How I Edit and Why I Hate It:

I just finished pumping out 60-80k words to write a novel. The story is complete. The hero is triumphant. I can take a break and enjoy the fruits of my labor, right? Wrong. Now the actual work begins. It’s time to edit.

You can probably tell from the title, but editing is my least favorite part of writing. It’s a mind numbingly tedious, yet necessary, part of the process. I much prefer creating new content instead of fixing it. But, there is something to be said for making your writing better.

Now that I’m writing full time, I’ve developed a system where I write new content half the day, and edit older content the other half. Needless to say, I’m pretty braindead by the time I hang it up in the evening.

But how do I edit my work? It’s not as simple as running a spell check after all. Over the last couple of years, I’ve developed my own system. It loosely follows the standard editing process any book in a traditional publishing house would follow, but I’ve adapted it to fit my needs. It consists of six steps, and all together the process can take almost as long as it does to write the book in the first place, and when I’m done, I’ll have read my book at least half a dozen times.

The Process:

1. Daily Edits: I do these every morning before I write anything new.
   1. Edit what I wrote yesterday. This is where I fix glaring mistakes. Often, I will wait two days before editing any WIP (work in progress) in order to give my brain a break. I catch more mistakes this way. 

2. Developmental Edit: I do this once the first draft is complete. It deals with the overall story on a macro level, making sure the framework of the story is complete. This stage requires a full read through of the manuscript, and even some judicious note taking. Here are some things I check for.
   1. Are the characters fleshed out completely? 
   2. Are their motivations believable? 
   3. Are any plot holes closed up? 
   4. Continuity? Nobody’s throwing punches with a broken arm, right? 
   5. Is the point of view (POV) consistent? 
   6. Are any subplots tied in?

3. Scene editing: Here I go through each scene in the story. I will sometimes do this out of order to avoid getting drawn into the story and missing any mistakes. Here are some things I try to edit at this stage.
   1. Does every scene have a purpose? 
      1. Does it drive the narrative forward, or 
      2. Escalate the conflict, or 
      3. Add tension, or 
      4. Add to character development? If a scene doesn’t fit any of these, I have to rewrite or cut it altogether.
   2. Trim any unnecessary dialogue banter. 
   3. Is the opening strong? 
   4. Is the climax satisfying and does it tie up any loose ends?

4. Copy Editing: This is the part I dread the most. I go through the story, line by line, making style and grammar changes. It’s an arduous process. There are some programs that help take the sting out of this, though. But I still end up searching through the manuscript for certain words and rewriting a lot of sections. And commas, I somehow miss commas All. Of. The. Time.
   1. Replace weak and telling words. 
   2. Fix punctuation, grammar, and spelling.

5. Listen to the work read out loud: This is something I wish I had known about earlier. I now have my computer read my entire manuscript to me and it is a game changer. This lets me find pacing issues, odd sentence structures, and elusive words that all the previous edits miss such as when I use “though” when I meant to use ‘through.” 

6. Send to beta readers: This is the last stop. These fantastic people give me their feedback, list anything that they feel doesn’t mesh well with the story, and often catch mistakes that the previous five edits missed. 

Once I’ve dealt with all the suggestions and made all the edits, it’s on to the next stop in the writing flowchart: Formatting. But I’ll save that for another post.

I hope you enjoyed getting a little peek into my editing process. Ignore any mistakes in this blog post, I literally wrote it while procrastinating from editing.