There are many different kinds of editors out there who focus on different things. Developmental, substantive, or content editors ensure that the story is compelling and actually makes sense as far as the plot and the actions of the characters. They also point out plot holes or inconsistencies. Structural editors make sure that the story flows, that scene to scene readers would be able to actually follow what’s happening. They’re very useful when your timeline or your point of view jumps around a lot. Line or stylistic editors will check the actual prose and the style of your writing to ensure it’s consistent and pleasant to read. They’ll tell you if you’ve got literary rhythm, more or less. Copy editors are the ones who look closely at the spelling, grammar, and punctuation of the entire piece to keep it all correct from a technical standpoint. Then you’ve got your proofreaders who go through for basically the cursory final checks, to see if any little things slip through the cracks.

My tendency, probably because I’m self-taught rather than professionally trained, is to do a kind of weird mishmash of all the different kinds both when I’m hired to edit for somebody else and when I’m going through my own work. I do at least two passes for everything I edit, regardless of length.

So, with that in mind, let’s take another look at that excerpt. First, I’ll try to fix it as is, preserving the style of the original author (10-12 year old Felix) as much as possible. We’ll approach this in chunks.

Step one is to fix the formatting and weird tense shifting. We’ll change tense so that it’s consistent, put in a line break between paragraphs two and three, and then we’ll get rid of all of those ellipses because they don’t do much but attempt—and fail—to add melodrama.

Step two is to condense. As I mentioned in the analysis of the excerpt, it spends a lot of time telling the reader over and over again that the viewpoint character is lonely and sad and alone. It’s not just unnecessary, it’s tedious. We’re going to pare it way, way down.

Step three is making the setting consistent. Setting is about more than just location; it’s about time period, genre, tone. It’s all the environmental details that determine where your characters are in space and time, how they dress, how they speak. It informs their viewpoints on the world, the way they might approach their issues or their personal relationships. It changes cultural and economic contexts. All of this sounds like a lot to get bogged down in, like these details can and will muddy the waters so that you lose sight of what you’re trying to do, but in reality all of this information is critical to making sure your story makes enough sense to other people as it does to you.

In this case, “making the setting consistent” includes deciding on the time period and then getting rid of or adding in references to things that would be present during that time. It also means taking into account details like the age of the character, the context of the scene, and how that impacts what could potentially occur in that moment, i.e., this is a 10 year old Victorian girl who has been sitting in the rain for 20 hours, so a) why does she have eyeliner on in the first place and b) how is there still eyeliner there to run after that long in the rain? Also, this girl should be hypothermic. Also, someone from her boarding school should have come looking for her, especially considering she says she does this every year. Also, how convenient that this location just down the street from the boarding school is the last place she saw her parents.

Cursory research into Victorian boarding schools indicates that they were reserved for boys, whereas upper-class and noble girls could be sent for a boarding school type education in seminary school, but most girls were educated at home if at all. After a few extra minutes looking into it, there were two schools founded in the 1840s which would educate girls, one Anglican and one more non-conformist, but both only allowed girls 12 and up, so our protagonist being admitted to a boarding school at 5 and still being there at 10 makes absolutely no sense for the era.

As such, we have two potential choices, which as a writer and an editor require a lot of thought to decide between.

The first choice is that we change the time period. Given that “the accident” is extremely vague, and I’m pretty sure my original intent was that it was a car accident, changing this to a more modern time would make sense. The story relies in a lot of places on semi-contrived situations where the two immortal love interests aren’t able to contact the girl because she runs away so she can cry and continue to be extremely alone, so preferably this would be a pre-cellphone society. We may be able to push it as far forward as the 1980s, given there is meant to be built in time for her to age up to about 16 so it’s slightly less disturbing that these immortals want to romance a child.

The second choice is that we age her up a little bit. We make her 17, if we want to maintain that her parents have been dead for five years, so that she could have been admitted to the school at the age of 12. That also starts to reduce the ick factor of the immortal romance angle, but doesn’t entirely remove it.

Given that we’re trying to maintain the author’s original vision (what little vision there was), the second choice seems most reasonable.

So, to recap what changes we’re going to start with: fix the tense inconsistency, remove the unnecessary italics, create cohesion between the first paragraph and the other two, reformat to add proper line breaks, remove redundant words and punctuation, create consistency in the setting by aging up the protagonist, remove incongruent references and anything purely nonsensical, and remove any irrelevant exposition. Ultimately I’ve decided to maintain the tense from the first paragraph because it felt better stylistically.

What we’re left with is this:

She sits alone in the empty stone courtyard, barely visible through the pouring rain. She’s been crying; her eyes are slightly obscured by her lank, dripping bangs, but the brilliant lilac color is visible through the gloom and wisps of fog. She sits for one day every year in the courtyard of mossy stone, waiting with a single black rose in her hand. Always she is disappointed.

Tannicent looks up from the mossy stones in their spiral pattern, turning her face upwards to the now-drizzling rain. The rose in her hand is the same false, feathery one she’d taken from a bouquet left on her family’s mausoleum the day of their burial, the only black rose of the lot.

This courtyard was the last place she’d seen her family alive. She comes back every year on the anniversary of the accident to sit and wait. She’s never known for what. She isn’t supposed to come here and she knows it. She will be punished when she returns to her dormitory.

But that isn’t for a long time, Tannicent thinks, pressing her nose into the middle of the rose. She can still pick up the scent of her mother’s homemade cologne, rose petals and hazelnut. Tears slide down her face, but she’s been sitting in the rain for hours already. A few more droplets won’t make much difference.

Now, this is a lot different from the excerpt we started with. If I were editing for another person, this kind of change would require a lot of back and forth with the author. These are extreme changes I’m comfortable making to this piece because I’m the one who wrote it, and I can tear it apart without worrying about overstepping. If you’re editing for another person, it’s much, much better to suggest changes of this magnitude than to just go ahead and make them unilaterally. My move is to highlight sentences or sections that don’t work well and write a comment that basically says, “This part seems like it’s kind of redundant/you’ve already shown us she’s alone. Maybe we can re-work this part so it shows us something new about her, or remove it so we can keep up the momentum of the scene?”

In this case, though, 2006 Felix can suck it. The original version was bad, there’s no getting around it. This edited version is at least more cohesive, but it’s still more flawed than something I would be happy publishing.

The next thing we’ll do is go through my process as it currently stands. We’ll approach this story as though it’s one I’m just coming up with, and when we’ve figured out enough about the story to do it justice, we’ll write out the first few paragraphs line by line. I’ll try to show you the stuff I try out and end up not liking, too, because showing you the final product isn’t the point; it’s the process. Let’s see what we can make.