Looking For Advice on Editing

SuperRedPanda said:

Hi all!

I finished the first draft of my novel about a month ago and now that I've taken some time away from it, I feel that I'm ready to move on to the whole editing and refining stages. Does anyone have any advice, tips, or idea's for the editing process?

Click to expand...

Years ago I started using Holly Lisle's one-pass method as a template.

Mind you, I never did it in one pass, or in such a short timeframe. But the questions she has you answer about the whole book, and the methodology of examining each chapter/scene, has helped me focus on what makes a story work as a whole.

I've often heard that you should try to take it in different chunks. First, start with the big picture. Read through the story and focus on just the main plot, writing notes for what needs to change to make the main plot flow. Once you've fixed those issues, focus on all the sub-plots. Then move on to the characters and make sure the main character and the most important side characters are consistent throughout the whole story. Then focus on world details and continuity. Then, finally, sentence structure and grammar errors.

Full disclaimer, I have never successfully edited a book. I've finished 4 rough drafts. The first two, I only edited for grammar errors and thought they were perfect after that (I knew absolutely nothing about actual story components at the time.) The 3rd I never even bothered to edit before trunking. And the 4th, I spent about a year trying to re-write due to some major plot issues, but eventually trunked that one, too. BUT when I finish the first draft of my current WIP, I'm going to try this editing in stages thing. It may work. It may not work.

Ultimately, what works for others may not work for you and the best thing you can do is try a bunch of different techniques, morph them to your own styles and needs and create your own process that will always be evolving as you grow as an author.

I take it one paragraph at a time. Waiting a while between writing and editing is a good idea, IMO. You'll see things with a fresher eye. A month is good.

One thing I've always found is that by the end of the book, I know a lot more about my characters, setting, and plot than I knew when I started. So I'm able to add more details to reinforce each of these elements in the early chapters.

What I also have to look out for are words or passages I thought were clever when I wrote them but are really just stupid. Sometimes simpler is better,. And you can't be afraid to ditch whole sections of the book when you realize they aren't that fun to read and don't add anything to the story.

Most people revise most effectively if they take several passes through their ms, and work from big things down to small things: so, don't try to fix all the spelling and punctuation until you've made sure the pacing, plot, structure, characterisation etc. is all as tight as you can get it.

I read a ms and make notes as I go, on everything I spot--pacing, structure, etc. I'll sometimes have separate pages to make different kinds of notes. Once I've done that I'll work out how to address the issues I've found; then I work through the ms making those changes, which will often require me to rearrange chunks of text, delete others, and write a few completely new scenes. And once all that is done it gets another read-through, and more notes, and I keep going until I am confident it is as clean as I can get it.

Don't rush, don't worry, and don't give yourself deadlines if you're new to this. Take your time.

It'll depend where your weaknesses are and how much writing you've done previously. You might be a whiz at scene structure, or not. Same with voice, pacing, viewpoint issues, and on and on and on. There's a dozen things (or more, at least) to juggle in a first novel--everything from making dialog work to getting the rhythm of words down to emotional form.

For what it's worth, I needed dozens of passes on my first novel to get it to a point I was happy with, and it still isn't good enough to get as much professional interest as I'd like, but each pass was instructive to me to learn the next thing. So--I'd suggest making a list of where your weaknesses are, some of which you already know because you know you, and going through your novel looking at whatever of those weaknesses you feel like tackling, and then the next, and the next.

Share your work is good. In part because you will get conflicting advice and will need, therefore, to decide for yourself which way you will go. You will also get consistent advice. And if you seek advice elsewhere (in person groups are good) you can see if there are local customs that differ between here and there. In my experience this happens, which is instructive in it's own way.

I start with Grammarly (free version that works in MS Word), I don't strictly adhere to what it tells me, but it catches things like when I used shutter rather than shudder, and I'm terrible with commas and it helps me out there.

