The Ten Structural Edits I Most Often Suggest

But don't beat yourself up! Many of these are not obvious till you've got a first draft down.

My Itch post of a few years back, The Ten Line-Edits I Most Often Suggest, has proved enduringly popular with Itchy readers, as is my post about The Ten Things Which Most Often Go Wrong With Beginners’ Fiction, so here’s a post which I hope does the same about the larger-scale stuff of (self)editing.

1. The narrative starts too soon. You may very well have needed to write your way into the story, figuring out and setting up your characters and their situation. That way, when the ‘inciting incident’ - which is just another name for the first event which they can’t help but react to, and at some point act on - the reader will understand why it’s so important. But you’d be surprised how little readers actually need to know of all those preliminaries: what matters is what the characters do now. Because audiences shuffle or snore if characters aren’t doing enough, it’s worth looking at how good drama aimed at your sort of reader gets on with what matters, while also tucking in the stuff the audience needs to know. For what it’s worth, I and my fellow editors’ crude experience is generally that the ‘real’ story usually starts in chapter three or four, when it actually needs to start right at the beginning.

   

2. The opening chapters don’t create the reader you need: the reader isn’t helped to learn unconsciously how this story is being told, in everything from who their representatives are in this world, and what narrative strands and viewpoints make up the storytelling, to why the journey to the end will be worth it. More about this here.

   1. The Prologue doesn’t have the effect or solve the problem you were hoping it did. In which case, is there a better way of doing that? For more about this, click through to my main post.

3. Scenes are told blow-by-blow, from soup to nuts, with no condensing of the unimportant bit during the fish course. Unlike Shakespeare, we’re not tied to real-time speed of dialogue and action and we don’t have to get everyone on and off-stage, so make the most of that.

   1. But in trying to solve the blow-by-blow problem, some writers keep jump-cutting to the next significant bit, and such jerky montages risk losing flow and momentum. See the next point, about moving from scene to scene, for help with this.

4. Timeline breaks don’t anchor us firmly after each jump or gap. This is most important in a non-linear narrative, which breaks up the actual beginning-middle-end of events and tells them in a different order. But it applies to ordinary decisions about how to get from scene to scene too: how will you make sure the reader doesn’t spend time and attention at the start of the next bit, simply figuring out where they are in time and space?

5. The story goes on too long. This is the second half of the thriller writers’ commandment to ‘get in late and get out early’. Of course the writer needs have created characters and situations which would play out into the future in ways that are right for the story: you may even have written the full playing-out to find out if they do, or to satisfy your own need to see your characters safely home. But who wants a story to end, after the bang, on a long-drawn-out-whimper of information? What matters for readers is that the action-and-reaction, cause-and-effect series of changes which the inciting incident set off, has been resolved. Even if beta readers say they ‘want to know what happened’, that’s still just ‘ribbons and bows’, as my main post about endings puts it.

6. Decisions about tense aren’t serving the story. It would seem logical that flashbacks are told in past tense, and the ‘present moment’ of the story in present tense - but it’s often better the other way round. Plus, that’s not the only way different tenses have different effects on the reader; whether you have an external (third person) or an internal (first person) narrator makes a difference too: more in that post.

7. Characters aren’t anchored in space and setting. This isn’t just about making sure they’re not floating in a void in the readers’ imagination - though that matters, of course. Because we are physical creatures who cannot exist except in physical space, the surest way to get the reader to ‘forget to disbelieve’ that all this happened is to give our imaginations concrete stuff to work on: the deck under our feet, the tobacco-reeking first mate leaning shoulder-to-shoulder on the rail beside us, the slap of salt water on our cheek as the ship heads into the wind.

8. Overreactions and undereactions. When something causes your characters to (re)act, is the relationship and scale between the cause and the effect convincing and proportionate? Obviously readers will believe that the loading-the-dishwasher row ended in agreeing to a divorce, but elsewhere I so often see some huge life thing cause one emotional storm then become totally taken for granted - and the opposite too: a mildly tricky moment which doesn’t seem particularly traumatising, but yet shapes a character’s actions and reactions for the rest of the story.

9. Things which hammer us over the head, and things that fall out of sight. Books take longer to write than they do to read, so when, for example, a character is frightened of something and so avoids it, it may be weeks of drafting since you last mentioned the fear. But it’ll probably only an hour or two since your reader read that last mention: give it one good evocation, then don’t keep hitting us over the head with it. Conversely, if you need a love or a worry for plot purposes early on, make sure that it doesn’t totally vanish as if had never happened. In real life these things don’t, however much they slip into the background.

10. Remember: ‘Why should I care?’. When we say ‘care’, of course, it needn’t mean that readers will only engage with characters identical themselves, nor that all your characters are put-upon-saints or sexy villains. This is about getting the reader to care about the outcome enough to keep reading: characters who have enough familiar about them that their core needs, hopes and fears feel important to us, but enough different about them that we don’t know how those drives will play out - so of course we burn to find out. And, of course, that means putting them in situations which are a good mixture, again, of the known-to-us, and the new. It does no harm to imagine your reader, a chapter or two in, asking, ‘Why should I care?’ Andrew Stanton’s TED talk is an old’un but still a good’un on this.

Good luck!

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