Edit to Bring Things to Life, but Don’t Kill Them

Editing is my favorite part of the writing process. I might take five to seven months polishing something to a state I find satisfactory, not skipping a beat, verb, sentence, the rhythm of the words, or even how a paragraph looks.

That might seem odd, but even how a paragraph looks on the page is important if we want to give the reader a certain feeling about a page.

Novels are fun.

We might know all the rules, but creative writing allows you to break the rules when necessary.

A paragraph might be only one word for maximum effect. A single line to emphasize something, or a single letter, which might lead you to a clue later down the line.

I find writing to extend my subconscious, which is like a complex puzzle of different facets of my nature as a man.

This inner self of mine likes to make things as perfect as they can be, which is why I might have a project done apart from those final few passes for polish.

But there’s a dangerous notion that we must know as writers when we polish our manuscripts.

Editing is a miracle of making that coal into a diamond, but if you polish it too much, things seem artificially made. It might be a diamond made in a laboratory, rather than something cut and refined to expensive caliber.

Too much polish and you remove those little lines that make the project yours.

Too much polish and your writer’s voice is replaced by something that sounds the same as everything else.

Our goal as writers should be writing in our own personal voice, leaving little hints and quirks that denote something as our own work.

If we took a DNA test of our work, it should come up 100% ours.

There’s nothing wrong with editing 100 times. Going over a seven-draft process yields some amazing results.

But there comes a time when we must hang up our guns and hope we’ve hit the target for our specific reader.

Our target reader is the one who will decide if we’ve hit that mark or not.

If you must write twenty drafts, that’s fine.

I have written books that took me ten drafts or more.

But, as Orson Scott Card once said, there is only one draft that is alive and breathing.

The living draft.

A discovery writer might use this draft as their outline, forming a perfect statue over the course of their writing process, making it look like they knew what they wanted to shape from the outset.

An outliner will have a far more perfected story right from the start, but they might polish it to something near the end product earlier in the process. By the end, both processes will yield something of value and hopefully entertain our readers.

Below is an excerpt of the beginning of Numinous, which introduces a battle-hardened lance named Zein Kestin. Zein will be instrumental in Konner Lavi’s journey through the novel as they unravel the mysteries of the Darcis and the focal plot of the Candles of Elixas. This novel will once again have an ensemble cast, rather than one singular protagonist.

I have pushed the release date of Numinous back just a hair toward Halloween to October 29th, 2024, to let Lowella have its own time. There will also be a box set of novels coming when the Occultus Ecclesia saga is over.