The ten most common structural edits
Emma Darwin adds structural edits to her collection of posts about the most common edits she suggests ... plus more smart ideas about writing from my curation bucket.
Hey, y’all—
Toiling over comma placement and wordiness is a waste of time if your story isn’t on point.
… So how do you know if your story is on point?
Before you can spot loopholes in story development, you need more than just vague intuition about what makes a story work; you need to know what makes it tick. Gaining those story revision skills sounds daunting, but … but! …
This week, we’re kicking off with the inimitable
’s list of common structural edits, and I’m sliding in a big-picture strategy for honing your story sensibilities.Join me in digger deeper into the foundations of storytelling technique, as we practice The Writes of Fiction.
The ten structural edits I most often suggest
“You may very well have needed to write your way into the story, figuring out and setting up your characters and their situation. That way, when the ‘inciting incident’ - which is just another name for the first event which they can’t help but react to, and at some point act on - the reader will understand why it’s so important. But you’d be surprised how little readers actually need to know of all those preliminaries: what matters is what the characters do now.
“Because audiences shuffle or snore if characters aren’t doing enough, it’s worth looking at how good drama aimed at your sort of reader gets on with what matters, while also tucking in the stuff the audience needs to know. For what it’s worth, I and my fellow editors’ crude experience is generally that the ‘real’ story usually starts in chapter three or four.”—Read the rest from Emma Darwin at This Itch of Writing with Emma Darwin.
More on starting at the story level: As Jami Gold confided to me via email, “I’ve seen far too many authors consider themselves ‘edited’ just because someone did a comma check, but my reviews and impressions of a story are almost always about the story itself. We can’t emphasize that enough, IMHO.”
If you’re a freshman novelist, you may be uncertain about your ability to spot story issues in your own book. That’s what editors are for, right?
But developing your story sensibilities is a necessary skill for authors too. A confident grasp of the structure and technique of storytelling will give you that much-needed objectivity, allowing you to spot flaws in your own thinking and process.
Let’s map out a route to get you to that point.—Read the rest at Six ways to improve your big-picture story skills at JamiGold.com.
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