Editing Like a Detective

By Niki Fixtion

The first round of editing a book you’ve just finished writing is arguably one of the hardest stages of the whole editing process. This is where you have to comb through every scene you’ve poured your soul into with the cynical eye of a street hardened detective. So put on your trench coat, straighten that fedora, and get ready to ask the hard questions.

Any good detective (of which I know zero and have no reference) will tell you the first step in an investigation is to track the timeline. How does this translate into the masterpiece you’ve created? Every chapter is a small piece of the larger story. Each one should move your plot forward with intent. So, as you’re re-reading your story from start to finish, ask yourself these questions:

Do my events line up? You can’t have your characters referencing events in chapter four that don’t happen until chapter twelve.

How did we get here—and does it make sense? For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, as the saying goes. While as fiction writers, we have a certain freedom in being able to make up the rules as we go along, we still need to establish a clear cause and effect.

Did that wound magically heal? Continuity errors happen and during your investigation, you should keep an eye out for anywhere your plot goes from A to C and accidentally skips B.

Now that you have a solid grasp of the timeline, it’s time to interrogate your suspects. And by suspects, I definitely mean your characters. Because every single one of them should have a motive no matter how small their part.

Do their motives check out? (Is their individual goal affecting their actions?)

Are their actions consistent with their behavior? (Did their personality suddenly shift?)

Does their end mirror their beginning? Using Hunger Games as an example, in the beginning all Katniss wanted was to provide for her family. By the end, she was able to do so, but at a cost.

After establishing their motives, it’s time for the interrogation:

Is their dialogue distinct or do a lot of your characters sound suspiciously similar?

Do any of your characters fold like they're facing a life sentence? (Info-dumping or revealing things they shouldn’t know?)

Next comes the search for plot holes. Can you identify any areas there are unexplained jumps in logic? Did your character suddenly solve the mystery when just moments ago they only had two vague clues and half a cookie? Are there scenes where you’ve done a lot of setup only to cut away with no payoff? What about the opposite? Did a big secret get revealed without a single setup moment leading up to it?

Then you need to examine the scene of the crime (aka the setting).

Are your details consistent?

Does the environment support the story or have your characters just been standing in a white room where things suddenly appear as it’s mentioned in the story?

Now it’s time to map everything you’ve collected out on your conspiracy board. I hope you brought plenty of that red string every detective seems to have.

Map out your subplots and character connections

Do all your strings connect or are some of them just dangling from a pin on the board? Every character and subplot should connect to the main story in some way.

At this point you have all your evidence. Now it’s just a matter of asking the right questions to solve your case. In every chapter you read, ask yourself the same questions a reader might ask. What will a reader wonder up to that point in the book and is it eventually answered? Did the question get answered too late? Will the reader lose interest when it’s dragged out too far or will they feel it was rushed by answering it too soon?

Being a detective isn’t easy work, but the clues were there the whole time—you just needed to clean them up a bit. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, you already did the thing. You wrote a book. Now your goal is to make that book shine and I’m here to help every step of the way!

What book are you currently working on and are you going to use any of this info in your editing stages? Let me know in the comments!