Editing fiction

Editing fiction is tough. Sometimes I think it's tougher than writing. Recently, I've been sticking to four rules.

1. Draft 2 = Draft 1 - 10%
2. Unless you’re writing philosophical fiction, cut anything that sounds like philosophy.
3. Condense dialogue. Reduce four lines to two lines, two lines to one line, and so forth.
4. Avoid dashes, exclamation marks, parentheses and semicolons.

Rule #1 is toughest. I read it in Stephen King's book, On Writing. Sometimes it feels impossible, but it isn’t.

Some words lend themselves to overwriting. Made. Of. To. That. Was. Were. Which. With.

I use MS Word, and scanning pages of text looking for words like “to”, “of”, “was” and “were” isn’t easy. A Macro I created helps. The Macro highlights and replaces the aforementioned words, creating a sort of heat map.

Rule #2 and #3 help with the word count.

Rule #3. Good dialogue isn’t real. It only sounds real. Especially if it’s short and sweet. No character, regardless of how much they talk, should have more than four lines of dialogue.

Rule #4 is based on past experience. Somewhere along the line, I developed a liking for semicolons and parentheses. Things got out of hand. Commas and full stops are enough.