Editing your manuscript

In The Practice of Writing, a series created especially for readers of MONTAGE, award-winning novelist, poet and critic Yasmine Gooneratne considers aspects of literary composition from a writer's point of view

By Prof. Yasmine GOONERATNE

Prof. Yasmine Gooneratne

The first thing to keep in mind before your manuscript (whether fiction or non-fiction) finds its way into an envelope and into the mail, addressed to the publisher or agent of your choice, it must go through a rigorous reviewing and editorial process - your own. Your first editor is yourself, and to carry out this essential part of your task properly, the first step is to distance Yourself-as-Author from Yourself-as-Editor.

This is difficult to do, of course, since your writing contains so much of your own thoughts, emotions and imaginative flights, maybe even your deepest fears. Still, it has to be done, and I have found it useful to put the manuscript away, out of sight (and if possible, out of mind) for a time, a fortnight or so.

Then, choose a quiet time when you will positively not be disturbed by visitors or a ringing telephone and sit down to reading your MS as if it were the work of someone else, someone you don't know.

(2) Tools and techniques

(i) Have a pen ready for this task. I sellotape two biros together, one red and one blue, and use this tool for editing manuscripts. I use the red to circle errors in spelling or grammar, the blue to identify sections that I want to alter stylistically or shift somewhere else. Don't hesitate to write little notes to yourself in the margins, e.g. On p. 4, you might want to write `Shift (the bracketed passage) to p. 10'. At the same time, write a reminder to yourself on p. 10 with an `insert' symbol at the designated point, `Insert bracketed section on p. 4'. Use the red and blue as you wish - you are the editor at this stage, and have no one to please but yourself.

The enormously popular W. Somerset Maugham, of whom a recent biographer has said: 'Writing was not just what he did: it was where he lived' (Selina Hastings, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, 2009), took a great deal of trouble in selecting the tools of his trade. His fountain pen was specially designed with a thick collar to give added weight to his words, a bottle of black ink stood ready to hand, and there was always on his desk - that dearly loved writing desk that he used for over twenty years - a neat stack of white unlined paper purchased from the Times bookshop. He wore horn-rimmed reading spectacles, and chain-smoked as he worked (this last being something a writer would probably not do today). In later years Maugham took to wearing an elastic mitten with zip fasteners designed to protect against repetitive strain injury. In extreme old age he stated that the happiest hours of his life had been experienced while seated at his desk when his writing was going well, and "word followed word till the luncheon gong forced me to put an end to the day's work". Delicious solitude, indeed!

(ii) Have a Dictionary, a Thesaurus, and if possible a computer close at hand. This is absolutely essential, for you will want to find alternative words or phrases quickly, so as not to disturb the flow of your thinking and editing.

Sometimes the judicious use of a Thesaurus will alert you to alternative possibilities in a word you have used in your writing, and suggest additional passages that could enrich the original manuscript. This happens quite often when you're writing poetry.

An example of this from my own experience when I was writing prose occurred when I looked up a dictionary to check the spelling of `gryphon', since that fabulous beast is part of the coat of arms of the D'Oyly family. Sir John D'Oyly, the British civil servant who master-minded the fall of the Kandyan kingdom in 1815, sailed to the East in 1802 as a young man, and was employed as a translator for the British Crown in Sri Lanka. I was researching John D'Oyly's life for two books, This Inscrutable Englishman (a biography co-authored with my husband) and a novel of my own, The Pleasures of Conquest (1995). The dictionary listed `gryphon', but also gave the secondary spelling of `griffin', defining this word as a nickname given to newcomers from Europe visiting Asia, who were inexperienced in Asian manners. What a gift! I took the hint, and gave the nickname of `Griffin' to my titled fictional civil servant.

If you are computer-literate and good at moving quickly between documents, a computer search engine like Google can find alternatives and explanations for you very fast, with a minimum of labour.

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(iii) Clear your desk of all distractions. The only exceptions to this are, I think, two:

(a) that if you are writing a magazine article or a short story that you want to have published in a magazine, you might find it useful to have a copy of that magazine, or that magazine's guidelines, beside you. Study it carefully, the length of an average article or story, the length of paragraphs, the kind of language used, the level of readership implied.

Whatever you submit must be suitable to that magazine and that readership, otherwise a busy editor will put it aside.

(b) if you are already in touch with a publisher who has asked to see your manuscript, keep a list of that publisher's Guide-lines beside you, to ensure that when you make decisions that affect the presentation of your text, they are the right decisions: e.g., American or British spelling? Titles of books to be in italics, or underlined? Single or double quotations to be used for dialogue?

NOW, the work of preparation begins. And it begins with reading.

If the work is a work of fiction, remember that you have written it, first and foremost, to please yourself. Make yourself your own sternest critic. Read sympathetically, but alertly and critically.

READ EVERY SENTENCE AS IF YOU ARE SEEING IT FOR THE FIRST TIME. GO SLOWLY. TEST EVERY WORD, EVERY PHRASE, EVERY SENTENCE, weighing it to make sure it is exactly the word, phrase or sentence you want at exactly that point. If you read too rapidly, you will miss both the tiny flaws and the full effect of the overall picture you have spent so much time building up.

A reader coming to your work for the first time will be reading slowly, carefully, critically. Do the same.

READING ALOUD is a good idea, it helps you achieve a distinctive rhythm of your own, and would also very quickly tell you if you've given a character unrealistically long or involved dialogue. People speak in short bursts, often leaving sentences unfinished because the person to whom they are speaking understands the point without having to have it spelled out.

Fictional dialogues should imitate life, but not to the point that the reader cannot follow what is happening. Managing this well, striking a balance between life and art, comes with experience and your own good sense.

You will find that the time-break you have given yourself has had the effect of allowing you to see the pages freshly, and you will find so many flaws leaping off the page at you that you will soon realize that what you'd rather thought was a complete manuscript, ready for a publisher, had better be regarded as a draft!