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Editing is like dish washing

Editing is Like Dish Washing

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“You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you, and we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.”

Arthur Plotnik

Editing is running dishes through a dishwasher.

This is what I think about when I should be ACTUALLY writing and editing. Yes, the creative mind is a tricky place, but think about it.

Dish washer safe doesn’t mean well thought out, or not annoying. We’ve had dishwashers for a while now. In fact, according to the US Patent Office, “Josephine Garis Cochran invented the first useful dishwasher in Shelbyville, Ill., and received patent # 355,139 on December 28, 1886.”

That means we’ve been using dish washing machines for going on 134 years. So, why hasn’t any engineer taken a moment during the glass, dish, or Tupperware design phase to say “how could we make these so water doesn’t pool in all the nooks and crannies?

I know it’s crazy talk, but my dishwasher has a DRY cycle, is it really too much to expect my dishes to actually be dry when I use it?

In your writing and editing process, you are that engineer. In writing, we have a series of editing processes that go beyond just cleaning up our prose.

Think of your reader when you edit like how the dry cycle on your dish washer should actually work. Your prose has to be clean shiny, whatever that means to your reader, with nothing standing in the way of them and your story.

When your reader cracks your book cover you want that rush of steam and a story that warms their touch. You don’t want excess words spilling out all over the reader, pissing them off, and delaying each page turn while they struggle through your figurative dish load to empty standing water before they can even use a plate or turn a page. So how do we do that?

Editing, like writing, is art and science.

First of all, this post is about what we as writers need to do before we engage an Editor. Good editors are specialists, subject matter experts, and honest brokers. Great editors can help draw the best out of us like jewelers sorting, cutting, and polishing stones until even our flaws are part of a beautiful arrangement. But the better the quality of writing we turn over to an editor, the better the product we’ll get back.

Three easy editing techniques for writers

Editing is expertise. The individual parts aren’t hard to master, but you can’t do what you don’t know. The classic reference is Strunk and White’s elements of style. But in terms of engineering your editing process, here are three easy places to start:

Read what you’ve written aloud. Most of us already have a good ear for what sounds right even if we can’t specifically cite a rule or say why. I can’t diagram a sentence without wishing I was mucking out horse stalls, but I do have a pretty good sense of what rings true. Odds are you do too. Use that to your advantage. After you’ve written a passage, read it aloud. You will likely catch things you didn’t on previous passes. This is particularly important with dialogue. So much action, motivation, and context are driven by dialogue, if it doesn’t sound right when narrated by you, it won’t read true.

Read it backward. This was a technique our Flight Commander taught me when I was a young sergeant writing intelligence summaries and Soviet activity reports that had to be quick-turned and sent to headquarters. This is an example of looking at a problem from a different angle and forcing your brain to focus on what’s on the page rather than what’s in your head. Whether it’s a scene, chapter, or short story, read it from the end to the beginning and you’ll be amazed by what you missed. And finally,

Editing is iterative. I wish writing and editing were one and done, but the reality is, all craftsmanship comes alive through talent and layers of detail. This means multiple passes. I like to disconnect the writing and editing parts so I can better focus on each. You’ll figure out what works for you by writing and editing. In our craft, we learn as we go. I write a scene until it feels right, then move on to the next, and the next until I have a chapter. Before I break for the day I reread what I wrote and tweak it until it flows well (try it and test drive the first two tips). The next day I review what I wrote the previous day, edit until it’s actually clear and flows well, then I write that day’s scenes and repeat. Once I have a draft done, the big editing begins, but that’s a topic for another post.

BONUS. But Bill, what about problem editors? (Asking for a friend)

Yes, there are also bad and difficult editors out there, just like there are, shock, bad and difficult writers. Don’t be that writer, you have to be a professional to work with the best professionals in the publishing industry.

Here are three articles about issues and editors I found interesting and useful:

Don Vaughan’s inkwell article, The Writer’s Field Guide to Editors. You can find it in Writer’s Digest, March 2020.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Novelists (According to Editors)

The 7 Deadly Sins of Editors (According to Novelists).

Leave a comment! I’d love to hear your thoughts and any techniques you’d like to share.

Burning Unborn Books

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Writers have magical powers. They can turn their dreams into a reader’s reality. It’s an intimate sharing, and great stories become a part of us.

I spent a lot of time in bad places growing up, and writers like Tolkien and Silverburg, Heinlein and Hemingway, LeGuin and L’engle spirited me away to big bright worlds I got lost in. All I had to do was wipe away a tear, turn a page, and for a little while, I was someplace safe.

I wanted that kind of power. Now I write, and stories are still magic to me.

There aren’t many stories with handicapped heroes. When my oldest was little he was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. There weren’t any superheroes like my son, and I looked hard. He was wired differently than other kids and in many ways, he lived in a different world. But he was honest and indomitable and funny and other kids rallied around him even though he was different. Raising kids isn’t easy, and different can be wonderful, but it’s hard to be an outsider to the tribe. Degrees of hate and mistrust can come from surprisingly unexpected places.

A writer whose work is well-loved and who I respect just experienced hate and a campaign of censorship because she shared the first draft of a story about the magical adventures of a girl with Down Syndrome to a friend who betrayed her trust in the vilest of ways, directly and through a social media mob, to threaten the author and her publisher if they didn’t immediately stop work on this story. They didn’t want discourse, or to inform a point, they wanted to burn her unborn book.

