Isolating Chapters when Editing

[JT Woody]

I find it helpful. I'm currently revising a chapter that needs A TON of work. Its chapter 52, and all the minor edits and changes made in the earlier chapters have made it a massive undertaking to update chapter 52. So i made a new document and copy/pasted the chapter into it. idk why... its just easier versus working on it within the entire manuscript.

One of my college friends used to print sections of her research paper out, cut them up sentences by sentence or paragraph by paragraph, and rearrange them on the table before rearranging them in the document.


Just curious what your processes are.
Do you guys isolate the chapters or scenes you re working on when you go back to edit?

 

[Dogberry's Watch]

Kind of! I approach it a chapter at a time, but since I have them printed out, I can easily pull them from the stack of the manuscript. I do find it easier to get a better view of things if I'm not seeing the rest of it behind what I'm trying to focus on. I go through and mark what I want to look at further, and then write a number by it. On a new piece of notebook paper, I'll write the number in the margin and then write the changes I want to make. I'll do that for each spot that needs content changes. If it's just a punctuation or a small phrase change, I don't do that, I'll just mark it with the pen.

 

[Mr Mononoke]

I started out printing but didn't enjoy the process as I wrote more and more on the edges and then I couldn't read my own handwriting because I had so much to amend. Then when I retyped everything, I would notice poor structure and wording and sentences that didn't make sense, so I ignored what I wrote and typed.

Just curious what your processes are.
Do you guys isolate the chapters or scenes you re working on when you go back to edit?

I do isolate chapters but I save all chapters into a separate document. I find this a lot easier as there is no scrolling and I can just open the chapter before and after to compare the style and see where I ended and what started next.

What I have been doing in my editing is read a page or scene at a time and if I think something didn't read flowing, I would change the colour of that passage. If I felt passages were poor and needed to be binned (even though it felt like a good time to write it) I would highlight into a different colour to chop. After this, I would go through paragraph by paragraph, line by line and if I make any changes (this can be just a word) I would re-read the sentence and paragraph before to see if the flow was smooth. It something didn't read right, I would stop and analyse and see why and if I make another change, repeat and rinse sadly.

Needless to say, my processes are slow and not perfect but I make no claims I am an excellent writer, just a learning one wanting to be excellent.

 

[JT Woody]

I would change the colour of that passage

oooh! I do this too!
I also write new scenes in a different color, so that way if, later on, they dont work out, they are easier to find. or, if i need to refer back to something i added, again, its easier to find

 

[Mr Mononoke]

That's a good idea. I was very 'formal' in how I wrote, until I found that if you experimented a little it makes things easier!!

What I do when I finished a large edit is to colour dialogue. We all instances where we break conversations with visuals or settings etc... but I like to strip away all those fillers and see what is just said. Sometimes, I have found that I have broken up dialogue to let what has been said to settle, but realise that a question asked by one of the characters was completely bypassed by the other. Altering this would then affect the transactions but it is great to spot if the exchanges actually make sense!

 

[Homer Potvin]

Do you guys isolate the chapters or scenes you re working on when you go back to edit?

Sort of? Not physically by printing them out by scene or chapter and manually rearranging them on a table or anything, though I have done that before. I'll use more of a supplementary map to keep things organized, which rarely works, so maybe I should try the manual method? I've never found much utility at the chapter level, though. I tend to find those landmarks to be arbitrary. As I'm sure you've discovered, changing something in chapter two affects chapter seventeen, and so forth. I've found that breaking things down by plotline or POV is easier.

Come to think of it, one time with a multi-POV novel I did rearrange all of the POVs to read in a linear fashion for editing purposes. It didn't work. That particular project was so Humpty-Dumpy'd there was no possibility of reassembling it. That's happened to me twice where the shit just wasn't salvageable and I didn't feel like doing a complete re-write. I think it was around that time that I stopped blindly plowing through projects without thinking to avoid creating an un-editable mess. Of course, then I thought too much about what I was writing and didn't get anything done anyway. Sort of like choosing between lethal injection or the electric chair for you own execution.

 

[Naomasa298]

Do you guys isolate the chapters or scenes you re working on when you go back to edit?

No, and it's a bad habit but it has its benefits. I sometimes jump around when editing, because I might be writing the current scene and realise that something in an earlier scene needs changing. I'm particularly bad with words - I'll want to use a certain word, realise that I used it in the scene before, think it sounds better in the current scene so go back and change the earlier instance of it, not the one I'm working on.

I usually make backups before making major changes though, so I have a series of versions of each story I've written. I'm going to have to do that more now, as I'm now looking at submissions where I might have to change the emphasis or focus of a story to meet that publication's editorial preferences, so I could have 2-3 "finished" versions of a story around.