Stop 4: Substantive Editing Begins
Reflecting on narrative structure and bemoaning Word’s lack of highlighter colors
Road Trip Press has been hard at work over the summer months. Over the past several weeks, I’ve become intimately acquainted with Microsoft Word’s highlight function. As Jessica’s been working towards a final draft of the manuscript, I’ve been extensively color-coding the prominent themes in each draft, trying to figure out the best way to organize the tapestry of ideas she’s still in the process of weaving.
As I read through the first of the drafts that was approaching final length, I tried to keep track of all the different ideas circulating in the text, assigning each a color and noting when it repeated itself. Here I humbly beg Microsoft to add more highlighter colors against which black text is still legible. Sometimes the limitation was helpful; was this really a new idea I was encountering, or a different side to the same idea?
In one draft, an idea may be mentioned once or twice, quick splashes of bright green against a backdrop of blue or yellow. In the next, those bright green spots have grown and expanded until they could become full chapters in their own right, eclipsing whatever theme they may have been embedded in before. Themes emerge in one draft only to be erased in the next, or sometimes combined with another, or split in two. In the developmental stages, ideas are meant to flow freely and loosely, seeing what sticks, what clicks, what flows. The author’s job is to write, to get those ideas articulated onto the page. The editor’s job is to take stock of all those ideas, and figure out where they all fit into the larger tapestry of the narrative.
The most prominent theme I kept running into was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the cycle of binging and purging. Pretty quickly, however, I began to think of this theme in a broader sense, beyond just food. Over and over Jessica discusses how we enforce socially learned norms in our interpersonal relationships, our art, and even in our own senses of self. We regurgitate what we consume; the idea that thinness is required for beauty [other examples]. The theme of binging/purging became a broader theme of consumption/regurgitation. And in the process of organizing these themes, I found myself regurgitating lessons I’d learned on writing, much in the way Jessica describes reflecting Plath’s writing in her own.
I recently read Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, an exploration and examination of the many kinds of structures a narrative can have. Alison used visualizations for these different forms, varying from a straight line to a jumbled knot. In this vein, I’ve made visualizations for where the manuscript currently is, and where I’m imagining it going.
Currently, the themes of the manuscript are extremely interspersed. There are some consistent throughlines, but they aren’t as clearly defined as they could be. At times a section will feel almost entirely disconnected from the main narrative until the very end, when it will loosely tie back in.
In another course I took last year, my professor described the writing of the book we were reading as “tentacle-y.” The book had a central idea, and the other ideas spun out from that main point like tentacles from an octopus. That style is what I hope we can reach with Jessica’s manuscript. This “tentacle-y” structure is what came to my mind when reading Alison’s work.
As we continue the substantive editing phase, I’m hoping to work to get the manuscript’s structure to more closely resemble the second image. One of the strategies we’re implementing for this is using a hand-bound version of the manuscript---stay tuned for reflections on the difference between reading a manuscript on your computer and holding an early version in your hands!
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