17/09/2020 – My Problem With Self-Editing Advice

I’m going to be taking part in an editing course in October because that’s one of many areas of my writing that still needs to improve after however many years I’ve been doing this thing. The course sent over a reading list, and part of that was the book written by the two people who run the course. I got the book and I read the book. It was a good book. It had useful advice and one piece of advice I vehemently disagree with for reasons I may go into later. I do, however, have one specific problem.

After I read the book, I went back over a couple of sections of the book that’s currently out with an editor to see if I could apply any of the lessons I’d just learned and the answer was ‘…not really’.

So, there was a whole section in the editing book on expository narration – the idea that you shouldn’t just have a first person narrator just tell the reader what’s going on, and they should demonstrate it through action. Great, good advice. So I read a section I’d wrote after a particularly fraught emotional scene. In the immediate aftermath of the scene, my narrator is caring for her best friend. They’ve both been traumatised. The friend is crying and the narrator is hugging her whilst she thinks about what she just went through. She wonders if she can trust her own experiences, her own senses.

So, here’s my problem: Is it expository to have the narrator ponder things like that? Is it okay? Is it expository? I genuinely don’t know. I suspect the answer is probably ‘it might be expository and it might not, even if it is expository, it might not matter because the quality of the material might justify it, but then again, it also might not’.

The problem I’m having at the moment is my writing is good enough to not fall into a bunch of common writing traps, but it’s not good enough to not fall into subtler versions of those same writing traps.

This, as I hope you can imagine, is a little frustrating.