#262 — DEAD OR ALIVE | WRITING TIPS

The Unique Art Of Editing Your Own Stories

Several tips to edit your shorter stories, but which also work for those longer ones

There is a big difference in writing a story of less than fifteen hundred words, as opposed to a story of three or ten thousand words, or even a full novel.

With shorter stories, the trick lies in getting your reader engaged in the story quicker. Keeping your stories tight and engaging lies in the editing.

If you edit your story well, it will become more powerful.

This post will give you several tips on editing those shorter stories — your own and that of others.

Obviously, the first thing is to sit down and write your story. Then let it rest for a day or two before you come back to edit it.

One part of editing is to bring your story down to a required number of words — this is when you write for a submission call or maybe a competition.

The other part — and this can be done either by yourself or by an editor — is to check your style, grammar, spelling, and tenses.

Editing tips to reduce the length

The following tips will help you work through that first draft of your short story and make it better.

1. Delete the first paragraph

When you write a story, the first paragraph often serves to warm your brain. It frequently describes the scene and the action only starts in the second paragraph.

When you have less than fifteen hundred words to tell your story, get right into the scene. There’s no room for a longer introduction.

While editing your story, note down the important things in the first paragraph, and then delete it. Work those details into the story somewhere else.

2. Remove much of ‘the world’

In every story you write, you build a world. You give your reader information on what the surroundings of your characters. It’s wonderful to add lovely facts about that world to your text, but in a story of fifteen hundred words or shorter, there is just no room for it.

On the third or fourth round of editing, you can put back some essential world facts to support your story, but only the essential ones!

3. Restore scene jumps

Scene jumps are when you hop from one scene to the other, for example, from the house of the main character to the doctor’s waiting room and back to the house.

You can often identify scene jumps by the use of words such as ‘two weeks later’ or ‘the next day’.

When you have fifteen hundred words or fewer for a story, you want to quickly get into the scene, want to introduce conflict quickly, let it escalate, and give a solution. All of this must keep moving to keep the attention of your reader.

Force yourself to stay in the scene and not jump to another. This creates an image in the mind of your reader, which they can hold until the end of the story.

4. Read it out loud to someone else

Even people who don’t like reading will listen if you read fifteen hundred words or fewer to them. Reading your story out loud helps with two things:

• It allows you to hear how your characters sound. Things that don’t sound logical come forward, for instance, when your character has suddenly developed an accent halfway through the story.
• Short stories, like songs, have a certain rhythm. It’s not rhyme, but an emotional flow of the story. It must feel good for the reader. Often, you don’t feel the rhythm of a story until you have read it aloud.

The editing checklist to clean up your text

It is one thing to write a story, but something else to edit it, especially to see your own style errors. There’s always the option to send the first version of your text — whether short or longer — off to an editor, but there are a lot of things you can do to self edit your texts.

1. Mechanics

• Capitalize the first word of each sentence.
• Capitalize all proper nouns (place, people, titles).
• End each sentence with a period, a question mark, or an exclamation point.
• Use punctuation correctly.
• Check your spelling.
• Indent the beginning of each new paragraph (this is optional).

2. Grammar

• Check for sentence fragments and remove them, unless they have a real purpose.
• Make sure there are no run-on sentences that should actually be two separate sentences.
• Check that subjects and verbs agree in number (singular subject, singular verb / plural subject, plural verb).
• Pronouns should clearly refer to someone or something.
• Use the same verb tenses (past, present, future) throughout your writing.

3. Style

• Use different lengths of sentences — long, short and medium.
• Choose for clear, interesting, colorful, precise words and make sure they are a fit for your audience.
• Don’t use the same words/phrases repeatedly.
• Cut out any unnecessary words.

More self-editing tips

1. Structure the editing task — put the largest elements, such as the plot structure first. Once you are satisfied with that, you can focus on details of language (grammar, style, spelling, punctuation).
2. Use free editing tools — there are some free tools that can help you edit your text, such as ProWritingAid¹. This helps to point out overused words, sentences that are too long, passive voice and other things you could change to make your writing more dynamic.
3. Be ruthless — don’t be afraid to cut parts of your story that aren’t working and start afresh. The cut piece may have been a vital preparation for something much better.
4. Take a break — after finishing your draft, put your work away for a day or a week or as long as it takes for you to come back and look at it with fresh eyes.
5. Mix it up — reading your texts repeatedly will make you miss the errors. Try reading backwards from the last word of a paragraph to try spotting those errors that are hard to find.
6. Change the picture — try changing the font and the font size in your word processor when you edit. The altered appearance could help you spot those errors.

Conclusion

Regardless of the number of words in your story, it’s always difficult to reduce it, and find those errors. Reducing the number of words happens when you edit it. Finding those errors happens when you edit it. Even if you have little time to edit your story, following the tips above can make an enormous difference in the quality of your tale.

Happy editing!

[1] This is an affiliate link.

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