Real Deep Dive Editing

Deep Dive. It is a term we hear all over the place any more. We see this in business when they look at taking a "deep dive into the data". We see this also in education. The goal is to take data and use it to drive what we are doing. In schools, teachers and administrators use the data to determine the best approaches in curriculum and instruction. Businesses use it to determine new projects and ideas. 

Publishers also use this. The data they pull from book sales determines new trends, which lines they promote, which lines they delete, and yes, which authors get more money and which authors leave.

I don't want to spend the time talking about the business side of things, however. I want to focus on what authors SHOULD be doing when it comes to editing. We are talking about:

DEEP DIVE EDITING!!!!!

(Dramatic huh?)

I have seen people teach workshops on this and try to teach the concept on blogs and in articles, but honestly, in the majority of the cases, they are totally missing the point. These people promoting what they believe to be deep dive editing are really nothing more than skimming the surface. Think about an iceberg here. They are only looking at the top. 

Real DEEP DIVE EDITING focuses on the things below the surface.

Too often, authors are only looking at the superficial elements of a story to determine why an author bought that book. They look at the genres. They look at the covers. They look at the tropes and character types. I am sure you have heard comments such as this:

• Rancher stories really sell.
• The love tropical locations
• Tropes like secret babies, marriages of convenience, friends to lovers...

Sorry, but these are all surface level items.

When you are truly doing a deep dive on your story, or someone else's story, you need to start looking at what is not written. You start looking at the "whys" and "hows" of the story. 

I recently read to books which had been hyped up as the greatest books ever. As I dove into the story, it became very clear that these stories sold because of just the first 2 chapters and probably this premise that was never fulfilled. As I "dove deeper" into the edits, I started to see real issues with the writing. Let me highlight one in particular. 

• Author starts out with a real "chick lit" vibe to the story. Prologue with a first person narration that gives you a sense this story is going to be fun. 
• First chapter however, shifts to third person (which, BTW) they never leave for the rest of the story. Still, very fun and light
• And then the story shifts to a traditional romance story. It was clear someone told this author to "provide more depth into the characters." OK, that part is fine, but the tone shifted.
• Story gets darker as we bring in more characters. Now the storyline that was promoted in the blurb, premise and prologue are completely missing. 
• Then author decides it is time to turn up the heat. OK, again not a problem, however, the voice now has shifted to a borderline erotica level writing. 
• It should be noted that the characters are no longer acting the way they have been portrayed.
• After these scenes, both characters talk about this type of behavior is not them and they would never act that way.

Why did this happen? Someone tried to use their version of deep diving, which was just to focus on these small details in the story. We need to see something really hot here. Focus in on the scene. Focus in on the paragraph. 

Nope, totally missed the mark here. 

Deep Editing is not adding in sentence level figurative language or making a single scene shine. True Deep Editing involves creating a truly meaningful and immersive experience for the reader. It is about making sure everything that happens in the story happens for a reason. We want to make sure that emotions are authentic and readers can connect. Deep Editing means that even if we use tropes a reader doesn't pick up your book and say, "Oh, that's a friends to lovers story." If that is all they see, you have not done a quality job editing. 

Before I wrote this post, I went back over my database of submissions. The majority of projects were passed on because the stories lacked this level of editing.