One of my standard phrases pertaining to writing that I’ve absorbed into my philosophy is, “I write my strengths and edit my weaknesses.” It’s a luxury of a non-live, correctable activity that if something is sub-par or simply doesn’t work, it can be fixed later. No basketball player can undo a three-point airball and move eight feet closer to the hoop. No marble sculptor can stop halfway through a life-sized model of a man and remake it as an elephant. Writing your strengths is easy, just do what comes normally. But the medium’s ease of multiple drafts can inadvertently make many aspects of editing sound too obvious to mention. “Just read the story over and make changes to make it better.” That in mind, here are the thought-out steps I’ll recommend to edit your weaknesses and make your stories better by leaps and bounds.
The first is as simple as it is practical: List out your weaknesses. It sounds moot to point it out but if you’re just starting or you’re lost in the weeds of your story, a succinct message can clear the path ahead. Even hospitals rooms have a checklist of things to do before performing surgery. Much of it is no-duh stuff but imagine if they forgot to check if the lights were on or if everyone washed their hands or if the the right person is brought out for the right surgery. Take a few minutes, be honest with yourself, and write down a long bullet point list of your weaknesses. Run on sentences, generic dialog, characters’ physical descriptions, plodding pace, character motivation, uninspired setting, repeat phrases, etc. Then take your work to other people and add the consistent criticisms to the list. If one person wants more action then that’s to their taste. If nearly everyone says the main character lacks motivation, that’s your weakness. At the end you should have a resource, and that is how you should think of it, a resource that you can refer back to as you edit. Keep it in mind as you draft and if something reads the wrong way, scroll down your list.
The next step to edit your weaknesses is to read back your short story, or a single chapter out of a novel, while checking for a single weakness you listed. As you do highlight and catalog each instance with a running tally. After you’re done, move onto the next weakness on the list and read the short story or single chapter again. Go straight through to the end. Let this exercise give you a quantitative measure of which issues are most pervasive. Don’t be alarmed if the first draft of your first chapter is highlighted to hell and back. You barely knew what you were doing then and mistakes were bound to happen. Going forward, you’ll know what needs the rawest, erase/rewrite attention and what may slip by due to infrequency.
A warning, please don’t do this for every chapter in your novel. That would take forever discouraging any new writer and even challenging the patience of a veteran. If you want to do a check-in every fifteen or twenty chapters to see how your weaknesses change in different parts of the story, it won’t take up the rest of your life. Perhaps you get better at character and setting descriptions after you’ve thought enough of them to get a clear image. If you want to make a short list of the most common offences and comb through each chapter for those, okay. Whatever is practical for your time. But not before you’ve marked all your weaknesses for the first chapter and learned how to identify and fix them. Go with one weakness after another until it’s done and know it will get done if you keep at it consistently. Please remember that perfection is the enemy of completion.
This is not a technique to make your story perfect. It is here to make your story better. As said of movies, “A good movie has three good scenes and no bad ones.” This is to hoist up the worst components of your story to be, at the very least, acceptable. Maybe it’s been edited well enough to wow the reader (we can all hope to polish our dirt into diamonds) but there should be no part they find unreadable. Let this calm your nerves and self-doubt. You haven’t written a terrible story because you’ve faced your weaknesses head-on and done your best to correct them. You’re a better writer for it. It’s only when you plow ahead with an undue belief that you’re the greatest writer who has ever lived that your weaknesses undermine your story. That belief works perfectly for your first draft. Let it guide you to the end. But as you revise, put a leash on it and tie it to a tree.
After you’re done with your first story using this method, save your list of weaknesses, all tallied up, and start it afresh after you write and show people your next story. Even though you’ve become a better writer, it doesn’t mean you’re free of those weaknesses. You can manage them/keep them in mind as you write, but unfortunately, they will stick with you in one way or another. Also, you aren’t writing the same story twice. You wouldn’t think suspense would be your greatest weakness until you write your first thriller, mystery, horror, or action story. Each story will have different demands on you, the writer. Dust off this exercise and start editing. If you lean on the architect side of writers then you might find this another part of the assembly line you use to write your stories (I jest). For discovery writers, (especially new ones) don’t think you’re immune. Do this and every basic exercise until you’ve internalized the mode of thought that will carry with you for years to come. Then get a refresher in every few stories.
Colin Klawans 