Almost didn’t send out the newsletter this week. Reason: I’m busy editing Land of Stone’s fourth Act. There’s really something about editing that makes me just zone out for whole blocks of 3 hours. And I can easily enter the Flow State and stay there for a good 6 hours per day.
But here’s the post, and guess what? It’s about my editing process.
Editing is fun; I love editing. Resistance is so much mellower when I’m getting ready to do my Rounds.
Let me explain what I mean by “my Rounds”. Writing a novel is a lot like being that juggler clown in a Cirque du Soleil show, except in my case, I’m nowhere near his skill level and I keep dropping the balls, or flaming swords or hula hoops or whatever it is.
Last year, I was listening to a podcast with Brandon Sanderson and he mentioned something he invented. He called it Elemental Genres (EG). It's basically every type of stories one can write. You’ve got the Thriller EG, the Mystery EG (or as he calls it, the Information EG), the Ensemble Cast EG, the Wonder EG, the Relationship EG, the Heist EG and so on.
And he said in a normal novel, you usually find four or five Elemental Genres. Like, the main plot could be a thriller, while one subplot focuses on a romantic relationship or a friendship, and yet another one is all about the awe you get in a Wonder EG (think characters discovering a cool fantasy world like, say, Stonehaven in the soon-to-be-published-and-amazingly-successful Land of Stone).
So I used Sanderson’s concept to fill in my revised outline before starting Land of Stone’s third draft. It helped me a lot. I was like: “Oh, so you mean I actually don't need to juggle six flaming swords all at once? I can take them one by one? Great!”
Once you have your four or five plotlines all neatly separated, you can start mixing them up again in chapters. But you find that you never have more than like three balls in the air at a time—although two balls is always ideal—, except in important scenes like the Mid-Crisis or the Climax, where they all collide.
What you get is something like this: in Land of Stone’s first chapter, I have an element of Thriller (kidnapping), an element of Relationship (conflict between the protagonist and her father), and a hook taken from the element of Wonder (the foreshadowing of a portal leading to a fantasy world).
And it doesn’t stop there. That process of taking it one at a time gave me an idea for creating a super useful editing method I’ve been using ever since, even if it’s a little convoluted and on the slow side. I call it prosaically: The Rounds.
Here's how I proceed. First, I use six colors for six categories: Description (yellow), Relationships/Backstory (blue), Humour (purple), Suspense (orange), Emotion (pink), Theme (green). I highlight every sentence with one color. It's not perfect and sometimes it's hard to decide if a paragraph is suspense or description but that's not the point. It doesn't really matter.
What matters is that I’m taking away some of those balls.
When the page looks like a Christmas tree, I start my Rounds. I'll focus only on the yellow for descriptions and run through the whole chapter. It really helps because I suddenly do not have to worry about anything else but bringing this great decor to life, coming up with the most vivid and specific description I can think of. When I'm done with yellow, I move on to the next one.
I’ve done 34 chapters like this now, and two short stories. I can see how my juggler’s skills have improved, and how eventually, I probably won’t even need the crutch of the color-coding. I’ll become super aware. It has already changed the way I tackle first drafts.
In a few years, I see no reason why I couldn’t end up having a role in that metaphorical Cirque, juggling 6-7 balls so casually I’ll be able to scratch my butt while doing it and, hopefully, give the crowd a good laugh.
That’s really cool. The EG idea is really interesting, and the way there are multiple in one story makes a lot of sense, I had never quite thought of it like that.