“Editing In” Versus “Editing Out”
I hated editing until I discovered the concept of “editing in,” probably (honestly, definitely) limiting the value of my words and making me come across as a worse writer (and thinker) than I actually was.
Why did I hate editing?
Because I foolishly believed what the teachers at my old school/college/university told me; that “editing out” was the only form of editing.
Editing Out – Or, Does Your First Draft Need Cutting Down?
Chances are, when you think of editing, you think of editing things out of the finished piece.
The prevailing wisdom is that you should cut out ten percent of your finished manuscript, eliminating all of the waffle.
This is considered true in writing fiction, academic essays, as well as content writing and copywriting.
Generally, it’s pretty good advice. Writers like Stephen King use that general framework, so it probably works for most folks.
However, nothing works for everyone.
When I’m writing, I tend to have to do the opposite.
My natural inclination is to turn everything into its most simplified, information dense bullet point form. As an example, if I’d written A Christmas Carol, it would have come to me first as:
“A miserly man is visited by a ghost of a former friend, who tells him that if he doesn’t change his ways, he’ll be condemned to a hellish afterlife. Then, three spirits come to him to show him the error of his ways.”
That is ok for a synopsis, but it’s not a story… let alone a novel. The first draft of my books is in that short synopsis style, because that’s how it comes out of my head.
If I took a first draft of my latest novel and cut out ten percent, it’d be about twelve thousand words.
So it would be a short story; an incomplete short story that should be a novel.
With editing in as a process, that story will b about forty to fifty thousand words.
Editing In
If you are a person who gets a bare-bones version of a story in your mind and then writes it out free-form as soon as it comes to you, then chances are you’re going to need to edit details in as opposed to out.
Editing in is just as valid as editing out provided you’re aware that that’s what you’re going to do.
As an example, you might not have any ideas regarding your character’s ethnicity, gender or even the location of the story. As long as you know you’re going to edit that into the story later, you shouldn’t let that lack of information slow you down.
I use [square brackets] when there’s detail that I’ll need to come back to. You can use this pretty extensively, and in some cases, you can just use the Find and Replace tool on Word or your word processor. Things like Character names, descriptions and relationships fit in here. You might have a list that looks something like this:
[Protagonist] [Love interest] [Protagonist B] [Love Interest’s Father] [Town where Antagonist grew up] [Criminal enterprise discovered by Protagonist B]
Something else I do is use cardboard cut-out scenarios from TV shows to edit out later. Carrying on the theme above, say we have a hard-boiled crime story where the protagonists are two detectives, and they’re hunting a criminal mastermind.
I probably don’t know what sort of criminal enterprise it is when I start, so I could just assume that my criminal boss is Lex Luthor. He runs a syndicate suspiciously like Tony Montana’s Operation in Scarface, and he’s being chased by protagonists that are like Poirot and Don Beech from The Bill.
None of that is going into the final draft, but it means I have images in my head and I can edit in something more realistic in the future.
If you’re like me when you write, then chances are you will not finish the manuscript if you think your already-sparse manuscript is going to be cut down even further. If that’s the case, then you should try racing through your manuscript and editing in extra detail later.
Non-Fiction
This is true of essays and copywriting as well.
For instance, I was pretty worried this article was going to be about one hundred words when I started. Introduction, What Editing Out Is, What Editing In Is.
Instead, it’s longer. Much longer.
The reason for that is once you get going, you realise that there’s all sorts of supporting information you can add in. Add a few examples as well, and you’ve got a different article. Of course, you might naturally add that sort of thing in anyway – I don’t.
One of the biggest problems that copywriters have is that they just list the features and benefits in their sales letters. That sounds a lot like people need to start editing in added things.
Half of the articles on this site deal with adding things in. For instance, here are ways of communicating to touch multiple audiences simultaneously, and here are a bunch of different motivations for wanting something. Those are probably not going to come naturally, so write the piece first and then reference them and add them in in a second draft.
P.S. How do you do your editing? Editing in, where you add to a final document, or editing out, where you cut out extraneous sections?