Breakfast at Epiphanies

Scott asked in a comment thread about what my editing epiphany was this past summer. So I thought I would make this more of a new post.

I polish my prose. I mean polish like you polish a copper plate for printing. It's hard work with different grit levels being used to scrub out minor imperfections in the copper surface before you take a gouge to it. This isn't polishing silverware or buffing the car, this is like sanding wood down to thickness, instead of using a planer. I want those words to sing. I'll reorder, cut, add, shuffle, and do a lot more, but mostly to the language.

Part of my epiphany was I needed to polish the story. I needed to look at the pacing, how many words I used for each part of the story, the larger rhythms of the words (as a part of the polishing I would look at the sentence rhythms). I would check and see if parts of the story could be told in different places, not just a paragraph or two different, but thousands of words different. So I moved those skills of polishing words to the larger model of the overall story.

Another part of the epiphany was editing the story out of order. For "War Stories" I edited each section separately, reading from the last paragraph to the first, editing only the sentences and paragraphs to make them as strong as they could be. That was another first, I looked at paragraphs and made them as individually strong as I could make them. Did each one say what I wanted that one to say. Before, I would look at these issues in context of the flow of the story. This is more of a looking at each lug nut on the wheel to make sure it's properly aligned to the threads and fitted on the bolts, that each met the tear weight criteria etc, instead of just making sure that they're all tight and keep the wheel on the hub. If you think of fractals, one way of describing fractals is that each rock that sits on a mountain mirrors the mountain in miniature. Before this epiphany I was just looking at the mountain and making the rocks pretty. After the epiphany I making each rock as good as the mountain.

Bear in mind, I'm not going to that level with my posts here or elsewhere. Then again, nobody is paying me for these posts.