Photo by Emil Widlund on Unsplash
One of the constant “micro” edits I need to do while copyediting or developmental editing is making sure the story is always moving forward, even on the paragraph and sentence level. No stutter steps back and forth. The story should push forward like a train running down the tracks in genre fiction.
What do you mean by that, Erin? you ask. Isn’t there backstory and flashbacks and information sharing happening all the time. The time order of a story is a web going back, forth, and all around, more a ball of yarn after kittens play with it than a linear if-then series without any side quests.
Absolutely past lore and character history are shared once the story starts, but the backstory is released when the information is needed in the next scene. Flashbacks happen when a pause in the rollercoaster emotion is needed to climb to the next drop, the flashbacks adding to the hill, pulling the train up the tracks.
Writing, drafting, and editing creates the track to keep the story pushing forward.
Particular to the micro-edits and the order of things, ensure when describing action to always have the activity in the order it happened. Don’t make your reader stop and reedit the scene’s action in their head.
Three examples (pulled from recent edits, adjusted to make generic):
- “Do you mind if I light a fire?” He asked once the shutters were latched.
- He started to get out of bed, and the woman did as well, offering her hand to him to help him stand, even though she was much shorter and lighter. The previous battle had left him bruised.
- MC woke from a nightmare of fear and forked lightning. Flashes and flying fiends sent them diving and dodging, ducking behind spindly spider statues. The dreamscape consumed them as they ran to friends and family always out of reach.
Each of these cases has a problem with the action sequence being out of order.
In the first case, the character is asking a question of the people in the room, but after the dialog, the reader needs to back up to the character closing the windows. This particular example is the classic stutter-step within a sentence, one forward then one back.
It would be better worded:
Once the shutters were latched, he asked, “Do you mind if I light a fire?”
The second example is confusing, leaving a question of who got out of bed first, the man or the woman? Because, how is she offering her hand to help him stand if he got out of bed first? He was mentioned first, so the reader would assume he was first out of bed. At the end, backstory is doled out explaining why she is helping him stand. If everything was in Time Order the paragraph, it would read like:
The previous battle had left the man badly bruised. The woman in bed with him got out of bed first and offered her hand to help him stand, even though she was much shorter and lighter.
As you can see, some rewording was needed to make it work. But editing is not about making everything Time Order linear, but also polishing the storytelling so that Everything is at its Time. Why the man is having problem getting out of bed should be supplied AFTER we see the issue of getting out of bed.
The woman got out of bed, and when he started as well, she offered her hand to him to help him stand, even though she was much shorter and lighter. The previous battle had left him bruised.
In this case, the NOW action needed to flow in time order, and the backstory information dropped to fill in the hole to make the sequence more immersive. The reader sees the action, and then the details of the white-room and new-characters get painted in.
The final of the three examples starts with the character waking from a dream, then describing the dream as though the character was still in the process of dreaming it. Either the character is awake or the character is dreaming in most stories, even in most genre fiction stories. In this manuscript for storytelling purposes, having the MC remembering the dream instead of having it happen in story-NOW-time would be better. The verb tense needs to change to past perfect.
Adjusted the paragraph reads as follows:
MC woke from a nightmare of fear and forked lightning, the emotions and images lingering in the morning twilight. Flashes and flying fiends had sent them diving and dodging, ducking behind slimy spindly spider statues. The dreamscape had consumed them as they ran to friends and family always out of reach.
Most genre fiction is written in “simple past” which expresses past actions, usually in sequential order. “Past perfect” is “past of the past”, describing an action or event that took place before the action being described by the (simple) past tense. By changing the verb tense, the reader is clued in through grammar on the time order of the sequence of the events.
As you can see, each Time Order issue needed a different solution, from a simple reorder of the sentence to tapping into grammar structure so an English reader understands what has happened.
The three original examples would leave a reader confused, reordering things in their head. The edited changes keep the information in order, the NOW time-sequence moving forward, and gives storytelling a chance to expand the reader’s imagery as needed.
Everything at its Time, with the train rushing forward on the roller coaster of genre fiction telling.
