How to Edit Your Book Step-By-Step: Save Yourself Time, Money and Stress
I may be a professional editor, but the most important things I’ve learned about editing my own books, I’ve learned the hard way.
I want to help you do it the easy (well, easier or somewhat less hard) way. If anyone tells you writing, editing, or publishing a book is easy, they’re trying to sell you something.
You’ve written a book. Hooray! What should you do next?
DON’T
Immediately send the manuscript to agents. You’ll set yourself up for rejection.
Immediately hire an editor. You’ll waste your money.
Immediately give it to a beta reader. You’ll waste your time and end up more confused than ever.
DO
Bask in the glorious feeling of having achieved something significant. Only a tiny portion of those who set out to write a book actually accomplishes it!
Take as much time off as you can bear, but absolutely no less than two weeks, and then re-read it yourself. Then you can start considering the above don’ts.
Step 1: Let it age
If you can take time away from your book before embarking on a revision, you’ll save time, money, and stress.
When you’re in the thick of a big writing project, it can be near impossible to see what is and isn’t working.
That scene you’re sick to death of might be brilliant, or your clever argument might not even make sense.
Resist the urge to pitch, edit, or publish a story until you’ve had at least two weeks away from it. When you come back to it with fresh eyes, you’ll be much more objective.
Step 2. Print out the whole book and read it yourself
Ever notice how many errors there are in web articles? The writer didn’t.
It’s so much harder to see your own mistakes on a screen. It drives me up a wall, but every single time I print out what I think is already perfect, I find mistakes.
Of course, you’re not looking for typos right on your first read. In fact, you want to get out of editing mode and get into an immersive experience that’s as close as possible to what your future reader will have. Printing will help there too.
When it come to screens, your brain has been trained to skim and to multi-task, shifting gears to respond to other on-screen and real-world distractions.
On paper, it will be easier to fully enter your story world. This is the main reason I always read my client’s manuscripts in hard copy.
After you’ve had time away and start reading on paper, you’ll be shocked how well you can see what’s working and what isn’t.
I always recommend clients self-edit this way before working with me or another editor. Coming to an editor with with a stronger manuscript is a great way to save money. Why pay me to fix things you could have seen yourself?
Pro editing tip: While you’re reading, resist the urge to stop your flow by marking small changes. If you need to, flag it on the page, but don’t go fix it in the computer.
Instead, have a notebook by your side and take notes on big impressions, things like pacing and plot and character development.
This is what we call developmental editing, as opposed to line editing, which focuses on the strength of each line, or copyediting, which addresses the nitty gritty like grammar and punctuation.
Line and copyediting are just as important, but they come later in the process.
Step 3. Begin triage editing
In other words, revise the most serious issues first.
With my first novel, I started out by revising from page one. Logical, right? Yes, but that quickly devolved into a huge mess. Take my hard-earned advice —DON’T DO IT!
You’ll lose the big picture. You’ll write a new scene at the end that means you have to change everything about a scene at the beginning. You’ll spend days, months, or even years perfecting words and lines to scenes that might not belong in the book at all.
Now I use triage to edit my books. I didn’t come up with this term myself. I got it from the editor Sol Stein, who likens revision to battlefield triage – treating patients in priority order, not first come first serve.
For a book, this means tackling the big stuff first. The stuff that is most likely to make a huge overarching impact on the book.
For fiction or creative non-fiction, we’re talking about things like character arc, plot, point-of-view, entirely new scenes that must be written.
For non-fiction, this could mean things like pacing, focus, and a logically-building chapter order.
Once the big things are ironed out, you can address more middling tasks like improving specific scenes, strengthening weak dialogue, streamlining exposition or fleshing out minor characters.
Finally, once the overall structure and story are strong, you can go back to page one to clarify each chapter opening, fine-tune each line, clean up grammar etc.
When I give my clients notes on their novel manuscripts, I will often suggest the order I think might be easiest and most productive for them.
That might mean experimenting with a re-ordered timeline. Or it might mean writing new chapters from a certain character’s point of view.
I know about that one all-too well. After talking with my agent about the draft of my new novel, we realized I would need to incorporate the protagonist's husband's perspective. But before I can even start writing him, I need to do something even bigger - write a new synopsis.
For example, check out my own personal triage revision plan:
After identifying the need for the husband’s POV, write a new synopsis that includes him.
Write new chapters from his POV. (Ugh, this will be a huuuuge undertaking.)
Write new scenes from the wife’s POV to make the changed plot fit together.
Read the whole really shitty rough draft to see how it fits together.
If it doesn’t flow, consider moving chapters, rewriting or deleting chapters or scenes that don’t fit.
Once I have a draft that more or less works from a plot and character arc standpoint, I’ll come up with a new list of smaller things to fine tune. I’m not even ready to think about those yet. Right now, I’m seriously big picture, and I won’t be wasting time perfecting anything.
I bet that puts your own revision into perspective!!
Seriously though, even if you tackle it in phases, revising a book-length project can be messy.
For some tech to keep you organized, check out my two-minute Scrivener tutorial. I promise it's not as complicated as you fear and it will save your sanity.
Because the opening pages of your book are the most critical, you might also like my post on the 3 Simple Mistakes That Will Kill Your Novel’s Opening.
Good luck with your edit, and don’t forget how awesome it is that you finished a book!
Keep Reading
