Types of Editing

Since I was editing last month, the topic of revising and editing is fresh on my mind right now. I admit that editing is my least favourite part of writing and publishing stories - research, plotting, and writing rank far, far higher than the necessary edit to get the story out into the world. Yet, it is a necessity for everyone who wants to let the public see their writing, so let’s talk about it.

 

First of all, there are several levels of editing: content editing, copy editing, and line editing. Each of them has its time and place and each is important to create the optimal version of your story. By the way, the order in which I have listed them is how you should be doing them, too. Everything else, as you will see, makes little sense.

I would also advice to take a break from a story before you revise it. Distance helps with a more objective look at the manuscript and that is what you need.

 

Let’s begin with the content editing. It’s the first thing you should do when revising a story. Content editing is all about the content of your story, that’s where the name comes from. Go over your story. See how well the plots work their way through. See if all the threads are neatly tied up in the end (or a plot you want to continue in the next book has reached the right point). This is the stage in which you will, most likely, make the biggest changes. Remember that all scenes should either further one or more plots or give insight into the characters. Ideally, they’ll do both. You might want to fuse two weak scenes to make a stronger one. You might have to cut a scene completely, because it does do anything for the story.

How heavy your content editing has to be depends a lot on your writing as a such. If you’re one of the people who plot tightly and, essentially, do a first draft in their notes alone before writing the story, there might be little content editing necessary. You might have found all problems with the plots and might have undone them already. If you’re a discovery writer (and thus on the other end of the spectrum), you might need heavy content editing to get your story into a coherent state. Yet, you need to take a look at the story content-wise, no matter what type of writer you are. With a bit of distance, you might spot a problem you didn’t see before.

 

Once you’re happy with the content of your story, it’s time to tackle copy editing. For most people, this is the largest part of editing, because it’s the one where you dive in at the deep end. Copy editing isn’t concerned so much with the story, but with the writing instead. You are looking for grammar errors, wrong words, and typos. You also optimize the language of your script, make sure sentences are easy to read and aren’t easy to misunderstand. While this might be easier to paraphrase, it takes a lot longer. I’m not saying that you should ignore typos or grammar errors you encounter during content editing, but it’s not what you look for then. When you are copy editing and realize there is a scene which doesn’t work, you should drop back into content editing and change it, too, of course. Yet, if you did the first step well, that shouldn’t happen.

Again, how much and how long you need to copy edit is something that isn’t the same for everyone. Some people do some copy editing while they’re writing, when rereading already written text. Others write everything down in the spurt of the moment and leave all kinds of editing for later. Both is equally valid, none is better per se. It also plays a role how well you command the language you’re writing in and how quick you are with spotting errors. For me, this is the longest part of editing, but it might be that you need more time for content editing, depending on your personal work methods.

 

Finally, line editing. This is something I have no experience with, because my books are never set for physical printing. If your books are, however - or you turn them into PDF files instead of regular e-book formats -, this is another thing you need to do. Once you have the completely set text (set by you or by another professional), it’s time to check all the pages for their looks. Are there widows or orphans (only the first or the last line of a paragraph alone on a page)? Are there areas with a strange spacing? Does everything look readable?

With a regular e-book format, there is no setting in the classic sense. There might be widows and orphans, but you can’t prevent them, since the type can be made bigger or smaller by the reader. Yet, if you do a physical book, you will want for every page to be optimized, that makes line editing necessary. Usually, this should be the shortest part of the process, since it’s more about the looks than about the content in any way.

 

These are the three different types of editing which go into the revision process of a book before it is published. Ideally, you have a step even before that - beta readers. It can be very useful to have someone read your first draft - even though it’s going to be horrid - or some scenes from your story and tell you what they think about it. Especially during the writing process, you can catch problems early and revise your plotting already before you do all the work of writing all the scenes and then change half of it.

 

Do you need to edit? Yes - even if you just want to publish on a fan page or a place like A3O. The first draft, what you’re writing down for yourself, is never fit to be released. It’s never in a shape in which you should let others read it. That’s a big problem if you’re releasing chapters periodically, not waiting until the manuscript is done. If you do a tight plotting, it might not be too much of a problem, since you can track the plot points and make sure they work out. If you don’t - and few fan-fiction writers seem to be avid plotters -, you might get into trouble with the coherence of the work. In such cases, I’d suggest writing the whole story first, even if you wish to release it in chapters.

 

Editing is optimizing the story, not only the content (although you should do that first), but also the readability. With my last editing, I worked a lot on my sentences, since I tend to make them too long. I also always read the text out loud in order to see where the sentences are weird or how they could be better. You should always edit before you put something out into the public, even a blog post like this one.