Editing
I hate editing. I think most writers hate editing. I love the writing process, the creating.
But I hate to edit.
I mean, I spent all that time – 30 whole days writing the story! Why should I change it?
Because choosing the right words to use is a left brain activity, and writing is a right brain activity. They should almost never be done on the same day.
Writing is the process of bringing a scene to life. Editing is changing that.
The conundrum is that editing is where a book is truly written.
What most writers consider editing is a read through. This is actually the LAST phase of editing. The first phase is a structural edit.
Did you accomplish the goals of the scene?
Does the book fit structural guidelines?
Does it have the elements of the genre present?
Don’t do anything else until you’ve finished that.
Next, you’re on a bug hunt. There are certain words to kill from your novel, such as very, then, see, heard, tested, etc. Might as well kill those -ly words also.
At this point, I recommend a ProWritingAid edit. Get a license for it, and edit it. Your next few edits will require a last pass through ProWritingAid. Trust me on this. I ignored all my own systems and put a first draft through ProWritingAid and by the time I was done, it literally was sounding like a best seller.
Now you’ve got a re-write. It’s not a cover to cover re-write, but you have to re-write every sentence that had a see, heard, felt in it. Over the last two years on Twitter I’ve given running instructions on how to do this, and there’s several articles on this web site on this as well.
Your next edit is the throat clearing edit. New writers tend to repeat themselves every three lines. You say something, you move on, then you repeat it for emphasis. The reader got it already. Learn to trust them. Cut those repeated sentences. It might be a good thing if your novel was 150,000 words, because we’re about to cut 60,000 of those words in this edit alone!
Next edit – name your secondary characters. You’ll be surprised that you can cut as many a one sixth of your words this way. Most of your secondary characters never existed before this scene, and they’ll disappear after this one. But give them a name.
Last edit and re-write – the read through, where you poke endlessly at your manuscript. This can take quite some time.
When you’ve repeated this last phase twice and can’t really come up with any more changes, do ProWritingAid again.
Now, the editor feedback. Writer’s Digest offers professional editors who will for a very short fee review your first 50 pages and give their feedback. Listen to what they tell you, act on it. They don’t hate you, they’re not picking on you. You paid them for feedback, listen to them. If you refuse to, stop writing. You’ll never survive the scourging you’re about to get from a literary agent or a publisher. They expect your work to earn them money. If you can’t take their criticism and throw a tantrum, they’ll drop you in a heartbeat.
I hate editing. But I love what it does to my novels.
