Re -entering the World of the Novel – Micro Editing and Meeting Linda

I am finally back to editing my novel and what a joy and a relief it is to be writing again! I have re-entered the world of my P. I. Danny Beck and in doing so have realised that this is what editing is all about.

Editing is the process of going back to our work, hearing our characters speak, watching them act and grow, and making all the necessary changes that the creative logic of the novel demands.

By now we know so much more of who our characters are; their motivations, their fears, what makes them angry, who they love….we can of course decide these things at the outset but what emerges in the organic process of writing a novel is something richer and more solidly grounded. Now is the time to harness our intuitions and allow the characters we have created to truly speak.

This is not the time to worry about correcting our prose like an English teacher might- what I have called micro editing – micro editing is just something we do instinctively as we go through and for me it is less about punctuation and paragraphs etc and creating rules to follow, and more about the weight, the rhythm, the feel and the purpose of every sentence we create.

And don’t forget, during this process we should  always remain open to new inspiration which can come at us unexpectedly and sometimes make us think in a different or more coherent way about what we are writing. This happened to me last week when I met Linda who is psychic, and we talked about PTSD – many thanks Linda – it brought a lot of ideas together for me.