1. Sentences can only do one thing at a time.
Have you ever heard a four-year-old run out of breath before she can finish her thought? I edit a lot of sentences that work the same way. You need a noun, you need a verb, you might need an object. Give some serious thought to stopping right there.
Sentences are building blocks, not bungee cords; they’re not meant to be stretched to the limit. I’m not saying you necessarily want a Hemingway-esque series of clipped short sentences, but most writers benefit from dividing their longest sentences into shorter, more muscular ones.
2. Paragraphs can only do one thing at a time.
A paragraph supports a single idea. Construct complex arguments by combining simple ideas that follow logically. Every time you address a new idea, add a line break. Short paragraphs are the most readable; few should be more than three or four sentences long. This is more important if you’re writing for the Web.
3. Look closely at -ing
Nouns ending in -ing are fine. (Strong writing, IT consulting, great fishing.) But constructions like “I am running,” “a forum for building consensus,” or “The new team will be managing” are inherently weak. Rewrite them to “I run,” “a forum to build consensus,” and “the team will manage.” You’re on the right track when the rewrite has fewer words (see below).
(If for some insane reason you want to get all geeky about this, you can read the Wikipedia article on gerunds and present participles. But you don’t have to know the underlying grammatical rules to make this work. Rewrite -ing when you can, and your writing will grow muscles you didn’t know it had.)
4. Omit unnecessary words.
I know we all heard this in high school, but we weren’t listening. (Mostly because it’s hard.) It’s doubly hard when you’re editing your own writing—we put all that work into getting words onto the page, and by god we need a damned good reason to get rid of them.
Here’s your damned good reason: extra words drain life from your work. The fewer words used to express an idea, the more punch it has. Therefore:
Summer months
Regional level
The entire country
On a daily basis (usually best rewritten to “every day”)
She knew that it was good.
Very
(I just caught one above: four-year-old little girl)You can nearly always improve sentences by rewriting them in fewer words.
5. Reframe 90% of the passive voice.
French speakers consider an elegantly managed passive voice to be the height of refinement. But here in the good old U.S. (or Australia, Great Britain, etc.), we value action. We do things is inherently more interesting than Things are done by us. Passive voicemuddies your writing; when the actor is hidden, the action makes less sense.
Bonus: Use spell-check
There’s no excuse for teh in anything more formal than a Twitter tweet.
Also, “a lot” and “all right” are always spelled as two words. You can trust me, I’m an editor.
Easy reading is damned hard writing.
~ Nathaniel HawthorneSome generally good advice here. Just remember that none of this is set in stone and there is wiggle room for variation in style, tone, and voice.
For Fury Road’s fluid editing, Miller called upon his wife, Margaret Sixel, who had spent most of her career editing documentaries and had never cut an action movie before. ‘We’ve got teenage sons, but I’m the one who goes to the action movies with them!’ laughed Miller. ‘So when I asked her to do Mad Max, she said, ‘Well, why me?’ And I said, ‘Because then it’s not going to look like other action movies.“
And it doesn’t. Compare the smart, iterative set pieces of Fury Road to one of the incoherent car chases in Spectre, for example, and you’ll see that Sixel prizes a sense of spatial relationships that has become all too rare in action movies. ‘She’s a real stickler for that,’ said Miller. ‘And it takes a lot of effort! It’s not just lining up all the best shots and stringing them together, and she’s very aware of that. She’s also looking for a thematic connection from one shot to the next. If it regressed the characters and their relationships, she’d be against that. And she has a very low boredom threshold, so there’s no repetition.’
That Sixel was able to whittle 480 hours of footage down into a movie that sings still astounds Miller. ‘It’s like working in the head of a great composer,’ he said. ‘Movies like this one — in particular this one, because it’s almost a silent movie — are like visual music. In the same way that a composer has to have a strong casual relationship from one note to the next, paying attention tempo and melodic line and overall structure, it’s exactly the same process that a film editor must have.’ Sixel, surely, is one of the greats.
