E50 – Editing Points of View

Show Notes

In this episode, Miss Catherine M.H. and V.E. Griffith discuss editing dreams, flashbacks, and letters.

The Revision Wizards are at https://www.revisionwizards.com
V.E. Griffith’s website: https://www.vegriffith.com
Miss Catherine M.H.’s website: https://www.scribes-pen.com

Transcript at: https://revisionwizards.com/?p=2462

Transcript

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Welcome to the Revision Wizards podcast. I’m Ms. Catherine M.H., and I’m joined by my co-host and potion maker V.E. Griffith. This is Episode 50.

[V.E. Griffith]
This week we’re going to dive into editing dreams, flashbacks, and letters.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Wow, I just had a flashback that I’ve done this intro multiple times. Have fun editing that. So, what do you think is the big challenge between editing these three different things?

Should we take a look at each one?

[V.E. Griffith]
I think we should.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
All right, let’s do it.

[V.E. Griffith]
The big thing for me about editing dreams is making sure that it’s clear either that we’re in a dream or that we’re intentionally not letting that be communicated to the reader until the end. So, if you’re doing a dream and the reader knows that the viewpoint character has gone to sleep, that changes the way you’re going to present the dream. If this is some sort of a vision, that can change the way that you’re going to present the dream.

If you’re only going to learn that it’s a dream in retrospect, that changes the way you’re going to present it. And so, each of those editing challenges becomes a little different to make sure that you’re conveying exactly the information you want to convey without conveying more.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
I think my biggest challenge with editing dreams is when you get into the scenario that the character doesn’t realize that they’re dreaming. If they’re going back and forth between dream world and real world, that’s fun, but difficult to make sure that you’ve got the correct amount of confusion.

[V.E. Griffith]
Correct amount of confusion is a good way to put it.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
So, I think that that’s where… Because, I mean, we as humans have those waking dreams where we’re really not sure if we’re awake or we’re not. And I think that those are fun in books when done right.

And they’re hard to do right and they’re hard to edit. Because you’ve got to really draw that line of this could be realistic. Because once you start throwing in things that aren’t realistic, that’s when you get, oh, this isn’t a dream.

So, it really depends on if you want the reader to know they’re in a dream or if you want the reader to not fully understand if they’re in a dream or not. That’s where I have the biggest challenge.

[V.E. Griffith]
Well, physically on the page, what does a dream look like to you? Is it italics? Is it underlined?

How is it formatted?

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
For me, if this is a dream that you want known that it’s a dream, I love to italicize everything. I use it for multiple things. And I think it’s done well in editing too.

Of course, you’d have a break, right? Maybe it’s a paragraph. Of course, it’d be a paragraph break.

Please have a paragraph break. You could also have that chapter break where you’ve got a difference and the reader is looking at this and totally understands that this isn’t part of the actual story, but it’s a dream version. So, when it’s done like that, I think italics looks good in that zone because you’re definitely understanding it is not cohesive to the plot, but needed for the plot.

If you’re doing that thing from before I was talking about, don’t italicize.

[V.E. Griffith]
Yeah, for me, a dream isn’t italicized. The way I do it, you italicize exactly one thing in the manuscript and you can pick what it is. If you’re picking dreams as your italics, that’s fine.

But then that’s a visual cue to the reader that something is different or something is off. And so you need to make sure that that is what you intend. If you’re using italics for internal thought, which is what I usually use it for, then you’re not going to be using it for your dream sequence.

The important thing, though, is to make sure that, yes, you do have a chapter break or you have a scene break if you’re using scene breaks like I do, to make sure that it’s set off from your main body of text so that your reader can easily identify it. If you simply start in the middle of a paragraph, that’s going to get confusing because you’re going to have what amounts to a scene shift in the middle of a paragraph. You’re going to have a setting shift or you’re going to have some kind of cognitive dissonance that makes for a confusing read.

So I always like to have those scene breaks even if you’re in a situation where your character falls asleep or gets bonked on the head, starts a dream, and they start in the same location. That way, even in retrospect, when I figure out that it’s a dream and the character’s been bonked on the head, that I can go back and look and say, oh, okay, this is where it started.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Why do you think someone would include a dream in their book? Editing-wise, why would we want to do that?

[V.E. Griffith]
I have not been using dreams. I’ve been using visions, but they serve two functions. One is to provide backstory.