Then I do multiple passes, first reading while taking notes, then listening to MS Word read it to me with the 'Speak' feature. I take notes, about who said / did what when and where to be sure everything is covered and not repeated. I also look for consistent dialogue, word usage and phrasing based on character. I also seek out over used words, repetitive phrasing, showing rather than telling where it makes sense. Further, I'm really critical about the beginnings and endings of chapters, one must pull the reader in and the other spur curiosity and drive them to the next chapter.

I'm a compulsive planner, so the structure and pacing was considered before hand, BUT I still check the tension levels and character arcs to be sure nothing was lost in translation.

As I said, I make several passes - how many depends on what each pass finds. The minimum number of editing passes I've made is 8 (last book, Desperation), and the most was 18 (2nd book I wrote, The Last Dragon - the plot was very complex for my skill at that time). Lather, rinse, repeat - until it's as good as you can make it.

After I've made a pass, I usually think I'm (almost) through. Then I print out the MS and find a ton of stupid mistakes. Appalled, am I. I don't know why the printed page is so unforgiving, but it is.

Any new format helps. You can even change the font size and face on you screen and you'll spot stuff you didn't notice before. When you've seen something the same way a hundred times, even subconsciously, your eyes will start to skim.

Depends what your priorities are. Are you getting it ready for publication? For querying? Or just trying to make an improved draft? Usually, the first step you'd want to take is getting another pair of eyes to look at your book. The best way to do this is by finding beta readers--you can enlist the help of friends/acquaintances who read in the genre you're writing (just be warned that you might have to ask them specific questions in order to get useful feedback) or you can do a manuscript exchange with another writer. Since you say you finished the first draft a month ago, this is most likely where you want to start.

Don't worry about sentence-level or grammatical things at all yet. It's more important to start with the big-picture stuff (plot, character arcs and motivation, pacing, etc.) than to polish the language at this point. If you're looking to self-publish and are particularly rushed to get the book out on the market, you can hire editors (a structural editor first to address plot issues and then a copy editor to polish up the language), but if you have the time and patience, taking advantage of the free resources that are out there (i.e. getting the feedback of friends/other writers) is the best thing you can do.

That being said, you may want to go through yourself and do a handful of quick revisions before handing the book off to beta readers (that's what I usually do). In that case, a good starting point would be to find different story structure templates (things like the three-act structure, for instance, or the Hollywood Formula) and trying to fit your story into those templates to see where the problem areas of your story might lie. Also look at your primary characters, their motivations, and their character arcs. See if those things are complete, and maybe even look at whether you can pull a theme or two out of the draft you've written and maybe bring it to the forefront. You don't need to address all of these things right away--I usually wait until I've heard back from beta readers to change big-picture stuff like that. But that should hopefully give you an idea of what elements to look at.

Ninten said:

Depends what your priorities are. Are you getting it ready for publication? For querying? Or just trying to make an improved draft? Usually, the first step you'd want to take is getting another pair of eyes to look at your book. The best way to do this is by finding beta readers--you can enlist the help of friends/acquaintances who read in the genre you're writing (just be warned that you might have to ask them specific questions in order to get useful feedback) or you can do a manuscript exchange with another writer. Since you say you finished the first draft a month ago, this is most likely where you want to start.

Click to expand...

I think it's foolish to use beta readers before first revising your work. Why ask for advice on work you know needs further attention? Far better, in my opinion, to get the writing as tight and clean as you can before using up favours.

Ninten said:

Usually, the first step you'd want to take is getting another pair of eyes to look at your book. The best way to do this is by finding beta readers

Click to expand...

Oh, no, no, no, no. A beta read is a terrible thing to waste.

Make it shiny-bright first. Take a few passes through. When you really think it's perfect, send it out for some beta-reads.

Adding my voice to the chorus: Do not slough off your first draft or even your second draft onto a beta reader. If you haven't perfected your vision, how can you expect your beta reader to see that vision?

One of the most useful pieces of advice I've ever found on revising comes to us from Bernard Malamud—"I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one's fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing."

