Editing Exercise

I led the workshop portion of my critique group last week.  It was nearing the end of Camp NaNo, which most of the group was doing, and I find that at the end of NaNo I have a pile of nonsense where I just dump huge swaths of backstory and utilitarian descriptions of characters and things like, "That made him sad."  There's a whole bunch of editing that goes on after NaNo if you ever want to make anything of the stuff I write, and I wanted to make an editing exercise for my group.  I didn't want us to edit our own stuff, because that would just open a can of worms.  I didn't want us to edit each other's stuff, because that would turn bitter.  So I wanted us to edit something that was already out there. 

Furthermore, a lot of what I see as pitfalls in my NaNo writing are things that are encouraged in middle grade books.  I find that middle grade readers are super smart and catch on to so much, but they need really weird stuff spelled out for them. 

So I grabbed the first page or so of five different Goosebumps books and presented them to my critique group.  I figure R L Stine is too successful to notice, much less take offense.

I didn't tell them what I'd given them exactly, just the first pages of popular middle grade books.  And I told them, "Pretend you wrote this for NaNo, and then you took a month away from it, and you're coming back now with fresh eyes."  The idea was to elevate the selections from mass market middle grade to a book for an adult reader (which is what we are all writing).  The idea wasn't that these books were bad and we needed to fix them, the idea was that this is what we had and we were going to change them.  And with that, we took five minutes and marked up what needed to change--not what words we would use to change them, but what we wanted changed.  More sensory details in description.  Sections cut for repetition.  Emphasizing themes.  Mixing up the diction.​  Afterwards, we discussed what we did.

We found that

• It was easy to pretend we had written these, meaning that it was easy to take ownership of them.  It was surprisingly easy to shift them into our own distinct voices​.  One woman in my group told us that she would change the selection from the mummy book so that the main character stealthily follows the tourist who bumps into her at the pyramid and stumbles onto an international mystery.  "That's...what the main character from your book would do."  It was also surprising how easy it was to go after the selections with a red pen.  I think this is because in the work we actually write, marking up your first draft is laying out guidelines for the cubic ton of work you'll have to do later, and that's not pleasant.  And then, aside from marking up our own work, we often mark up each other's work, and there we have to back off a bit because it's their story and not ours, and changing someone's work to sound like your work--again--turns people bitter or has them ignore what you're saying.
• We all were pretty much in agreement in the broad strokes of what should be changed.  This is good to remember when we're getting feedback.  On the other hand, we all approached how to address those problems differently, which is also good to remember.  I'm reminded of the Neil Gaiman quote, “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
• When we read the selections aloud before our five minutes of editing, everyone thought they were pretty good.  Charming even.  But then when it was time to edit, everyone said, "Who's the main character here?" "Why is this description so boring?"  "Why is this character so obnoxious?" 
• I emphasized that these were published works--popular published works.  And we could still edit them to death.  You can always edit everything to death.

It was a pretty good exercise.  We had fun, and the group seemed to find it helpful.