So I’m dreaming about things that happened in the past, but I’m twisting the story such that the character who’s having the dream is forced to make some kind of choice and take an active role in the dream. So we’re not just watching what’s happening. The character is actively participating.

So I use it a lot for backstory. The other thing that I do is look for opportunities where I can flash forward and use them for essentially visions of the future. Now, I want to be careful because I don’t want to simply copy and paste my dream into my future when it actually happens.

I want something different. I want the character to make some other choice that’s better or worse or somehow different so that the outcome is different. But I can set them up as mirror scenes so that if my character is going to jump off a bridge, I put him in a situation in the vision where he’s about to jump off a bridge and he has to make the decision.

And then maybe as far as a couple of books later, we get that mirror scene where he’s in a position where he has to jump off a bridge and make a decision. Does he make the same decision? Does he make a different decision?

Is the outcome different if he decides to jump or if he decides not to jump? So you don’t want the same thing to happen. You want it to be a funhouse mirror where it’s a little different each time.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
I think having dreams, usually if they’re being like from the editor because I will write them into a book and then delete them myself. But I think as an editor, we have to look for how it ties into the story. Is it necessary to be in there?

If a dream, like what does it do for the story, for the character itself? What is it actually giving the writer or the reader? If you could remove an entire dream and the book still works perfectly fine, that’s just extra words and you don’t need it in there.

So I think that’s one of the things that I would look for is do dreams need to be there? Or is it just extra spacing?

[V.E. Griffith]
That’s a situation that really you can apply to any paragraph or any scene in the story. Does it move the story forward? Does it give you necessary world building?

Does it give you character development? Does it give you character interaction and dialogue? Or does it push the plot?

Those are basically the four things that a scene needs to do. You don’t have to do every one of them in every scene, but those are the four things a paragraph as well, but a scene needs to do. So you’re not doing at least one of those.

It needs to go.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
I will say that dreams are fun though. Editing them can be a challenge, but they’re fun to do because they are usually a separate entity from the actual story. Which is fun.

[V.E. Griffith]
You have a weird definition of fun.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
It just it brings out something different. And usually a dream is written in a slightly different voice than the author is using. So it’s cool to see how varied an author can be by reading those scenes.

[V.E. Griffith]
They do often have sort of a weird ethereal quality to them if they’re done well. And so it does make sense that the author’s voice would change, would modulate a little bit. Sometimes that’s intentional to give a clue that not all is right in the universe when you’re doing a dream or when you’re doing a vision.

But yeah, I think honestly, they are interesting to edit and they are different to edit from your standard moving from place to place or having a conversation with another character.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
What do you think of flashbacks? Because sometimes flashbacks can be used as a dream. But I’m thinking of them as not dream sequences.

So when they are done in the story itself, when that flashback hits, not I’ve gone to sleep and I’m dreaming about my past. What do you think is the biggest challenge with that?

[V.E. Griffith]
The biggest challenge for me is making sure that the timeline fits. You want to make sure that if you’re doing a flashback, either the reader knows that it’s a flashback or the reader doesn’t know that it’s a flashback. And that’s going to depend on what your goal for the scene is.

But you don’t want to make it wishy-washy. If you do that, your reader is going to have trouble getting your timeline straight in their head. So you can make it complicated like a Doctor Who episode if you want to.

But or a Doctor Who season, let’s say, season five with River Song and the Doctor. And I’m sure some people listening have seen that. Where River Song appears in the Doctor’s life out of order.

You want to make sure that it’s clear that you’re going out of order or that at least that it’s clear to you and that at least at the end of the novel, you’ve resolved it such that when the reader thinks about what’s happened, they can put events in logical order and that you have done a flashback for a specific reason that pushes the story forward. Again, we’re back to pushing the story forward, developing character, developing character interaction or developing world building. So those are the big issues you run into.

People sometimes put in flashbacks that don’t need to be there simply for the exercise of having done them, but it winds up being confusing or unnecessary. And so you need to either pull them or rewrite them or move them such that they are actually in sequential order.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
I think one of the big challenges with a flashback is nailing the moment you go into the flashback and the moment you come back to the reality of where the story is. I think that’s the hard, hard challenge is making sure that that flashback runs smoothly in whatever zone you are putting it in. If they are looking at something and they’re flashing back to it, that transition has to be smooth and then has to smooth back into that reality again.

