The art of writing: what editing brings to our craft

A masterclass with Gita Ralleigh

by Zahra Mayeesha

As writers, we often get stalled along the boundary between storytelling and technique. When a draft is complete: there, the story is told! What next? What, then, distinguishes a good writer from an amateur writer? How do we develop our ability to execute skilful writing? From poet and author Gita Ralleigh, we learn how editing and revision brings intention to our work and how, through editing, we grow as writers.

Gita’s masterclass reflects her experience and insightful introspections on the art of writing. She takes us through the technical aspects of a draft and details the ways we might begin to refine it. Before we get editors or literary agents, we must become our own editor. As Zadie Smith recommends, we must “try to read [our] own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would”. And this is hard, because it requires us to take a large step back and treat our work with a truly technical gaze, as an agent would. Gita stresses how one uses language is oftentimes the first thing that stops a reader from reading; when they decide that the writer’s style is not for them. One’s control over language is their writing style and as Gita says, “you only develop [this] through editing and revision.” To begin practising precision of language, Gita suggests avoiding cliché, generalisation and repetition, and this is really the starting point of developing your own style as you look for ways to write that are particular to you.

Gita refers us to George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” in which Orwell gives us his five rules of effective writing (for nonfiction, but Gita feels they’re applicable to fiction). She touches on the effect of passive voice in writing, how it creates distance between the reader and what’s going on in the text. This can be demonstrated in the real-time coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, where major news organisations use passive voice in their headlines to create distance from the horror and the violence. For fiction, of course, this means that the passive voice will create distance from the emotion of the text, which weakens the effectiveness of storytelling.

Gita also notes that Orwell’s fifth rule – “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent” – is English-centric and contextualises it to our South Asian context. She discourages from applying it to the use of other languages in our English language work, not italicising non-English words or providing a glossary, but rather to make the words accessible through the context of the scene.

She provides us with some general tips and tricks: checking for overwriting, losing extraneous words, rethinking long complex sentences, when to use commas vs dashes vs semicolons, checking adjectival order if English is not one’s native language. Gita’s main advice, when it comes to grammar and form is: “If you’re breaking a rule, do it intentionally and deliberately, and know what the rule is.”

Gita’s awareness of the politics of being English language writers of South Asian origins informs her discussion of language. “Do we all have to conform to how language is taught in MFAs in the West?” she asks. Classes in which particular styles of writing are given precedence over others, where minimalist and succinct writing is privileged over lyrical and complex language, where literary fiction with social realism or psychological realism is privileged over magical realism. Pushing back against this alienation is important, especially because it is limiting to be constrained to only one way of writing. “We write the kind of prose that our story demands,” says Gita.

Character and setting are usually the first elements we edit. Character pulls us through the story, so when we edit, it is important to understand the character in our own mind well enough that we may bring it alive through the text. Setting is something most writers are generally good at, but sometimes it’s hard to convey things that are in our head, especially if the protagonist is familiar with what an editor might consider ‘foreign’ setting. Gita gives us an exercise she uses with her students called “Inside & Outside”, where she asks them to write a description of a picture of a setting and then rewrite it from the point of view of a character who is within that setting. The exercise makes us think about a character’s state of mind and if the portrayal of the setting is consistent with it.

When it comes to structure, Gita warns us that we’ll likely have to keep working on our draft until the shape of our narrative emerges, but not to necessarily restrict our story to convention. She recommends Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative for unconventional narrative structures. She stresses that it’s important to trust oneself and that the middle is often the most difficult, confusing part of the writing process. “Sticky middle is called that for a reason,” she says. “We all struggle with that, particularly when we’re writing a long novel.” At the heart of story – the middle of it – is change and the story’s exploration of it.

Lastly, we look at theme, which often gets lost and muddled through the writing process, and needs help to shine in the re-draft. Gita’s pragmatic advice is to study the motifs that naturally come up in our storytelling – the repeating symbols, images, sounds, etc. and how they relate to the theme, and to see if we can make them work harder in its service. Developing the theme deepens the work.

There are general practical tips to reading our own work as a stranger – printing out the draft, emailing it to our Kindle, recording ourselves reading out loud and listening like an audiobook – but Gita’s final reminder is that the work is not complete in one re-draft. Revisiting and refining the work multiple times is how we gain clarity in our storytelling and confidence in our skill.