Editing for a friend

Over the course of my extended blogging hiatus, a long-time friend of mine and I were sitting around the basement reading a story that he was in the process of writing. This was interesting because he is by no means a writer- he’s actually a training the be a plumber- and I know for a fact he spent the majority of his high school english classes watching The Price Is Right.

I was honestly impressed with how grammatically correct his writing was and the way his words flowed across the page. Maybe it was because I know him so well that I understood what he was trying to say with a lot more ease than a total stranger would, but it kind of caught me of guard. 

His dialog was witty and he innately seemed to adhere to the “show, not tell” adage that was drilled into my head by a certain creative writing instructor. 

We edited his work by cutting down some of the extra words he used. We made it cleaner. I fixed a lot of “your and you’re” and along with some apostrophes but left the story alone. 

The one issue he had that grew tiresome reading was the dependent clauses. There were a lot of them, and it began to drag the story down a bit. So we fixed it. I showed him how to work around the “subject verb noun, while verbing with adjective” and took to it right away. 

Before long he was back at digital manuscript rewriting it faster than I could read it.

We also discussed the medium in which he wanted to see his work come to fruition. The story was dialog heavy and the humor suggested some sort of graphic novel, (which he is a huge fan of,) though his depiction of the scenes that the story unfolds in is something that might be best left to the imagination. 

Regardless, it was a pleasure to edit a friends work, and more so because the story was so ridiculous, so awesome, so laugh out loud, so HIM, that I could really assist him in getting across the story he wanted to tell, rather then the story he was telling. I’m very excited to see what happens to the Doctor and Retard. ( I think his name is Steven)