[V.E. Griffith]
It does need to be smooth and you need to make sure that it is smooth because otherwise you get a confused reader and unless you’re going for a confused reader, which in a mystery at the beginning of the novel, you probably are, but at the end of the novel, you’re not. You don’t want them to be confused. If you do leave them confused, you’re going to have an unsatisfied reader and they’re not going to be able to articulate why, but that’s going to be why.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yeah, and when we’re thinking about the font or how this looks, most of the time, this is going to look normal because you are doing the flashback in those moments. If you are starting off with a flashback before something happens, then you’re going to get into what we had talked about before with the dream sequence where you’re probably going to want that chapter break or however, then you’ll have that chapter break we talked about before in the dream sequences where you will have it be in italics possibly or even just regular and you’re going to go through the flashback and then start whatever section of that story is, but most of the time, a flashback is going to be taking place in that moment. So the style of font and how it’s all written out in your book isn’t probably going to change very much.

[V.E. Griffith]
I would tend to agree. I would always suggest that a flashback unless you have some specific stylistic reason for doing it in italic and again, it’s the only thing you’re doing in italics that you put them into regular Roman type. I feel like most of the time there’s not a specific reason to use italics.

Some of that is a stylistic decision, but as long as you’re being consistent, it’s fine.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
And again, when we are looking at flashbacks as editors, we’re looking to make sure that it’s pushing the book along, that those flashbacks are either foreshadowing something that is important for the reader. It’s giving some insight to the reader. Maybe it’s giving the character themselves or learning something from that flashback.

It’s starting to click in place what’s going on around them. It has to make sense for the book to help move it forward.

[V.E. Griffith]
It does. Those are the big things as always, moving the story forward, building the characters, building the character’s relationship.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
That and I don’t find flashbacks fun. I would much prefer a dream sequence. What about you?

[V.E. Griffith]
I prefer flashbacks to dreams. I think that…

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Look at us being so opposite.

[V.E. Griffith]
As always, I feel like a flashback is an opportunity to not just set up a mirror scene like I was talking about earlier, but to set up an opportunity for character growth. Because I get to see in a flashback how was this character back then. I get to see later in a mirror scene how is this character now.

So I get to see that growth arc. And that is necessary for a story. Readers read for character growth arcs most of the time.

They don’t read just for plot. So unless they’re reading a plot-heavy book like a Jack Reacher novel, most novels are going to have some kind of character growth arc. And if you don’t, frequently your reader who is looking for them again will be unable to articulate why, but they’re going to be unsatisfied if your character doesn’t grow and change.

And a flashback sequence is a way to show that growth and that change.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
I think we should move on to my favorite one. Letters. I absolutely love letters in books.

I don’t know what it is. It is something really fun, but they can also be a challenge. And I think it’s because the author has to…

Like it’s no longer your voice. When you are writing a letter, the author’s voice kind of has to vanish and you are hearing the voice of whoever is writing that letter. So if your character talks a certain way, that letter is going to sound that way.

It is no longer me talking how I want. I am now talking as the proper lady who is writing this letter to you and it just must sound like it. So I find them challenging in the sense that if I’ve never met this character that the letter is coming from, I need to know what they sound like just by reading this letter.

And that can go well or not, because if you then meet that character later on, it’s got to match. So I think that’s my big challenge when reading letters is that they have to match up correctly.

[V.E. Griffith]
They do and they can become an interesting exercise in learning your character’s voice because you have to get it right. You have to excise your narrator and include only your viewpoint character. The problem becomes one of, again, viewpoint and voice.

So you just need to pay attention to that. If your character is always prim and proper, your letter is going to be prim and proper. If they can’t write, your chances are you’re not going to have a letter.

So you need to be careful and make sure that whatever they’re doing is consistent with their character and with their voice.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
And as for how they look in books, that varies so much. It is sometimes one of those things that people who, if you use italics for only one thing, will suddenly allow occasionally. You can see them in completely different fonts as if they are something that’s been handwritten from someone.

I’ve seen them typed out like an email. I’ve seen all kinds where it’s really sometimes dependent on the genre you’re writing in. If you are writing with a lot of sci-fi, I’ve seen a lot of that digital texting style font.

If you are writing romance letters back in the day, you’re probably going to have a little bit of that cursive handwriting throughout. So I’ve seen that that one varies so much. What about you?

