I've had to edit the shit out of Genocide. The problem when I started was, I didn't know where to begin. I'm too cheap to buy a book, and I couldn't really find a simple blog on what the hell to do (so watch, I get a million emails with links to the blogs I missed).
Let's get this out of the way: Trimming sucks. It's redundant, boring, and tedious.
Luckily, I've learned a lot with my trimming run, so I'll run you through the neccessary steps to trim that novel to a decent contender.
Thanks to the wonderful misery I caused an agent friend of mine, She passed on a few good things about editing I can pass on to the rest of ya's. Her little suggestions have helped me, and I'm sure combined with my regimen it can help you too. By the way, my pronoun misusage and choppy segments in the flow of things is still apparent...neither me nor my friend could fix it...errr..nevermind.
With that said, it aint gonna help you wiht nagging problems in continuity or storyline progression. I've had to live with the fact my writing is just flat choppy, and I can't write a few sentences the "way" they are supposed to be written to save my life...but that's neither here nor there. This is polishing folks.
So the first question is...why trim? Well if you're anything like me, you write opus's that are wayyyy over the 110 mark agents look for. Fact: Agents are going to form reject your ass almost every time if you submit a 120k manuscript. Genocide clocked in at 160,000 words. Count everything that 'should' have been thrown in and it easily would have ran over 200k. Most of the later stuff was thrown out as I realised I was running out of space. Edited, even in a directors cut version, knowing what I know now...I could probably have everything in 150k range, extras and all.
Get your rough and lets get this thing ready.
Read it over once and make changes: Read it and start deleting repetitive phrases, cut scenes out, etc.
Do it again After reading it twice, once more means you can get the point across and have an idea of what's going on.
Take a month off There's a rumor that you should take a year off after writing before editing...unless you want to be 50 years old when your writing gets published, I don't reccomend it. You can clear your head in a month easily, don't take a year, that's bullshit.
Find all usages of the following words: Even, That, Just, Going to --ing, Was --ing, were, had, did, didn't, but. Proof and delete. Word has a nifty feature called Ctrl+f, just type find and go through the whole manuscript. Read the sentence beforehand and anything in the prior paragraph to make your decision. Here's a direct sentence. "Kelita had known that Andrea was getting stronger." I repleaced it with this. "Kelita knew Andrea was stronger." See how much better that is? THere are exceptions, but most of the time, you can think of a better verb than the ones used. Change those --ings to --eds, think of some new words. Along the way you'll catch more redundant sentences and can change those. This will lop off 20,000 words easily. Again, don't just take out all usages, read your sentences and decide if the word isn't needed or maybe you can rewrite it to work better. Chances are you can make the writing less redundant using these words.
Read again, take out uncessary descriptions Readers arn't idiots. they don't need to know the bedroom was on the right and a guest room was on the left (This in fact was a description in Genocide...changed to between)they don't need to know someone reached for, grasped and drank...just drank. Don't worry if you arn't making long paragraphs of descriptions...some people can do it. I can't do it, and it isn't a big deal if you can't either. Fiction should invoke someone's imagination anyways, so don't feel a need to completly jack up the animation.
Hopefully this helps. It's helped me. I may not know much, but believe me, your writing will improve drasticly. There are certain things you can work around...in my case, my limited word set looks passable for this. At this point I'm under 110 (the threashold where they won't form reject you), so obviously I wasn't an exception to that rule...and I'm not like some lucky buggers who can get away with it. When people say "exceptions to go over 110" they really mean EXCEPTIONS, meaning it most likely isn't any of us.
