Editing - My Least Favourite Work

Editing, revising, and proof-reading are my least favourite work as an author. As a discovery writer, I do have a lot of fun while writing, because I never know what I’ll really end up writing in a day. I also enjoy researching and coming up with new scenes, stories, and characters. But once the first draft is out, things are definitely a lot less fun.

Yet, editing is a very important part of an author’s work. The first draft is simply getting everything out of your system and down to paper - or to digital file, these days. It’s horrible and not fit to be read by anyone, save for the author themselves. (Yes, for all those of you who have written something, compared it to their favourite book, and thought it was dreadful: the first draft of your favourite book probably wasn’t any better, but the author did their work on it.) Therefore, after the first draft has rested for a bit (a few weeks at least, in my case usually a few months), it is time to get back to it and work out all the horrible stuff, so you can publish it, one way or another.

It doesn’t matter which way you publish it, either. Of course, you have to do the whole process alone (or with a beta reader or two), if you merely publish for free somewhere on the internet. Or if you’re self-publishing. But the editing of the first draft is always the author’s work, even if they’re with a publishing house. Because this is still part of writing the story.

There are three different things to do with your first draft during the editing process.

First of all, you need to revise the story, check it for internal errors, smooth everything out. This is especially important for someone who doesn’t do a lot of plotting before they write everything down. The beginning, the middle, and the end of the story don’t necessarily fit together well in that case, because your muse drove you to another venue than originally planned. A good revision will clean out logic issues or issues where two or three parts of the story negate each other. So, first of all, revise your story. Read it through with fresh eyes (which is why you should take a little break after writing it, so you can take a step back and look at it anew). Read it as a reader and see if there’s something which simply doesn’t fit. If you have something which doesn’t fit, correct it. That might mean rewriting some chapters or scenes, but it’s absolutely necessary. Readers are sensitive about that kind of thing and with good and valid reason.

General editing comes next. Read through the story and ask yourself whether that scene you’re reading is really necessary. Does it either further the plot or deepen the reader’s understanding of one or more characters? If it does one thing (or even both), keep the scene, but if it doesn’t, cut it out. Every scene has to fulfil at least one of the aforementioned jobs. Ideally, a scene will do both, but that’s not always possible. Also ask yourself if you can tighten the scene a little, if you can make it a little smoother, pace it better. Do this from the beginning to the end. Since you have done your revising first, the internal logic of your story is in place already, which means that you won’t pace or streamline a scene you will cut out or change later on.

Finally, you have to get down to the very bones of your story: grammar and spelling. A spell-check can be useful and I certainly always have mine on when I’m writing, but you will still want to smooth out the wording more. For this part of the process, I find it useful to read out loud, to hear the sentences, because it helps me to see if they really flow. Optimize the sentences, see if all words you use are the words you need for this. And then, do this part over and over again (I go through my stories for proof-reading at least three times - depending on how well you spot mistakes, you might need less or more).

Editing is a lot of hard work and it can be even harder, if you’re on a page or (more likely) word limit. I once wrote a story for an anthology (which was never published, so I published Thorns a while back myself) and was on a 300-words limit.

I do give myself a limit of 2,500 words per chapter for novellas and 3,000 words per chapter for novels, but this is not a hard limit, it merely helps my pacing, my motivation (because I can estimate how much more I have to do in a day), and my chapter length (which is similar this way). But once I’ve written the first draft down, those limits go out of the window, I do not check them when I edit, so chapters might fall below the count or go a good deal above it. It’s just a trick for me while writing.

But a lot of people are really on a word limit, because they write for a publisher who does have one, because they are writing something non-fictional for college or suchlike, or for other reasons. If you edit with a word limit, you have to tailor all three stages of the editing process to it. You need to revise with the word limit in mind, trying to make the changes without changing the word count you have too much. You need to edit out the scenes very carefully, cutting or adding lines, depending on whether you’re above or below the limit. And once you’re down to the actual words and sentences, you need to streamline everything as much as possible, so you get as close to the limit as you can. It’s not easy and I surely don’t envy you. My word limit is self-imposed and I can ignore it when I feel like it, you might not be able to.

Editing is a very important process, even though it’s also something the general audience is hardly aware of (at least of the extent of it, because a lot of people think editing is mostly about grammar and spelling, which it’s not - that is only the last step). As a writer, you have to do a lot of it yourself, even though you will have a second (or even third) pair of eyes on it, if you hire a professional editor for the last step or are published by a publisher, where a professional editor will go over it before it goes to print (or online, these days). If you can afford it, having a professional editor go over it is always a good idea. If you can’t, finding a few beta readers to weed out illogical parts and help with the pacing is also good. A few more eyes on a text are never wrong.

I do really hate the whole editing process, but I know it’s necessary, so I do it four times a year (plus a lighter one for my blog posts). It’s part of my work and, as with every job, there’s things you like, things you love, and things you hate. Editing falls in the ‘things I hate’ category, but that doesn’t mean I would inflict my first drafts on anyone but myself. Especially for money.