Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Summer is not my most productive season for writing. There are too many distractions—gatherings, to-dos, house guests, falling into an overheated swoon—and this summer has had more than its normal share, what with the passing of companion animals, a switch from office-office to home-office, and most recently, a week of sitting bleary-eyed, head-achy, and miserable, waiting for the smoke from wildfires to clear.

Also, I was editing a book.

Alas, not one of mine.

I have the honor of being a beta-reader for a good friend. He’d completed his manuscript and was in need of a fresh set of eyes. Editing someone else’s work is always an opportunity to learn, for me. Whether it’s through analyzing a passage that works well or through hitting a bump in the prosaic road, reading another’s early draft is a great way both to learn new things and to reinforce lessons learned long ago.

Hopefully, I will be able to apply this new and refreshed knowledge when I (eventually) get back to my own WIP, but for now, here are the top three lessons I came away with.

Lesson 1
All manuscripts have typos and stylistic errors, and this one was no exception. But at this point in my own WIP-journey (i.e., still writing the first draft), errors like the line-item nits I picked in my friends MS are unimportant. That itself is the lesson: Don’t sweat the grammatical details . . . yet. Take that copy of Strunk & White or the Chicago Manual of Style and put it on the shelf. High on the shelf. Better yet, put it out in the garage (unless your writing den is in your garage, in which case, put it in the freezer). Remember, all first drafts are crap.

Lesson 2
Every paragraph needs a focus, and every sentence within it needs to support that focus. This may seem obvious, something you’d hear in Essay Writing 101, but it’s really very easy to stray from this nugget of wisdom. The focus is easy to spread out until it’s just a blur, or break between two paragraphs that would work better as a cogent whole. The opposite case exists as well; packing too much into a single paragraph can lead to Proustian labyrinths of prose, causing the reader to stop, blink, and retrace a few lines, hunting for the exit. This has nothing to do with the length of the paragraph. Long paragraphs can be in tight focus while short ones can meander between topics. I can use this while writing the first draft, though I must take care not to paralyze myself with overthinking.

Lesson 3
It’s an old lesson, but an important one: there’s more to description than meets the eye. Literally. An aroma, a taste, the temperature, rough or smooth, what’s that sound? Incorporating sensory description beyond the mere visual adds vivacity to prose and the best examples have multiple layers, in nearly every paragraph. More than sensory description, though, there’s also description of inner life. Thoughts, emotions, fears, reactions, evaluations, comparisons, expectations, desires, hungers, opinions, judgments . . . these can add depth and color to a mere recitation of events. The challenge with this is keeping it in check, and showing more than telling, but better to overdo it in the first draft. It’s always easier to excise the excess than plump up otherwise thin prose. I always prefer to edit by subtraction, rather than by addition, whenever possible.

None of these insights are new, but through the process of editing, they are strengthened, and hopefully when I get back to my WIP, I’ll be more attuned to the pitfalls that pockmark the writer’s landscape.

k