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  • Writer's pictureMandy Rabin

Thoughts on Editing

Updated: Feb 17, 2020

You've finished your first draft. It looms over you, monstrous and unwieldy, and you face it, terrified by the monumental task of rewriting, editing or both. Where do you even begin?


The Beating Heart

The first thing I do is try and understand what's at the very heart of my story. Just as a wheel rotates around the cog at its centre, so a story flows from the theme at its heart.

I ask myself: What's my story actually about? I might have written a story about a girl who has to fight dragons in order to rescue a valuable sword, but what's the main theme? Is it coming to terms with grief, or understanding that power comes with responsibility, or something else?

Before finding the beating heart of my own story, I've found it helpful to find those of other stories I know well. As we all know, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is a story about a boy who goes off to wizarding school and has to defeat a Dark Lord in order to survive. But at its heart, it's about a boy in search of family and identity.


The Logline

The next thing I do is try to write a logline. One way to do this is to think:

What does my protagonist want? What's stopping them from achieving their goal? What's at stake?

An example of a logline for Harry Potter might be: An orphaned boy goes to wizarding school where he must defeat a Dark Lord intent on killing him.

What does Harry Potter want? To become a wizard. What's stopping him from achieving his goal? A Dark Lord. What's at stake? His life.

Once I've discovered the beating heart of my story and have a logline, I have a fundamental understanding of what my story is about, and can use this as an anchor in the stormy seas of editing and rewriting ahead.


What is this Beast?

I next try to get a sense of the overall shape of the beast. I'm averse to using the word 'structure', as it implies rigidity, whereas stories are fluid, with a continuous flow of action, and an interwoven tapestry of plot and subplot. Nevertheless, thinking about my story in terms of different theories of structure helps me see it from various angles and identify where the key turning points are. What are the pivotal scenes I need to build up to, and how can I do that?

Into the Woods by John Yorke describes story in terms of three-act and five-act structure, whereas Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder deals more with the momentum of story. For example, what's the driving force that leads to the hero breaking through from their everyday world into the brave new world of the story?

There are other more character-driven approaches to the shape of a story, where what a character needs in order to grow and develop guides the development of obstacles and major turning points.

As with the Beating Heart, I've found it really useful to examine the way different models apply to well-known stories before seeing how they apply to my own.

By the way, your story doesn't have to neatly fit the mould of a specific model in order to work. Rather than trying to shoe-horn your writing into a particular structure, see the theories and models as if they were different filters through which to view your story in order to get a three-dimensional picture of it.


Scene by Scene

Once I've thought about my story in all these ways, I'll analyse it scene by scene.

I'll draw up a table, either by hand or in Word, with a separate row for each scene, and columns representing different attributes such as - What happens in this scene? What's its purpose? What changes? What character development is there? What do we learn about the world of the story?

Ultimately, I'm looking to understand how each scene drives the story forward in terms of how it helps or hinders the protagonist in reaching their goal. When I create such a table, I notice that some scenes work really hard and tick lots of boxes. These are often momentous scenes, such as the catalyst, the midpoint or the climax. Other scenes feel weak, and if they don't tick many boxes, I ask myself: Does this scene justify its existence in the story, or can I delete it or merge it with another scene?


I've drawn on many different sources in writing this blog post, including Save the Cat by Blake Snyder, Into the Woods by John Yorke, and wonderful workshops I've attended led by Jo Cotterill, Sara Grant, Karen Ball and Dr Vanessa Harbour, the latter while I was studying at the Golden Egg Academy. I've by no means covered all aspects and levels of editing here, but I do find these tasks helpful before plunging into the perilous waters of a second draft. I hope you'll find them useful, too.

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