Ready for structural editing?

This article is by WTD Chief Editor Mary Jaksch

Sometimes I write a Frankenstein piece. It looks fine until I notice that arms sprout where the legs should be – and unfortunately I forgot to attach a neck.

I don’t always notice that straight away. Why? Because when I finish writing a piece, I’m in love with it. I adore it. It’s great. No, not just great: it’s brilliant! …Until the next day…

Next day I’m shocked to see that my piece needs intense reconstruction. What happened? Overnight I took off my writer’s wings and donned the editor’s white coat and stethoscope.

Let’s say that you are ready to do the same. What now?

Those of you who can wave a First Aid certificate will know. First you do triage. Find out whether it’s a case of CPR or whether a plaster will do. Is it an oh-gawd-this-just-doesn’t-hang-together-at-all piece? Or is it a well-this-will-only-need-a-tweak piece?

In the following I’ll focus on how to get a piece to hang together. It’s about structural editing, or, how to reverse engineer a piece. Structural editing makes sure that all the bones of a piece are in the right place.

Here’s how you can operate successfully on a bungled piece:

1. Reassemble the Bones

• Write down each point of your article in its shortest form.
• Re-arrange the points into headings and subheadings.
• Add missing points.
• Cut and paste each part of the old article into the new structure.
• Add or delete sentences to make transitions.

2. Check Your Transitions

Once you’ve got your bones right, check for smooth transitions. The reader wants to be led from one idea to the next – without any jolts. I find that transitions sometimes happen in my mind but don’t land on the page. Maybe it’s perfectly clear to me how I got from cucumbers to cataracts – but my readers might need a pathway from one to the other.

3. Make a bold entry

Before you settle on an a beginning, ask yourself if it provokes sufficient curiosity in the reader. - Leo Stein

Take a look at the start of your piece. There are two questions you need to pose:

• Does it grab your readers?
• Does it introduce your theme?

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at my writing to show how editing the entry made a difference. Some months back I wrote my first guest post for Write to Done: Juicy Writing: 5 Ways to Glue Readers to the Page

The draft I sent to Leo Babauta had this beginning:

Do you want your readers to sit up and read your stuff in one gulp?

Here are five ways to glue readers to your page, whether you’re writing a blog post, an article, or a book.

1.    Sweep in; don’t creep in

Leo wrote back:

Could you add a couple paragraphs to the intro, explaining why gluing the reader to the page is a good thing and how it’s worked in your experience — I find that having a bit of background leading into such a list is helpful to readers — less abrupt.

My version number 2 was as follows:

I love reading. But not just anything. Some writers arrest me on the spot and shackle me to their page. But others fail to keep my attention: I soon start playing with the cat or surf off to other sites.

Our readers are exactly like that. Their attention is fickle and they will wander off if we don’t grab them with our words.

That’s why it’s important to seize them from the moment they hit the page and get them to read our stuff in one gulp. In the following five steps I’ll show you how to glue readers to your page, whether you’re writing a blog post, an article, or a book.

I think you’ll agree that the second version is more elegant and leads the reader into the theme.

4.  End on a high note

Check out your ending.

• Do you fizzle out?
• Do you cut off in mid-stream?
• Do you wrap up your theme?

It’s important to wrap up your piece and hand it to your readers at the end. Don’t just throw it at them and walk away!

When you look at these four points, you’ll understand that a structural edit can rescue a bad piece, as well as enhance a good one.

There are some simple things you can do to improve the structure of your writing. One is to plan your piece before you write it. (All the pieces of mine that needed reconstructive surgery were ones I wrote on a surge of inspiration – but without prior planning). The other is to analyze articles by other authors with the eyes of a structural editor.

Ask: is it a Frankenstein, or does it skip, dance, and sing?

I’d love to know whether you too have ever written a Frankenstein. Where you able to rescue it? If so, how?

Mary Jaksch is Chief Editor of Write to Done. If  you enjoyed this article, please visit Mary’s blog GoodlifeZen.com where the focus is on practical inspiration.

Photo courtesy of juhansonin