A Few Tips from an Editor—Jillian Grant Shoichet

I’ve been an academic, legal and personal-narrative editor for 25 years, both in-house and freelance. Although I’ve edited fiction in the past, I don’t think of myself as a fiction editor. But many of the editorial skills I’ve honed over the past two and half decades are applicable to editing my own fiction and creative nonfiction, and to editing the creative work of my writing colleagues.

When I tell people what I do, I’m often met with You’re an editor? Great, you can settle something. Which is correct, [x] or [y]? The person who asks the question then looks over at the individual they’re standing next to or sitting with or across from, and it becomes clear that I’m being called upon (often on a day off, maybe after a glass of wine, on the spot, without a written text in front of me) to arbitrate in a long-standing dispute that could have been settled by a good grammar guide or any reasonable dictionary and—because language rules change over time—would just as likely have been settled the opposite way two hundred years previously.

In such circumstances, there can be no winner. Certainly, the winner won’t be the editor or the text.

How I edit a text depends on the context in which it was written, the message the text is intended to convey, the audience it’s intended to reach, and the environment in which it will be read. There are some hard and fast editorial rules, but any good editor will tell you there’s a time and a place and a text to break even the hardest and fastest rule—if not in the past or the present, then at some point in the future.

This is because good editing is about ensuring a text works, which is a shifting and nebulous goal. What makes one text work is not necessarily what makes another text work, and knowing what works is largely an editorial instinct. What a good editor aims to do is help the writer tell her story as clearly and as powerfully as possible. To do this, the editor must keep the (imagined) reader in mind—because in the end, it’s the reader who judges whether a text works.

As an editor who also writes, I sometimes find it challenging to switch from writing my own text to editing my own work. For larger pieces, I never rely solely on my own editorial skills, no matter how honed they are. But there are a few simple tricks I use all the time, whether I’m editing my own work or the work of someone else.

The same tricks may also be helpful to you, so here they are:

1. Listen to the text.

Our ear often hears things that our eye might otherwise miss. When we read silently, our brains tend to supply the missing word if we don’t see it on the page, so it’s easy to miss gaps or odd spellings when we read silently to ourselves. When we read aloud, we frequently catch those missing or misspelled words.

On a second read-aloud pass, I flag dialogue that doesn’t sound natural and sentences that run on too long or repeat words I didn’t mean to repeat. I go back to these and re-work them until they sound right.

2. Listen to yourself.

When a narrator takes too long to tell a story, it can take all our self-control not to shout to the hapless storyteller, Get to the point!

Pay attention to the pace of your narrative (which is also easier to do when you read aloud). If it feels like it’s taking too long to say something, it’s taking too long to say something.

Make whatever edits you need to get to the point. If a sentence is unnecessary but too good to throw away, open a new document and paste it there. You can always use that well-crafted sentence somewhere else.

By the time you realize it wasn’t really so fabulous, it won’t matter anyway.

Years ago, my brother borrowed a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream recipe book from the local library. The most memorable part of the book was the duo’s sage advice on the appropriate use of egg whites—advice that I paraphrase here:

Separate the egg whites carefully from the yolks and set the yolks aside. Place the egg whites in a Tupperware container and seal the lid. Place the container with the egg whites at the back of the fridge behind the lettuce. After three weeks, take the container out of the fridge and throw the egg whites away.

Ben and Jerry were natural editors.

3. Completely and wholeheartedly minimize your fantastically amazing adjectives and adverbs.

If you have to qualify it with an adjective or adverb, rethink your word choice. Choose a more descriptive noun or verb instead. Or remove the adjective or adverb altogether. You might find it wasn’t as integral as you thought it was.

If you must use an adjective or adverb, use one, not two.

This will help you get to the point.

4. Look out for that.

We often use the relative pronoun “that” to introduce a noun clause that takes the place of a noun. Native-born English speakers and writers use relative pronouns and noun clauses all the time without thinking about it. So, for example, we might say, “I know that Joe robbed the bank [relative noun clause],” which is the approximate grammatical equivalent of “I know a fact [noun]”.

But using lots of thats can make our writing feel heavy.

An elliptical clause is a relative clause that omits the relative pronoun (the word ellipsis comes from a Greek verb meaning “leave out”). Native-born English speakers and writers also use elliptical clauses all the time without thinking about it.

The key is to start thinking about it. Don’t use a full relative clause when an elliptical clause will do.

So, for example, don’t tell me that Joe robbed the bank. Just tell me Joe robbed the bank.

Don’t tell me that you knew that Joe was going to kill his wife after he robbed the bank. Just tell me you knew Joe was going to kill his wife after the whole bank thing.

5. Avoid the passive voice

For the most part, your characters should do things, not have things done to them. Victims of circumstance are typically more interesting when they have at least some agency.

Think about what you want the reader to focus on. If you want the reader to focus on the person or thing receiving the action, use the passive:

               The methamphetamine was manufactured in a lab on the outskirts of the city.

               Who or what receives the action of manufacturing? Methamphetamine.

               Who or what manufactured the methamphetamine? Who cares? 

In this case, the passive makes sense, because I want the reader to focus on the object of the verb “manufacture”. It isn’t important in this sentence who manufactured the meth.

But if I want the reader to focus on the person or thing doing the action, the subject of the verb, I should use the active voice:

               Joe manufactured the methamphetamine in a lab on the outskirts of the city.

               Who manufactured the methamphetamine? That jerk Joe, probably right after he robbed the bank and killed his wife.

The importance of writing too much

One final thought on editing your own writing:

In the same way that a sculptor whittles away the stone to reveal the form beneath its surface, a writer who edits her own work chisels away at a wordy text to find and polish the story at its centre.

But an editor can’t edit what isn’t there. When you sit down at the keyboard to write, always write too much—and then edit. The writer in you should do the writing. The editor should wait her turn.

I’m not saying you won’t have to write additional scenes or dialogue once you’ve whittled away the extraneous text. Writing is an iterative process: you may have to write and rewrite and edit and re-edit the same story, or parts of the same story, many times.

But it’s always easier to edit too much writing than it is to edit too little writing. Even the best editor in the world can’t reveal the story that hasn’t been fully written yet.