The Process Part 3: Editing Process


In a previous post I explained how I organized all the letters that made up the source of Letters From New Zealand in the program Scrivener.

 Once I’d assembled all of the letters into a Scrivener document, I had 1,500 individual letters and over 1,200,000 words. This document I’m saving as a record for the family, but I didn’t really think it would be of much interest to a wider audience.

 I’d had the idea for a book early in the project, but it was only after I’d got everything loaded in—and decided it was time to start editing—that I really devoted any thought to how I was going to organize everything.

 I made a copy of the master Scrivener document, and then started the process of deleting personal comments, repetitive statements, and the hundreds of ways of describing the weather!

 After the first pass, it became apparent that I had to get more ruthless if I was going to get down to the target; which was 120,000 words.

 After the third pass, I was close to the targeted length, and thought it was time to think about how to present what I had. Should it be by year, or by topic? The original plan was to just present everything in the date order of the letters, but several topics; fishing, golf, farming, memories, the weather, government, appeared many dozens of times in the letters.

 I thought that putting them together might make sense; so I took a pass at organizing these topics into their own sections. What I found, after doing this, was that was too much; you didn't want to read pages about the weather or government!

 So it was back to everything organized by year, but there were certain long stories—or in other cases a couple of retellings of the same story—that were long enough to set apart. The final book, therefore, ended up having sections for each year, interspersed with some pieces on particular topics.

 In the end, I felt that made for a more interesting read.

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