Revision is more a mental envisioning process than it is a mechanical one. So my advice is simply this: revisit and re-vision each scene to see in your mind how closely (or not) your prose matches that vision, that mental picture. Make notes on your word choices and the placement of those words within your sentences so that you can better choose in order to evoke that vision as closely as possible for your reader. Try that and see if it'll help make your story fresh and new for you too.

Ari Meermans said:

Revision is more a mental envisioning process than it is a mechanical one. So my advice is simply this: revisit and re-vision each scene to see in your mind how closely (or not) your prose matches that vision, that mental picture.

Click to expand...

Oh, so much this.

I do the read-throughs first. See if the plot makes sense. If the characters are consistent. If I have the right hooks in the right places. Then I use a cheap editing software for grammar, punctuation and passivity. Works for me, but everyone is different.

I did say in my third paragraph that you can do some revising before sending something off to beta readers.

But I'll elaborate on my personal process a bit more to clear things up. Fixing big-picture things, I think we can all agree, is not an easy thing to do. I've gone through the feedback and revision process both with beta readers and writing groups for several novels now, and I find that there are two different levels of feedback (at least). There's bigger picture feedback, and then there's more nitpicky feedback. Beta readers are good for giving big-picture feedback; weekly writing groups are good for nitpicky feedback. When I finish a first draft, a lot of the elements (the overarching plot, the themes, the character arcs) are very much up in the air, though seeds of these things will have worked their way into the book without my knowing it. What I usually do at this stage is form an idea of how I might go about changing things, but I'll wait to implement it until I've heard back from beta readers. Based on the feedback I get from beta readers, I can get a good sense of whether the changes I was planning on making will actually take the book in the right direction. The beta reader feedback also gives me a good sense of what my readers are getting out of the book, which parts captivate their interest most, and what they're missing. When I combine that knowledge with my initial plans for what to change, I have a pretty good outline for what I need to do in order to fix as many of the sweeping structural issues as I can in the second draft. After I've made those major revisions, I find it more useful to get feedback on a smaller-scale level, polishing individual scenes and plot points rather than completely restructuring the book from scratch a second time. So to counter your point, I'd say why waste time making your writing "as tight and clean as you can" if you're going to make major revisions after you hear back from beta readers anyway?

There are a few risks inherent in the feedback process as well. I hesitate to bring this up, because it's a much more nuanced thing than I can summarize very quickly here and I don't want to give the impression that I'm against revising, because I'm not (I'd hope not--I'm an editor). One risk is that you may wind up making changes to your book in order to make it better fit the personal tastes of a specific beta reader, rather than to actually make it objectively better (if such a thing is even possible, which it arguably isn't). Another risk is that we creative types tend to have a bias for things that are new. That is, since we often believe it's impossible for a book to be perfect, we constantly tweak it, not knowing when to let go because it can always be just a little bit better (this is why, as mccardey said, our instinct is to send the book out AFTER we already think it's perfect). And as a perfectionist, I of course appreciate this. But something we also have a tendency to do (that we might not be aware of) is change things just for the sake of changing them. You might decide to rewrite a scene or revamp a character not because it'll make the book better but because it'll make the book DIFFERENT, and different is new, and new is better. This isn't a conscious thing--all the while, you'll believe you're actually making the book better. Again, this is a really tough subject, and I'm probably doing a poor job of communicating it here. Editing and perfecting a manuscript is a crucial part of the process, but it's not the case that nothing can go wrong during this process and that you can't be misguided in making changes. To that point, there's also a risk that if you make major changes to your first draft before sending it out to beta readers, you'll make the book worse. Not in a structural sense, most likely, since we know what stuff we need to fix. But if you're not careful, you might accidentally alter elements of the book that make it unique and appealing in the first place. You might make things worse by overcomplicating things and wind up with a convoluted plot that is going to be much more of a knot to untangle than it would have been to fix things in a much more informed manner after getting input from your beta readers. Sometimes the writing is much purer and truer to your original vision in the first draft before any sort of meddling has taken place.

