LET’S TALK EDITING! PART 3.5…

There is a plaque on my wall, something I picked up from a cathedral in England when I had gone travelling with my wife and in-laws. It’s a simple thing, plastic covered in bronze paint, engraved with a quote from Michelangelo when he was 87 years old.

“I am still learning.”

That’s a pretty powerful thing for an artistic master to admit, and I like it better than, say Socrates’ earlier spin on the theme, “the wise man knows that he knows nothing.”

To me, we can always know things, and we can always know more, or know that what we knew was wrong, or needs adjustment. What we know can be improved upon.

“I am still learning” is also expressed in the saying that art is never completed, only abandoned (attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci). Even today I found a minor typo in one of my earlier books that slipped through the net, as well as a bit I know I could have written better if I had written it now.

So what brings this up? Well, I’ve been listening to a book on editing on Audible. The Great Courses. Effective Editing: How to Take Your Writing to the Next Level.

Just because I’ve edited well over a hundred novels from dozens of writers doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement on the editing front!

And in this case, it helped illuminate some aspects of editing that I knew intuitively, but never had the correct terminology to express.

For example, in my earlier entries about editing, I talked about avoiding things like “looking at something” or “knowing something.” It turns out that these are referred to as “filter words” and “telling words.”

In my earlier editing sections, I mention avoiding these, but when it came to why, I managed to dance around the real reason they should be avoided: they add distance to the story by filtering the character’s experience, rather than putting us in the character’s head.

When I added this to my list of things to avoid, I only saw it as stripping away stuff that was unnecessary to keep the narrative tight. I had an intuitive sense of why it was important, but until now, lacked the full context.

So… now you know, too. Just remember, no matter how long you work at something, you’re still learning.