Editing with the Joys of Spring
The sun is shining, university teaching has finished, and I am returning to editing! Slots for editing, manuscript evaluation, indexing, and mentoring are available from June and into the summer, so book now to avoid disappointment. Email me today to discuss your project!
Editing Tips: Maintaining Voice in First Person
Starting out with a strong first person voice is usually quite easy. You will often have a good idea of how this character sounds, and how they want to introduce the reader to their world and their perspective on it. However, as the story progresses, more characters are introduced, and there’s a need to progress the story, it can be easy to lose that strong opening voice among the other requirements of the story.
On your first draft, don’t worry about this too much. The first draft is the time to get out the story as it needs to be told. But when making your first revision pass, keep a note of when you can feel your narrator’s voice and when you start to lose it. This will be really helpful for targeting where more work on this is needed so you’re not wasting time trying to fix problems that don’t exist.
Armed with your notes, return to the chapters or scenes where you feel like you lose your narrator’s voice. Take a step away from the manuscript, and run this scene through your head, focusing on what’s said and what happens. Make some notes — I always like a bullet point list — on what your narrator’s reaction is to everything that happens. How do their feelings change through the scene? Do they think everyone is telling the truth? Are they going to have to change their plans? Note down three or four reactions to the scene that belong just to your narrator — not things experienced as a group.
Take these observations back to your scene as you revise. How can you work these feelings into your scene? Focus on describing and reacting to the scene from your narrator’s perspective, working in all those things that are particular to their experience of what’s happening. You’ll likely find the character’s voice, their way of describing things, returns as you shift your mindset into their perspective. And hey presto! You maintain that strong narrative voice even when there is a lot going on in a scene.
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Vicky’s Writing
This last quarter has seen me return in a big way to writing, across fiction, life writing, and journalism. Here are some of my journalistic pieces, including an article featured in This Is Horror’s round-up of the must-read horror news of the week:
I am also serialising some life writing on Substack. This features stories about my pretty unusual upbringing, including such titles as “My Dad Was a Chaos Wizard” and “My Mum Was a Dominatrix”. You can subscribe for free to receive weekly updates here.
And finally, I’m teaming up with Cherry Edits for a free event to celebrate indie author week. Join us on Sunday 8th June at 4 p.m. BST for an hour of editing chat, in which we’ll talk about where to find support, what types of editing are available, what to expect, and how to find the best-fit editor for you. Whether you've been doing it all yourself and are now thinking about bringing in expert help, or you're new and looking to understand what's available from the word go, this informal chat will have something for everyone — and you can ask all your editing questions!
You can sign up for Let’s Talk Editing here.