Razor Mountain Revisions — #1

After taking a couple weeks off, I’m jumping into revisions on Razor Mountain.

Having done my best to forget everything about the book, I now have to identify all the parts that suck and make them better.

Critique

To get in the editing mindset, I reactivated my account on critters.org, and I’ve been doing critiques on other people’s stories. This is great practice for editing, because I want to approach my own stories in the same way that I’d approach someone else’s: as an objective reader.

The other reason that I’ve been critiquing is because I sent in the first chapter of Razor Mountain for critique. Critters keeps the whole system running by requiring everyone to submit a critique in 3 out of every 4 weeks if they want to send out their own work for feedback.

Critters also has an option to request “dedicated readers,” which flags your submission to say that you’re interested in having people read the whole novel. Unfortunately, about six submissions in a given week are novels, and I don’t think these requests tend to get much traction. It’s a lot to ask of semi-random strangers, even if they do get a bunch of reading credits for it. I haven’t gotten any takers so far.

I’ll be sending the second chapter through in the next couple days, but I haven’t decided how many more chapters to put in the queue. I suspect I’ll see diminishing returns on later chapters. Novel chapters don’t get as much feedback as short stories, and not all the readers will be following chapter by chapter, so the feedback is less useful.

The other problem is that it takes a couple weeks for a submission to reach the top of the queue, and each user only gets one submission at a time. At that rate, it’d take a year or more to get through the whole book.

The Editing Plan

I posted recently about making a novel editing plan, and I’m now doing that for Razor Mountain. I’m looking for big structural changes I might want to make, and trying not to get bogged down in small changes. This is always hard for me, because tweaking words and sentences is easy and satisfying right away. It’s much harder to see possible improvements at the chapter or multi-chapter level, and it’s harder to let the ego go and try a bigger rewrite when the story feels “finished” and set in stone. Even if it will result in a better story.

The only place where I have been purposely doing smaller edits is in the first couple of chapters, because I know I’ll be submitting those to Critters, and I want them presented in as much of a polished state as possible. I’m working under the assumption that better chapters will garner more useful feedback. Of course, the Critters feedback includes plenty of suggestions for low-level improvements, but I’m mostly tucking those away for use in later revisions.

Once I’ve made the big, structural edits, I’ll pass the book to a couple of real-life readers for more feedback. I’ll give them the guidance I outlined in my post about asking for critique. Then I can finally start looking at the smaller edits, cleanup and polishing. At which point I should be on my millionth read-through and ready to never look at the book again.

Making a List, Checking it Quite a Lot, Actually

To quiet down the part of my mind that wants to do little line edits, I’ve been compiling a running list of smaller things to go back and improve when the big edits are done. It’s going to be a long list by the time I finish rereading the entire book. So far, it’s things like this:

• Danger Words: I tend to overuse words like felt, seemed, mostly, some, nearly, almost, a bit, like, might
• Overused Punctuation: em-dash, colons, semicolons, parentheticals
• Overused Names: Don’t use a proper name when a pronoun would be just as clear
• References to “artifacts”: I originally thought God-Speaker would get his power from some objects that he found in the mountain, but then they morphed into the voices. I’m not certain all the references got updated.
• Adjectives and adverbs: They’re not strictly poison, as some writers would claim, but they had better pull their weight if they don’t want to get cut.

More to Come

I’m still not exactly sure how to structure these posts. It’s a lot harder for me to talk constructively about editing than it is to talk about coming up with ideas or writing the first draft. But I think editing is probably not discussed as often as it should be, since most first drafts tend to be pretty flawed, and it’s the revising that makes those mediocre drafts into excellent books.

For now, I’ll continue editing, and post again when something comes up that’s worth talking about.