Hopefully that clarifies why I don't think it's "foolish" or "a waste" to get input from beta readers at such an early stage. And I'm not alone in this either. A lot of people engage in what you might call "alpha reading"--that is, they feed their books through a writing group as they're still in the process of writing them. I personally can't do this, as getting feedback that early tends to interfere with my process. But I am in groups with successful writers who do just that and find that it works for them. I wouldn't call them foolish. They're just different. The writing process varies for each individual writer, and what's effective for one person is not effective for everyone else. I see absolutely nothing wrong with getting feedback at ANY stage of the writing process--it depends on what level of feedback you're looking for and your motives in seeking feedback.

One last qualifier: I also understand that I'm speaking from a place of privilege here, where I have a large enough network of writers that beta readers are not a limited resource, so I can do multiple rounds of critiquing. If you don't have access to that many possible beta readers, then I totally agree that you don't want to "use up favours". But in that case, I'd think about the type of feedback you find yourself most in need of. Do you want to use your beta readers to help you transform a messy first draft into a coherent second draft? Do you want them to tear your second draft apart so you can rework the story from the ground up in the third draft? Do you want them to suggest minor changes and tweaks to an already polished draft? I think the key is to know what kind of feedback you're looking for and to communicate that to your beta readers so that you can make the process work best for you.

I agree with most of the good advice already on the thread, especially 1. Take your time, 2. Work in manageable chunks and 3. Be prepared to repeat the process.

Assuming you're beyond the point of grammar and spellcheck, the editing process means you need to be prepared to be decisive and brutal with your much-loved MS and those cherished characters.

One (admittedly not for the faint-hearted) approach I have found helpful is to set yourself a very tough word count target. This depends on how long your MS is right now, and you will need to do your research in your target niche, but let's say it's currently sitting at 100,000 words and you want to get it down to 70,000 words. That's a 30% reduction. Or every third word, if you like...!

I've cut a 150,000 word MS down to a 75,000 word book using this process. (Which I realise says a lot about that first draft!!! But that, in a nutshell, is the whole point of editing...)

You might not achieve your word count target, but the process will sure as hell force you to edit. With that large a target you have to look very hard at the whole construction of your MS.


These are just my thoughts - which may be entirely unsuited to your circumstances so as ever: only pick the advice that resonates for you.

Where to start? Well, to sort of borrow from the bard - first we kill all the adverbs. Search your MS for the term "ly". Delete them all. I said it was brutal. (Don't worry, you can add one or two back in later if you (really) must!.

Then search for over-used words. I always search for "said" at an early stage. See how many of these you have, and think about how to improve your dialogue. "Said" is a common one, but you'll have your own "pet" words. One of mine is the word "glance". My characters are always glancing at everyone and everything. I've no idea why this horrible little word is stuck in my brain...it drives me nuts...

DMakinson said:

Where to start? Well, to sort of borrow from the bard - first we kill all the adverbs. Search your MS for the term "ly". Delete them all. I said it was brutal. (Don't worry, you can add one or two back in later if you (really) must!.

Then search for over-used words. I always search for "said" at an early stage. See how many of these you have, and think about how to improve your dialogue. "Said" is a common one, but you'll have your own "pet" words. One of mine is the word "glance". My characters are always glancing at everyone and everything. I've no idea why this horrible little word is stuck in my brain...it drives me nuts...

Click to expand...

I agree that it's helpful to pare back your prose in the way that you describe: but this is not the best place to start when you're revising. Better, surely, to focus first on getting the bigger things right--the structure, the plot, and so on--and leave these smaller issues to later in the process. Because when you focus on those bigger things you're likely to cut some scenes, rewrite others, and make other major changes. Why get the prose perfect in scenes you're going to have to lose?

Wrote this piece on what to do when you've finished your novel--you might find it useful. Congrats on finishing!

I start with a general read, which usually picks up lots of typos and other obvious errors. Then I do separate reads for story/structure, plotting, each of the main characters and dialogue, revising after each of these passes, and then I do at least two more general reads. Each of these reads, by the way, uncovers more typos. Once I am sure I have edited the book to the best of my ability, I give it to me two trusty readers. One is my wife, who performs a general read and scares the sh!t out of me with her brutal honesty, the other a professional author friend, who I direct to specific areas of the novel I want him to look at closely during his read. They both give me feedback and I amend the manuscript with any changes I agree with (and fix the typos they found).