This philosophy of “if I don’t agree with a person or like a thing then no one can like it” is an arrogant disease spreading throughout our culture. It’s the opposite of freedom of speech. It’s nothing short of intellectual fascism.

Truth be told, I don’t know if I’ll like the final story after rewrites and editing, but I want the opportunity to read it and decide for myself. I love the idea, the author is a powerful storyteller, and I think the world benefits from different kinds of heroes. Particularly for children who don’t have many protagonists who look and act like them. Especially if she reframes our perspective or shows us an insight we might have otherwise never seen.

That’s a place I’d like to go as a reader, and a story I would have liked to have been able to share with my son when he was little and first became aware that he was different.

I won’t be told what books I can and can not read, and I’m glad the author and her publisher stood their ground against the digital torches and pitchforks of that angry mob. Ideas and differing views can be frightening, but where would we be today if we never challenged our assumptions.

Let me know what you think.

Elk Rasberry

Drive-by Elking

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Friday, I drove through a mountain pass, late at night, in dense fog, thinking, this must be what limbo is like. A low beam, peephole view of the chipped stripe and the monochrome guard rail framing a windy road where everything else had faded to a quiet white. Threading a needle in that dreamscape of fog, I wasn’t making good time. The road wound around, the scene looped again, definitely limbo.

No one else was on the road. What wasn’t black or grey was lit flat white. The first shimmer of color in what felt like forever came at mile marker 17. The sign reflected green, 17 glowed like pearl in the night. Then the road switched back, I climbed out of the fog and nearly died.

An elk was galloping beside my truck. It’s huge rack, and chestnut shag with white marks, rippled alongside me, and it was massive. I usually see elk at a distance in the mountains, and I forget how big they really are, and that the early settlers decorated their antlers, balanced carefully on their backs, and rode them into town like elf princes.

The bull elk brushed, my side mirror, it groaned, and I jinked into the oncoming lane as waves of elk washed over the road. I held my breath; made the smallest adjustments. I was surrounded. We were a herd. My heart raced. My eyes darted. Their hooves clattered on the blacktop, and their exhales chuffed. I was hemmed in. We raced in formation. It was surreal and frightening, and wonderful, but I didn’t know how to leave. Would my horn spook them? If I slowed down, would they? If I nudged over would an elk bigger then my Ridgeline yield, would his friends?

I was a stampede. Then two bucks in front of me clattered and veered off the road. I took the opening, a wall of elk filled the rearview, and I accelerated away. Then the road dipped, and I was back in the fog.

Snaking through quiet limbo, breathing hard, calming my heartbeat.

Seven mile-markers to go. Almost there.

Smile For The Camera!

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Idaho Vet Shares Life Lessons from Saddam Hussein

Check out the July/August edition of Eagle Magazine!

Barb Law Shelley asked me tough questions and Rase Littlefield took great pictures, but I always feel a little sad about what I put photographers through. I’m truly grateful they want to take my picture, but I feel like I don’t give them enough to work with.

It’s like when my barber spends a half-hour making the couple dozen hairs I still have on my crown stand even and at attention for my usual hair cut. Over the years, too many follicle soldiers have fallen from my formation and retreated down my back, but my barber still gives it his all.

It’s the same for pictures. I’ve gotten better at smiling, but it wasn’t for any reason I expected. It was because my young teen son Sam had been pissed off at me for a while and when he finally told me why it took both of us some time to work through. Mostly because I didn’t realize I still did it.

Sam thought I enjoyed punishing him.

I don’t, and it stung to hear. Normally, I’d have set it aside as an in-the-moment barb, a teen’s reaction to a restriction, the more adult-child cry for lightning to strike me because he didn’t get his way. But something was different. When our argument reached its crescendo, it wasn’t the generic “I hate you” it was specific and chilling. “You always smile when you punish me like you like it.”

It took a few weeks to circle back to it. I haven’t talked much to my boys about my parents. All they knew was that my father passed away before they were born, and my stories about growing up focused on things I learned and a few funny stories. But I wrote a book about it and both my boys can read.

When Sam and I were ready to talk about hard things we did. For my part it started and ended with “I love you” and it went like this.

I’ll tell you a story that isn’t in my book. I smile when I hurt the most. I wish I didn’t, but it’s true. I think smiles should happen when we’re happy, but when I was a lot younger than you, my punishments were brutal and severe. I wasn’t allowed to show anger or fear, or cry.

If I did, my punishments were so much worse. It wasn’t a great way for a kid to grow up. But I learned that if I stayed calm and smiled, no matter what happened, the beatings quickly ended. Eventually, I was able to get away and get strong enough so that never ever happened again.

I try hard now to smile when things are good, and I’ve gotten better at it.

But when I’m hurting the worst, I still smile. I know how screwed up that is, but that calm, maybe even that smile has gotten me through some pretty terrible things. Sometimes I was even able to use that calm smile to think and not react and stop bad things from happening.

I wasn’t punishing you because I enjoy it. I’m your father, and enforcing the rules is part of my job. I know that you’ve seen me smile when things were the worst between us and that it hurt you. But not everything is what it seems.

We agreed to work together, and Sam seemed genuinely relieved. There are great things on the horizon for us, and I want to be able to smile right for them when we get there.