12 Sure Fire Methods to Edit your Novel!

I’ve thought before that there needs to be serious overhauls in the publishing industry. I mean, if you have a killer first draft, then the editors really should require edits! If your novel is huge, it’s just huge and that’s how it is.

The real thing that needed the overhaul was my uninformed opinion.

So let’s get the first question out of the way – why do I have to edit my novel? Because editors know one thing they’ve learned through experience – every great first draft novel gets astoundingly better by the second, third and fourth draft and edit.

They’ve seen a novel they’ve thought, “well this is a great first draft” and they take it upstairs. The more experienced publisher knows what the novel CAN be if they edit it, so they kick it back. The Editor knows they’re in for an argument, and they’re not looking forward to it.

They go back, red line a lot, and give it to the heartbroken author. The author goes home, and cuts roughly every third word.

Then seriously, I’ve seen this two or three times where people say, “my novel was beautiful. It was powerful. But as I cut every part that I thought was so crucial, every scene that was amazing that didn’t move the story forward… I could believe the change, how much better my novel got. Suddenly it had tight pacing, and it read like one of those books I’d pay money for.”

That has led to a complete change in my attitude towards editing. Literally, I spent a night looking up every tip I could on editing, and clipping to Evernote. Have I mentioned lately how crucial Evernote is as a writing tool?

Here’s some things I found…

1. Put your novel in an Excel spreadsheet. I spent a lot of time working on one, and got it where I need it. You can now put your anticipated word count of 85,000 words, and start putting in word counts for scenes. You’ll now see exactly where your novel is bloated.
2. Think in terms of pages. If you cut one sentence per page, your flow and pacing improves dramatically, and you cut your word count by 10,000 words.
3. Edit Your Novel From the Last Chapter to the first. This prevents the self congratulating read through. It forces you to focus on what you’re reading.
4. Edit in short sessions. This prevents you from working on a chapter, and heavily editing the first four paragraphs, and skipping the rest. Do 15 minute edit sessions at first until you can slowly build tolerance.
5. Cut Useless words. If you cut 3 words from an average 12 word sentence, you’ll cut a huge 30,000 words from your novel. I’m not kidding, this is the lifesaver. I’ve already slashed 40,000 words from your massive 180,000 word epic.
6. Cut Repeated words. Apparently, the habit of new novelists (anyone whose written less than 5 novels) is to not trust your writing. As a result, you explain and explain and explain, and you repeat and repeat and repeat. You can often find the same word twice in one sentence. Fix this, and you’ve slashed another 10,000 to 20,000 words. This can bring your massive novel down to 120,000 words. That’s great, but you’re still over the 100,000 word “automatic pass” limit.
7. Cut every scene. This can be done in Scrivener easily. Have a directory in the Research section called “deleted scenes”. Move every scene to that directory, one at a time. If the story survives without it, leave it in the deleted scene. This is the part you as an author will shed tears over – but it’s got to be done. And this is the step you’ll use to get you finally under 100,000 words. These six steps will cut your novel in half. You’ve gone from 180,000 to 90,000 words.
8. Delete Chapter one and the last chapter. This is a step that some authors say they’ve done and it was amazing. Your novel usually has a chapter of “a long time ago in a galaxy far far away”, where really it needs a birthday party and a confrontation with Gandalf immediately. Delete the “in a town…” and now you’re right into the near fatal car crash with the Mummy, and his curse now sets the stage for action.
9. Expletives. I’ve written many times about expletives – these are words with zero value, they add almost no impact to the sentence. Get a list of Expletives and pin that to the task bar of Evernote, or put it in the Scrivener template you use in the research section. This will be a ruthless hunt and slash mission, and once this is done, you’ve probably gotten your book down to 75,000 words from 180,000. No worries, your word count is going to go back up slightly on the next step.
10. Filter words – see, touched, heard, smelled. Sentences like “Carpenter tasted the coppery penny…” or whatever is actually really great writing (naturally), but its creating a filter between the reader and the reading. If you have too many filter words in the novel, you eventually lift the reader out of it. “Gunpower residue left its familiar stink in the air” versus “Carpenter smelled the gunpowder in the air, reflecting on its familiarity.” Well, that’s a bad example line, and it should be redlined because it’s horrible.
11. No compound sentences. There you go.
12. ProWritingAid. I do this step first, but you’ll want to do it again at the end to make sure you haven’t introduced any more errors as you went along!

Do these things and your bloated epic novel about the adventures of a door to door button salesman and his curse from an Egpytian mummy will now be tightened into a fast paced novel of intrigue and action!

No more excuses! Edit!