[V.E. Griffith]
Well, you have to be careful as the author or as an indie author because when someone is reading your e-book, the e-book reader controls the font, not the author. So I wind up putting letters in italics because I can control that most of the time. The way you get around the stricture of only putting one thing in italics is having the recipient of the letter read the letter.

So rather than simply printing the letter, you have them read the letter and they don’t read it aloud. Suddenly it’s stopped. Easy.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
As you guys can tell, I really like to use italics for multiple things and I think it’s done well if it’s done correctly.

[V.E. Griffith]
And I hate it.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
But yeah, so italics, different font styles, it very much varies author to author, you know, person to person. And editing wise, personally, I’m not going to do much to it. VE over there might turn your italics non-italics, but that’s different.

[V.E. Griffith]
I am more forgiving with other people’s manuscripts if it’s clear. That’s the thing that I care about. That’s the really important thing.

It needs to be clear. If it’s not clear, you’re confusing the reader and a confused reader puts the book down and that’s the outcome we do not want.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
As for when I’m editing someone’s book and it has a letter, it’s a little bit different than when I’m reading dreams and flashbacks. Sometimes a letter is the way to condense a timeline or if you’ve had a gap in time, that is a way to condense it. So a letter could even be like that diary page that you’re writing to yourself.

It condenses time and can help give a little bit of that background of why time has passed before the next part of that story picks up. So I feel like it has to be done right and just enough information in it for that time gap to make sense.

[V.E. Griffith]
I tend to not go for filling time gaps unless absolutely necessary. The other way to approach that is instead of doing a letter, you could do dialogue with another character. Well, what happened at that meeting?

What happened when you were sitting on your couch talking to Aunt Mildred about how many kids you wanted to have? You could summarize in a conversation and make it an interaction between multiple characters. Or you could do a letter where you’re recounting the conversation with Aunt Mildred to a third party and just summarizing it and making it go quick.

On the other hand, if you’re adding information to simply be adding information, you need to think about whether or not the information you’re adding is actually necessary. If it’s not necessary, chop chop.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yeah, your letters can set up a story. It could help with timelines. It could be little clues in your story or just ways to help break it up, but it also needs to be in them for reasons.

Like you’re not just throwing a letter in because. And I personally find them absolutely fun. I love reading them.

I love editing them.

[V.E. Griffith]
I find them a challenge to edit, but if the story requires them, the story requires them, and that’s perfectly fine.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
You know what’s funny is that when we were doing these, I was thinking about my space opera and my space opera has hallucinations, which is a lot of fun to also work with and is very similar to writing dreams and flashbacks. It’s super fun. Very difficult for me to go back and edit, so it’ll be fun if I ever hand it to you and be like, now take a look at this.

[V.E. Griffith]
I’m looking forward to it.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
All right. So do we have anything else to add for our lovely dreams, flashback and letter writers?

[V.E. Griffith]
I think that about covers it.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
All righties, everybody. Until next time, I guess.

[V.E. Griffith]
All right. So until next time.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Stay magical.

[V.E. Griffith]
Bye.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Thank you so much for joining us for today’s episode. You can find every episode on your favorite podcast player and on YouTube. For transcripts, please visit our website at revisionwizards.com.

They go live the same day as our episodes.

[V.E. Griffith]
If you’d like to reach out to us separately, you can find me at vegriffith.com and Ms. Katherine at scribes-pen.com.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Stay magical. Welcome to the Revision Wizards podcast. I’m Ms. Catherine M.H. and I’m joined by my co-host, my cow-housed. Okay. I’m a redo. Let me get a drink.

I look at the word potion and I skip too far ahead. Now that we’ve hit record, I was fine until we hit record.

[V.E. Griffith]
It’s okay. You need a blooper.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Yep. Welcome to the Revision Wizards podcast. I’m Ms. Catherine M.H. and…

[V.E. Griffith]
You mispronounced revision.

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
Wow, buddy. Okay. Welcome to the Revision Wizards podcast.

I’m Ms. Catherine M.H. and I’m joined by my co-host and potion maker V.E. Griffith. This is episode 50. I can badly curl it for you.

All right.

[V.E. Griffith]
We’re going to have a long blooper reel today, aren’t we?

[Miss Catherine M.H.]
I mean, we could get that. That’s fine. I did well.