Writing Tip #18: The Nuance Edit

A writing tip a day every day for all of 2025

This week, I’m talking about the Six Stages of Self-Editing. I’ve alread covered:
- The Structural Edit
- The Character Edit
- The Worldbuilding Edit
- The Scene-Level Edit

And today is the Nuance Edit.

On this round of editing you’re looking for Foreshadowing, Metaphors, and Subtext.

Subtext is the easiest one to talk about, so that’s where I’ll start. Mostly to get good subtext, you gotta delete the actual text. Start with conversations, if you’re not sure how to do this. In a real conversation people rarely say exactly what they mean. There’s a lot of nonverbal communication, of course, but there is also the relationship between the characters to consider.

A long-term romantic couple has a shared language. New friends hold back and don’t say everything they’re thinking. Co-workers do so even more, but they often have to say something so they say something they don’t mean instead.

A trick I once heard from Mary-Robinette Kowal was to delete every third line of dialogue in a conversation and see what that does to the scene. Obviously, the scene won’t stay that way, but it is an eye-opening exercise to look closely at how much you don’t need to explicitly have on the page.