Like many crafts, writing is actually a number of different skills all wrapped up in the process of creating something. Like all craftsmen, writers are better or worse at various aspects of the process. In the case of editing things are particularly polarizing. Authors seem to either enjoy the process of editing, and indeed claim to do their best work in this stage of the craft, or they hate editing and just have to slog through it. I must confess that I fall firmly into the second category.

Let me be clear. Editing is a very necessary part of the process and there’s nothing I’ve ever written that didn’t benefit from having a good editing pass to make it clearer and more consistent. However it’s not something I enjoy doing and as a result this is the part of the process where my advice will probably be the weakest. So, what’s the purpose of editing?

Well, as I already mentioned, making it clearer and more consistent is a good starting point. Watching for consistency is pretty simple. Check your set ups for important pay offs and make sure the set up actually leads into the payoff you are aiming for. When I discussed outlines I mentioned I didn’t tweak my outline to reflect revisions I made as I planned scenes but I probably should. Why did I say I should? Because scanning the most current outline I have is the fastest way to remind myself what payoffs my setups should be pointing to. (Again, I keep coming back to the outline as the fastest way to keep your story straight. This is why I stress its usefulness as a writing tool.)

Clarity is harder to gauge. It’s best to set a piece of writing aside for a while before editing it, although it’s best to acknowledge that the time available to the writer is a factor into how practical that is. When you come back you’ll hopefully be able to read what you wrote without your intentions clouding your mind. That will make it easier to gauge whether you actually said what you intended to say. Developing the proper perspective when doing this is also important. You’re not reading and asking whether you said something other than what you intended, that’s not the way unclear prose works its way into what you write. What happens is you write gibberish instead of something understandable.

I should also note that, in my case, how long I must leave something sitting before I can effective edit it is dependent on how many times I’ve edited it. Often a week or two of down time is enough for the first editing pass. This is part of why I try to give myself a couple of weeks of material in padding for the stories I am writing. I can edit them the day before they are posted and have a pretty clear eye for what I’m reading. However it can take a month or two before I can make a second editing pass with any clarity and even longer before a third is effective.

Ultimately editing on your own will only take you so far. It is also wise to seek out the input of people who are willing to give fair and even handed critique of your work. Ideally that would be a professional editor. The problem with going that route is that such people will rightly charge you a fair amount of money for their services and if you are not yet a major publishing phenomenon you may not be able to afford it. I understand this problem as I also suffer from it.

That said, there’s really something to be said for having one person who handles all your basic feedback. An editor who knows you, your style and your priorities is going to give very personalized input. You also won’t have to constantly go back and fill in important context and thematic through lines as you discuss your story. If I could afford that kind of consistent input from someone I would definitely pay for it. Sadly, I can’t afford it and I suspect, if you’re reading this, you can’t either.

So what’s the alternative?

There are plenty of forums, websites, Discord servers and the like where you can find like-minded, struggling authors and exchange feedback with them. While you won’t get the same level of personalized input from them as you would an editor, any feedback is good. It’s not impossible, of course. Sometimes a collaborator will be able to work with you for months or longer on multiple projects but it’s not a guarantee and you shouldn’t count on it.

Managing feedback is a whole ‘nother thing. Hopefully you’ll be able to engage in a lot of dialog with them and not just get an email outlining a few thoughts on the story. Ask as many questions as you can. Again, clarity and consistency is a major thing you want to ask questions about. Did they understand characters and decisions? If not, how can you make them clearer?

Beyond those two basic issues dealing with feedback is a lot harder. Readers will offer thoughts on your characters, the tone of your story, your prose, your genre of choice and many other things you won’t think of until people bring them up. All of that feedback is good and useful but you should be careful. Don’t chase any one particular kind of response from your audience. People have many and diverse opinions on these many facets of your story and you cannot control them. The ultimate question is did they see what you were trying to do with your story or not? Don’t concern yourself as much with whether they liked what you were trying to do.

Ultimately, whether you are editing yourself or asking someone else to do it you are not trying to make people like your story. That’s not something you can do. What other people think of your story is their business. You are the creator of your story and you need to focus on whether the vision you had for that narrative is getting through to your audience. If you didn’t have enough confidence in that vision to stick with in the face of criticism you shouldn’t have written it. This part of the process is about making your vision as clear to others as possible. If you can do that, you’ve fulfilled your role as storyteller. With that, your role in the process is done and thus, so is this series.

Writing a scene is more than just working out the people and how they would carry out their goals. It’s also how they interact with each other while trying to convince others of their positions or dismiss their objections. It’s how they interact with their environment. Ultimately it’s what these words and actions say and don’t say about what they want and what they value.

