
Greg Larson:
Webster's II New Riverside Desk Dictionary. Honestly, I like it just because the content is pretty thin; each entry is pretty short. But what I like about it is the size and the weight are perfect. I can... It's easy to carry. It's easy right here. And it's packed with enough words that it's very useful.
Ben Guest:
Yeah. So much of art is about making connections. And so, when we're talking about writing and editing and sentence construction, and really drilling down on what's the right word and the right sentence, I need to make a connection to a word that I'm not normally going to think of.
Greg Larson:
Yes.
Ben Guest:
So having a dictionary that has a bunch of words in it that are slightly out of time, so 1913, Webster's 1913 Dictionary, it's going to find words that I wouldn't normally associate with this other word that I'm trying to figure out, what's a synonym to use.
Greg Larson:
Yes. Yeah. The thesaurus work is done for you, just in the definitions.
Ben Guest:
Okay. So that's the self-editing process. Now, working with an editor; and you've done both. You've been an editor and a book coach, and you've worked with an editor. What are your thoughts about that?
Greg Larson:
As an author, I won't go to an editor until I'm at the copy, edit, and proofreading stage. When I say, "All right, I've polished it to the point where it's as good as I could possibly make it right now, in this stage of my career." If I... Okay. So my copy editor for Clubbie, she was amazing, Amanda Jackson. She gave me a lot of really good sentence-by-sentence, just grammatical stuff that needed to be changed; that was necessary and good.
Greg Larson:
But what she also did was she pointed out two really important narrative discrepancies, where she said, "Hold on a minute. This scene that happens on page 125, makes it seem like you are the messy roommate with your girlfriend. But the corresponding scene on page 74 makes it seem like it's the other way around. It's okay if there's a discrepancy there, but as a reader, it's confusing without at least a little bit of explanation."
Greg Larson:
And I was like, "Oh, shit. Me just putting the facts forward, or putting the scene forward wasn't enough. I actually needed... We were talking about nine times out of 10, you don't need it. That was one of the one times out of 10 that I actually did need to explain a little bit more. And she pointed that out. And then she also pointed out that my ending was confusing. It still might be confusing; that the ending made it seem like I was going forward in time, instead of a flashback in time. And I was like, "Oh God. I didn't know that." Those two insights alone, even if I took away all the commas and all that kind of shit, were well worth the entire... Those two insights were worth everything that she did for me.
Ben Guest:
Yeah. I think the two non-negotiables in writing and publishing your book are a thorough copy edit, and a good cover design.
Greg Larson:
Yeah.
Ben Guest:
Those are the things that you pretty much have to spend money on. It doesn't have to be a lot of money, but you need to allocate resources, in terms of money, for those two things.
Greg Larson:
Yes. If I'm thinking about self-publishing, if you have a publisher and a contract with them, royalties, all that kind of stuff, they'll take care of it. But if I'm talking about self-publishing, I'm thinking if you want to do it right, you have to be allotting $5,000 to those parts of the process, combined. Copy edits, that might be $500 to $1,000. Cover design might be $4k to $5k, something like that. $5k is minimum to get a high quality design like that.
Ben Guest:
So for me, in the editing process, working with an outside editor, I love... And this goes back to being in the film world. I love to work with an editor when I have final... I hate to work with an editor when they have final cut. So, in filmmaking, that means somebody's writing the check, then they're going to have... If a company or an organization has hired you to make a film about what they do, they have final say over the product. And that for me, I don't like not being able to control the final output. But when someone is giving you feedback, and then you can decide, or I can decide, "Okay. I am going to incorporate this feedback." Or, "I understand what they're saying, but I'm still going to make this choice, a different choice." That's when I feel really comfortable, and it's like having a great dance partner, when you're working with a good editor.