Then it's ready to submit.

I have had two novels traditionally published and on both there was still a lot more editing work to be done prior to publication (and they found more typos!).

Another thing you might find helpful is to put your work (or at least chunks of it) into a text to voice translator. There are some free versions online. It really helped me with where I was repeating things at.

DMakinson said:

I agree with most of the good advice already on the thread, especially 1. Take your time, 2. Work in manageable chunks and 3. Be prepared to repeat the process.

Assuming you're beyond the point of grammar and spellcheck, the editing process means you need to be prepared to be decisive and brutal with your much-loved MS and those cherished characters.

One (admittedly not for the faint-hearted) approach I have found helpful is to set yourself a very tough word count target. This depends on how long your MS is right now, and you will need to do your research in your target niche, but let's say it's currently sitting at 100,000 words and you want to get it down to 70,000 words. That's a 30% reduction. Or every third word, if you like...!

I've cut a 150,000 word MS down to a 75,000 word book using this process. (Which I realise says a lot about that first draft!!! But that, in a nutshell, is the whole point of editing...)

You might not achieve your word count target, but the process will sure as hell force you to edit. With that large a target you have to look very hard at the whole construction of your MS.


These are just my thoughts - which may be entirely unsuited to your circumstances so as ever: only pick the advice that resonates for you.

Where to start? Well, to sort of borrow from the bard - first we kill all the adverbs. Search your MS for the term "ly". Delete them all. I said it was brutal. (Don't worry, you can add one or two back in later if you (really) must!.

Then search for over-used words. I always search for "said" at an early stage. See how many of these you have, and think about how to improve your dialogue. "Said" is a common one, but you'll have your own "pet" words. One of mine is the word "glance". My characters are always glancing at everyone and everything. I've no idea why this horrible little word is stuck in my brain...it drives me nuts...

Click to expand...

This depends on how you write. Yes, no matter your process, at some point (not my first pass) I look for repetition and redundancies, overused words. But I write lean, so often my first pass is going through and finding what needs to be layered in for clarity, making sure characters are clear, intention of characters and story are clear, etc.

Much like writing, while some bits are truisms for all regardless of what/how we write, a certain amount will be finding what works for you, imo.

I wanted beta readers early in the process (against conventional wisdom) for manuscript one simply because I had no idea what part of this massive undertaking had been done 'wrong.' It seemed like the easiest quickest and best way to get there was to find a writerly friend or two and have them read the thing.

Now, on the other hand, I believe that reading recent books and finding what I like and why, is more instructive than asking for input from others on early drafts, (partly because a good book is a treasure trove of structural and stylistic ideas, and) partly because I've seen how all over-the-board feedback can be. One guy who's an editor and reads voraciously insists that I need impossibly bizarre elements in my world. Like upside down mountains, for example. That idea totally opposes what I'm doing--but he keeps saying I need something so over-the-top because no one will read it otherwise. A couple other folks say they can't get past my characters' names.

The feedback is just all over the place, and now, getting a beta on an early draft doesn't make sense to me, but I remember that it did, back then (a whole eighteen months ago.)

On the other hand again, rough drafts to writers' club makes sense, but that's different. We all are drafting.

I mean, it can take a while just to find a voice.

lizmonster said:

Years ago I started using Holly Lisle's one-pass method as a template.

Mind you, I never did it in one pass, or in such a short timeframe. But the questions she has you answer about the whole book, and the methodology of examining each chapter/scene, has helped me focus on what makes a story work as a whole.

Click to expand...

Thank you for posting a link to this article. I bookmarked it and printed it out.

Much good advice.

I found that after a few books I began to do everything right the first time. Now I wait a month or two, while working on other books. Then I do a final pass fixing mostly small stuff, essentially copy editing. Maybe that will happen with you, maybe not.