So, once I have the basics of a scene blocked out I ask myself how direct they would be in talking about what they want. A Candle in the Wind is our case study for this series and it has a couple of examples of this. The best is probably the meeting between Sheriff Avery Warwick and the Fairchild siblings. The sheriff suspects the Fairchilds are working with Harper, who he’s just sent out of town so he won’t cause any problems. Which they are. Brandon and Cassie are trying to figure out what’s happening in Riker’s Cove while also not getting kicked out by the sheriff and, in Brandon’s case, upholding the first tenant of Avaloni chivalry – to seek the truth. In other words, Brandon doesn’t want to lie directly to Avery. Both characters are pursuing goals they cannot state explicitly to the other – but they still need the other to do something for them.

Much of the dialog in these scenes is constructed so that the two men serve these goals without ever explicitly bringing them up. Most people will describe this as showing the characters are intelligent. There is certainly an element of that to writing characters with subtext, as intelligence is an important factor in recognizing subtext and both characters do pick up on some of what the other is trying to do. Likewise, less intelligent actors tend to have less subtext. But adding subtext is more than just a reflection of intelligence; it is a way to give insight.

In his final duel with Heinrich von Nighburg, Roy baffles his opponent with his resistance to the other’s mental push towards anger. In his dialog he points out that his anger comes from showing up late and short on silver. This reveals that Roy’s real emotional vulnerability isn’t anger, it’s guilt. He becomes angry with himself when he feels he had a responsibility to help others that he couldn’t fulfill and that anger leaks out. Nighburg would have done better to push him towards guilt rather than bait him into anger but his understanding of Roy was too superficial to understand that.

I could have written this in plain language. However, Roy Harper isn’t a character who is comfortable with strangers, especially those who are out to kill him, so it’s not something it would be in character for him to state plainly. Furthermore, it’s more interesting for the audience to work it out from the subtext than see it so stated.

It’s important to have moments of subtext woven into your scenes. It doesn’t have to come from dialog, although these are the most obvious examples, but can come from interacting with objects as well. Say you have a protagonist who was given a keepsake by a parent who hated violence. Having the character holding that keepsake or even fiddling with it while debating the ethics of using lethal force creates a subtext to all the character’s arguments, for or against, without need any explicit dialog or exposition.

In a visual medium subtext can also be established by character expressions. Smiling while saying you’re sorry is a fairly blunt way to create subtext, a character looking at the door while promising to stay is another. This kind of visual subtext can be used in prose but it’s often very on point. I prefer to use it when a character is realizing another character’s subtext rather than as a way to signal subtext to the audience.

How you integrate subtext into your narrative is up to you. There’s a lot of different ways to do it but I’d recommend picking one or two and really honing them before trying another one. You don’t need a huge amount of subtext in a scene. Keep adding it and eventually it’s just the text of the scene so it’s better to be good at delivering it than having a bunch of different ways to work it in.

I put dialog and subtext together because I like to try and write dialog that introduces subtext. (Whether I succeed or not is not my place to say.) However there are also other techniques I try to keep in mind while writing dialog and, while not a process per se, these rules of thumb are things I find helpful when trying to put one word after another.

Characters should have preferred kinds of metaphors. Roy speaks in terms of fighting and army life most of the time but sometimes lapses into the language of his religion, the Mated Pair. This reflects his general outlook on life and his background. I’ve written a character who grew up as a grove tender and for whom I deliberately wrote down a series of tree based similes that I looked for every chance to use.

Analogies and metaphors grounded in real-world history and culture can be used in some cases. Obviously if your story is set in the present day feel free. Otherwise, depending on how deep you want immersion in your setting to be, you might sprinkle a few in or chose to invent “parallel” idioms based on the history and cultures of your world. If you do chose to avoid “real” colloquialisms in your dialog be careful. There’s a lot of things that don’t immediately look like they’re directly rooted in Earth history or culture that turn out to be if you look closer. For example, “zounds” is an abbreviation of “Christ’s wounds,” a potentially sacrilegious exclamation common in medieval England.

Characters should also have a rhythm of speaking. Some might prefer short words or sentences, others are prone to stringing thoughts together. Any kind of verbal tic can be present in character dialog, although I recommend not writing any dialog in a way that is difficult to understand. Spelling out heavy regional accents, for example. I try to describe these in narration rather than write them out as someone not familiar with the accent might find it incomprehensible.

It is possible to give characters difficult or even impossible to understand dialog. Giving the incomprehensible speaker a translator can create comedy, subtext and intrigue in equal measure. The dialog might not be important, either. But in general, if you’re going to write it out on the page I recommend making it understandable. Having strings of gibberish written out on the page typically just frustrates me and I skim past it. Your mileage may vary.

How your characters communicate with each other, persuade one another or conceal their goals is a difficult thing to manage and probably one of the most important things for you, as an author, to work out. As such I don’t have as fixed a process for it as some other things. I do have a lot of rules of thumb, however, and I’ve gathered them together in large part by reading blogs like this one or books on the art of writing and, of course, reading lots of good stories myself. Hopefully something you find here will help you create compelling scenes as well.