I’m editing what I expect will become my next novel. Editing, for me, is a fundamentally different headspace than writing. When I’m drafting – especially when pantsing – I lean into a stream-of-consciousness flow. Iain McGilchrist might call this right-hemisphere activity. I don’t steer so much as ride shotgun, scribbling while the character drives.
(Side note: I’ll share the tentative cover art soon, but this post is about process.)
Editing, by contrast, is all left hemisphere – angles, order, logic, connection. When I’m writing, I don’t worry if a detail makes sense. That’s future-me’s problem. In this project, future-me discovered that the protagonist had been pregnant for over thirteen months, undertaking activities most wouldn’t attempt in that state. In a nonlinear story, this might slip past many readers – but not past my editorial self. I mentioned this in a prior post.
I used to devour writing advice, but I don’t write like other people. Most advice seems geared toward genre fiction. I’m not opposed to that, but I lean literary and experimental. Templates don’t work for me.
I know the Hero’s Journey. I’ve read Save the Cat. But I don’t write about heroes – or even anti-heroes. That’s not the kind of story I’m telling, nor the kind I usually read.
I don’t much care about strong characters for their own sake. I care about what they allow me to explore philosophically. That said, this project is different. The main character is strong. So are the secondaries. And while it’s still fiction, it’s rooted in real people and events – compressed, reshaped, but recognisable.
I’ve condensed two decades of experience into a seven-year arc across ~200 pages. The first three years are flashbacks, brushed in for colour. The rest unfolds more or less in sequence. This time, I didn’t give myself free rein. There are rails. And while I occasionally jump them, I still need to land somewhere coherent.
The structure is a four-phase design. The book opens in media res and stays there for a few chapters. Then we rewind. And rewind again. Eventually, the timeline catches up, and the final half moves more linearly.
To tame this beast, I turned to spreadsheets. I built a plot matrix – numbering each section twice: narrative order (as written) and chronological order (as lived). I had to find the earliest flashbacks and stitch the rest together like some temporal jigsaw. It felt like Inception at times. Where am I? What layer is this?
From there, I started tracking time: days, weeks, months. That’s when I uncovered the 13-month pregnancy. Realistic for an elephant, not a human.
The root problem? I sequenced the conception too late and compressed the birth too early. I also omitted two earlier pregnancies to streamline the plot. To fix it, I reinstated one and used it to restore character depth that had been left on the cutting room floor. It worked – but it added new complications. Now I’m back in spreadsheet land, scanning for widows and orphans – narrative orphans, I mean – where scenes dangle or disconnect.
This is where editing diverges from writing. Writing is dreaming. Editing is retelling. And retelling demands coherence. Dreams ignore time, cause, and logic. Retelling insists on them: this happened before that, and then…
So-called “plotters” operate almost entirely in the left hemisphere. Structure first. Logic forward. Details coloured in after. It’s a valid approach – but one with fewer degrees of freedom. Creative constraints come with the template. You still get unique results, but you’ve narrowed the space. Stephen King’s version would differ wildly from JK Rowling’s – but both would be channelled through the same scaffolding.
You can argue that creativity happens in the choosing of the structure. Fair. But unless you’ve invented something truly novel, you’ve still chosen from a shelf of precedents. The story begins where freedom ends.
And yet, there’s value in that too.
Ridley Park 