Director George Miller Explains Why His Mad Max: Fury Road Deserves These Oscar Nominations (via jag-lskardig)
so good on George Miller for giving credit to his wife and colleague. that said, FUCK YES women have ALWAYS edited for male directors without getting any recognition within the industry let alone any kind of mainstream acclaim. I mean, film editing isn’t really on the radar for most moviegoers/watchers so yeah, I don’t expect people to know this? But goddamn, even so many self-proclaimed film and cinema buffs fail to realize that so many of the “best” movies (mostly directed by men, natch) were edited by women. Does anyone remember that quote/anecdote about male directors discouraging their female film editors – or even actively sabotaging potential opportunities – because they didn’t want to lose the person who made sense of all their footage?
(via lordlouiedor)
George Lucas’ brilliant ex-wife was secret weapon in ‘Star Wars’
George Lucas’ brilliant ex-wife was secret weapon in ‘Star Wars’
This shit’s been going on since time immemorial – before movies, it was wives editing and proofing books, sometimes putting in enough work that, had they been male, they would’ve been credited as co-authors.
That’s why having George Miller rhapsodize about how amazing his wife Margaret Sixel is and how important she was to Fury Road was so unusual and important – too often, women’s contributions to their husbands’ creative endeavors are viewed as a sort of marital obligation, not achievements in their own right.
Also, there’s this:
“You can see the huge difference in the films that he does now and the films that he did when he was married,” [Mark] Hamill pointed out in the 2005 interview, in a not-so-subtle dig at the prequels.
Yeowch.
Yes! Now, THIS is a valid and important case of a male director taking credit for/refusing to give credit due female work on “his” project, not to mention prime auteur theory bullshit.
“When we were finishing ‘Jedi,’ George told me he thought I was a pretty good editor. In the sixteen years of our being together I think that was the only time he complimented me.”
In “The Secret History of Star Wars,” Kaminski makes the case that she has been “practically erased from the history books at Lucasfilm” as a result of the divorce.
“[She] is mentioned only occasionally in passing, a background element, and not a single word of hers is quoted; she is a silent extra, absent from any photographs and only indirectly acknowledged, her contributions downplayed,” he writes.
“Marcia Lucas, the ‘other’ Lucas, has basically become the forgotten Lucas.”
This happens enough that we’re not shocked or surprised.
You know, I just watched the first trilogy, and noticed that she was listed as one of the editors. Having recently heard about Mad Max, I wondered how much of the movies’ greatness came from her.
I watched some of the BTS stuff talking about the history of the originals, and they talked about how originally George wanted to fill Star Wars with all sorts of history and politics and talky-talky stuff–all of the things that made the prequels pretty ugh. I wonder how much of that Marcia talked him out of.
For Fury Road’s fluid editing, Miller called upon his wife, Margaret Sixel, who had spent most of her career editing documentaries and had never cut an action movie before. ‘We’ve got teenage sons, but I’m the one who goes to the action movies with them!’ laughed Miller. ‘So when I asked her to do Mad Max, she said, ‘Well, why me?’ And I said, ‘Because then it’s not going to look like other action movies.“
And it doesn’t. Compare the smart, iterative set pieces of Fury Road to one of the incoherent car chases in Spectre, for example, and you’ll see that Sixel prizes a sense of spatial relationships that has become all too rare in action movies. ‘She’s a real stickler for that,’ said Miller. ‘And it takes a lot of effort! It’s not just lining up all the best shots and stringing them together, and she’s very aware of that. She’s also looking for a thematic connection from one shot to the next. If it regressed the characters and their relationships, she’d be against that. And she has a very low boredom threshold, so there’s no repetition.’
That Sixel was able to whittle 480 hours of footage down into a movie that sings still astounds Miller. ‘It’s like working in the head of a great composer,’ he said. ‘Movies like this one — in particular this one, because it’s almost a silent movie — are like visual music. In the same way that a composer has to have a strong casual relationship from one note to the next, paying attention tempo and melodic line and overall structure, it’s exactly the same process that a film editor must have.’ Sixel, surely, is one of the greats.
Director George Miller Explains Why His Mad Max: Fury Road Deserves These Oscar Nominations (via jag-lskardig)
so good on George Miller for giving credit to his wife and colleague. that said, FUCK YES women have ALWAYS edited for male directors without getting any recognition within the industry let alone any kind of mainstream acclaim. I mean, film editing isn’t really on the radar for most moviegoers/watchers so yeah, I don’t expect people to know this? But goddamn, even so many self-proclaimed film and cinema buffs fail to realize that so many of the “best” movies (mostly directed by men, natch) were edited by women. Does anyone remember that quote/anecdote about male directors discouraging their female film editors – or even actively sabotaging potential opportunities – because they didn’t want to lose the person who made sense of all their footage?
