Jeff Macfee

I am discovering that my approach to editing was a classic beginner’s approach. Meaning wrong.

I was zooming to a detail level unnecessary at this stage, and possibly counter-productive. I kept getting caught in sentence level fixes, rather than flow and structure and other high-level issues. I was making a lot of sentence changes that would wind up getting cut, and failing to see structure problems. But seeing as I am a super-genius, today I figured that out and adjusted. As a result I’m editing Chapters 3&4 right now, and expect to finish Chapter 5 tomorrow. Draft Two will be about the read-through and notation of major problems, not the fixing and tuning of sentences. I still have to do that, just not right now. This puts me on pace to finish Draft Two in three weeks (after having spent two weeks on editing Draft Two so far).

I don’t claim this is original. I just claim it is working for me.

And, in the midst of Chapter Four, I have found a new character and scene. Maybe it will get cut later, but I think not. More than likely, it will mean something else will get cut, which I think is the right think for THE STORY. And this scene is making me write it longhand. Weird. You write long enough, and scenes and characters become these things with power of you, the writer and supposed head honcho. Shows what I knew.

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