Greg Larson:
Yeah. Dude, I couldn't agree more; if I couldn't have final say. There was one thing that actually came up. Okay. Yeah. When I was doing the copy editing process, my copy editor changed a lot of my... She put in a lot of semicolons that were necessary. It's okay, two independent, but related clauses. Yes. Technically, that's supposed to be a semicolon. But every... I was like, "There are no semicolons in a minor league baseball clubhouse. This does not fit the ethos of this world."
Greg Larson:
So, by the book, technically you have it. But for the world that we've created, it's wrong. And luckily, my publisher and my editor were on board with that, and understood my explanation. I just cannot imagine these pieces of dialogue with semicolons instead of m-dashes; because that was my go-to; anywhere there would be a semicolon, it would be an m-dash. It just keeps the things, keeps stuff moving. But that's the kind of thing that you have to look out for in an editor; because their job is to be buttoned up and more binary. And you have to be on their ass; sometimes, it's not binary.
Ben Guest:
Yeah. If I'm editing, I want to point out you're making a choice here.
Greg Larson:
Yes.
Ben Guest:
Okay, great. You're a choice to use an m-dash instead of a semicolon. A good editor is helping you realize, "Did you realize that you're making a choice here?" And then, if you realized it, you're good with it. Half the time, it's, "Oh, shit. I didn't realize I was making that choice. And that's actually not what I want." So to me, a good editor is pointing out, "Okay. Just want to make sure you were consciously intending to do this, or you're consciously making a choice to do this."
Greg Larson:
Yeah. That's where I was a professional editor only. There's a reason why I do book coaching instead and some ghost writing, although not as much. I'm just not, how to put it; I'm just not good at it. I can see through so much of proofreading. It gets in the way of the flow. Proofreading is necessary for the layout, but in copy editing, so much of proper copy editing gets in the way of the narrative flow. It's like stuff... I don't know, man. I think it should be sloppier than that, at least for my stuff. Again, the New Yorker, they're all buttoned up, all that; but you've seen the stuff I write. I like to chunk things together, and there's fragments all over the place. And I like that because it's, that's the flow.
Ben Guest:
One of the things that we keep coming back to, is the idea of juxtaposition, counterpoint. And so again, my training initially is in filmmaking; and the best book on film editing is called In the Blink of an Eye. You have a hierarchy of when to make a cut. The second level is to match Sam Jackson's holding a coffee cup in his left hand in scene A, and we cut to the over-the-shoulder shot. He needs to be holding the coffee cup in his left hand in scene B. But more important than matching continuity, is cutting for emotion. So if this cut, even if something is wrong in terms of continuity, but fits the emotion, then you cut for emotion. And what you're talking about is ultimately our job as writers, is to engage the reader. We're writing to create hopefully, an emotion in the reader. And that has to come necessarily before, "Is the semicolon here correct?"
Greg Larson:
Yes. And we have an advantage over a filmmaker, that we can change the scene if we want to.
Ben Guest:
Yes.
Greg Larson:
So we-
Ben Guest:
We can change the content.
Greg Larson:
We can put the cup in the metaphorical correct hand, and we can get the emotion right.
Ben Guest:
Exactly. Okay. Those are my thoughts on editing. Any more tips and tricks, any other thoughts on editing?
Greg Larson:
Here's the framework that I give my clients for self-editing; and it's just really, I call it the GLOW framework. You start four rounds, global edits, line-by-line edits, out loud edits, work with a professional.
Ben Guest:
I love that framework.
Greg Larson:
And then you have framework that glows.
Ben Guest:
I love that framework. Okay. I think that's the all I've got on editing.
Greg Larson:
Yeah. If I said anything else about editing, I'd be talking out of my ass even more. It's pure alchemy.
Ben Guest:
That's Part Three, The Editing Process. Next week, Part Four, Publishing Your Book. If you enjoyed this content, please subscribe to my weekly newsletter and podcast, at benbo.subststack.com. That's benbo.substack.com. B-E-N-B-O.substack.com. Have a great day
64. How to EDIT Your Book