(via ladyoflate)
I must remind myself—
they can’t tell that I didn’t write this bit immediately after that one
the six months where I ignored the manuscript are not visible to the naked eye
the bit where I put my head in my hands and muttered “I have no idea what I’m doing” takes place in the single space between the period and the next capital letter.
As soon as I shove that character in, she has always been there
and someone will probably say that she’s the emotional center
and the book couldn’t have been written without her
and nobody will know that I thought of her three thousand words from the end and scrolled up and shoehorned in a couple of paragraphs near the beginning because, for whatever reason, the story needed an elderly nun
she was almost the cook
and for about ten minutes she was the earnest young village priest
and now she has been there since you started reading.
I am sanding down the places where my editor found splinters
kicking up a fine dust of adjectives and dropped phrases
(Wear a breath mask. Work in a well-ventilated area. Have you seen what excess commas can do to your lungs?)
and eventually it will all be polished to a high shine
and hopefully when someone looks into it
they’ll see their own face reflected back
instead of mine.
70% of editing is just looking at ur work for a few hours with this face
true story
true for drawing
true for video editing
true for writing
just true
How to Ship Johnlock without Really Trying
I. The Soundtrack Does It
Listen to this audio clip. The notes you hear are the motifs for “John Watson’s Theme” (first) and for “SHERlocked” (second.) “SHERlocked” is the music that plays during the scene in the Battersea station between Irene and John and continues playing while Sherlock is walking down Baker street as he opens his eyes.
Both pieces have four note motifs (but they’re different chords) and very similar contours.
The very musical themes that stand in for John and Irene, that color their characters on screen and jerk our emotions are quite connected but different- just like their relationship to a certain consulting detective. (I dare you to listen to John’s theme and not feel a pang!)
II. The Editing Does It
Here’s yet another example of why the editing of Sherlock is so damn good. Irene enigmatically says to John, “I don’t think so, do you?” and the camera jump cuts from Irene to a very still John. Then there is a slow fade out over John’s face to total black— as if we’re looking at him and closing our eyes on his unmoving, and fraught face. The next edit is a jump cut to Sherlock opening his eyes as the music titled “Sherlocked” swells. These three are so intertwined— by shot selection, editing, music— that beautiful music that wells up in them all, in us. Irene is outspoken about her sexuality and desire and she’s outspoken about John’s. He does not contradict her when she says “Look at us both.” In fact, she has seen right through John. He’s not gay— on the whole. But he is Sherlocked. Irene knows what John likes. They are a little jealous of each other. Sherlock intentionally lets them know he’s there.
The scene has opened Sherlock’s eyes. Not because he didn’t know Irene’s true feelings, not because he is in love with Irene, not because he is touched that she is still alive- remember John says that the moodiness Sherlock is enacting is what he normally does anyway- doesn’t eat, plays sad music, etc. Sherlock has no sentiment towards her. She intrigues him and at this point is winning the game. Irene was easy to see though emotionally— well Sherlock proves her attachment by cooly taking her pulse. No— the eye-opening moment for Sherlock is that he begins to see John’s attachment— not that he understands it. In Hounds he says he has no friends but smartly reconsiders when he sees he has wounded John (as he had Molly before). In Reichenbach, Sherlock can’t understand why John would be upset at disparaging things people say about him. But I happen to think that by the time he makes his final call to John from the roof, he does care.
This short little edit, this blink-and-miss-it moment is the exact point in time that the CAMERA ships Johnlock— not in the sense of them having actual sex in canon— but in the sense that their bond is real, mysterious and eye-opening. Strong enough to last their whole lives.
AAAND the editing is done!
Just have to resubmit it to CreateSpace and, yeah, I have myself a book. Squee.
I said i was going to go do one final edit on this book before I publish it. And I’m finding myself making changes on almost every page. Eesh. But it’s mostly minor things like tightening up sentences or clarifying things and deleting things. A lot of deleting extraneous words and sentences. I guess this is good? But part of me is freaking out that I’m making changes this late in the game, even though I’m not changing the substance any, just the details.