As aspiring writers there’s nothing, we rather want to do than write: The idea, the story and the characters.
We want to bring them to life in the best possible way.
And if you’re anything like me you struggled with the dreaded blank page before finally getting started.
You put in hours of work for months, trying to squeeze every last bit of creativity until you finished your draft.
Now, what if I were to tell you the dreaded blank document, the document you thought was the worst to get over, isn’t actually the worst, would you believe me?
Because now that you’re done, there’s this thing called editing.
And it can (and will) be a pain in your ass.
You have your precious draft, a vision, but you’re standing in front of a mountain.
And I understand if your first thought is: “how do I get started?”
Here’s the thing: The mountain inside your mind might be filled with rocks, thorns, and everything unpleasant and dreadful, but the truth is: It doesn’t have to be.
The most common pitfalls are also the easiest to avoid and if you do, you’ll see a nice concrete trail leading to the top.
I know it’s an incline and it’s something you must conquer, but get comfortable, and I’ll take you through my editing journey.
I’m going to take you through how I edit my novels and help you avoid falling into the same pitfalls and make your novel editing enjoyable.
It all starts with an overview.
First off without an overview you’ll be lost from the start.
The editing phase is long and will involve a lot of changes, and the number 1 thing I discovered made my life a nightmare was the lack of structure.
I had multiple ideas, notes, or thoughts inside the same documents. I made notes in the margin of my documents as I read through the story. It was so overwhelming that when I finally created folders and separated my thoughts into separate documents.
Puff.
It was gone.
So, do yourself a favor and create a folder structure you can work with.
Either by naming your documents, creating multiple folders, or a combination. The theory is: If your story folder is overwhelming, so will your story.
Personally, I like to keep it like this:
Help yourself by keeping backups
The first thing I do before editing any novel is to make a backup of my original file.
It’s the perfect way to be safe, but it also works as a motivator.
if you need to compare changes, need inspiration, or just need a pad on the back, then a quick look will do wonders.
Maybe it’s something that’ll work for you, maybe not.
That’s a huge thing about editing: You need to figure out what works for you.
The editing process is something you get better at the more you do it, and you’ll probably find yourself changing things up multiple times when going through a draft and that’s normal.
It means you’re improving.
With these two, smaller, but equally important points out of the way, let’s get to the real reason why you’re here:
How to make your novel editing phase enjoyable.
Create an editing flow
I wrote the novel I’m currently working on, in just under 3 months, and at this point I have used 6+ months editing.
I think I might be somewhere around 60% done.
And that’s the reality of editing.
Editing will take time and for most this reality pushes them away. I know it’s a lot of time, but it’ll only suck if you make it suck.
And one thing, I discovered helped me enjoy novel editing is to find an editing flow, or order of things, that works for you.
Because you can’t edit everything at once.
If you start at page 1 and continue to the last page, and have to do this multiple times until you think the story is done, then you’ll feel like you’re going nowhere and burn out.
I can’t tell you how long I dreaded editing my novel. It was the one thing I didn’t want to do.
(Okay, I might be a bit biased as I love to write, but that wasn’t the reason.)
I would sit down, edit from top to bottom, and it would be so overwhelming I just gave up.
And, therefore, to avoid the overwhelming feeling, I decided to start focusing on different aspects of my story and start from the top. I divided it into an order of importance (an example):
- Overall story/plot
- Character development
- Dialogue
- Formatting
- Grammar
- Miscellaneous stuff
And this is now the order I follow whenever I edit.
I focus on following it to the point. Taking my list from the top to bottom. The only exception is if I find something really bad or minor, then I’ll do it immediately.
But why does it matter?
It matters because you never know how changing one thing will lead you to change another thing. And if you go from top to bottom without a specific goal in mind, you’ll end up editing the same things over and over again, basically wasting your time.
And having an order of importance will, in the end, make novel editing easier for you, because you only focus on one thing at a time
Now, if you’re just starting out and it seems weird to skip something you want to edit. Then remind yourself: “If I change it now, I might end up changing it 100 times over”
And I’m sure you’ll appreciate the fact you don’t waste any more time than you have to.
Therefore, when you have decided on your order, I recommend reading the story with a notepad open.
Writing with a notes document (with example)
Let’s say your first focus point is the overall story.
Then as you read through your story, if you find something that doesn’t fit the plot, you add it to your notes with a few words to why you don’t like it or what to do about it.
Sidenote: The notes shouldn’t be over detailed. It should just be enough to give you an idea of what you don’t like and what a possible solution could be.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Once you’re done with the read-through it’s time to go through the notes.
Here you just do whatever seems natural to you, but they’re written in order of appearance, so if you don’t know where to start, then you can should take advantage and start from the top.
Herre’s an example of my “Editing pass through” document:
The great thing about keeping a note document open while editing is you’re able to quickly write in new notes.
You’ll, undoubtably, experience that one single note turns into 2 and that’s a good thing. Because it gives you a smooth transition to the next thing on your list.
And just because your document gets longer, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer. It just means you’ve identified something to work on.
So don’t get discouraged if you never reach zero. It’s better to have something to do than nothing at all.
Give yourself a few breaks
I know your novel draft is done and you want to publish it as soon as possible, but pump the breaks for a bit.
It’s all glamorous to publish a draft and you want to show off your product, but give it time to breath for a while.
Just like you (hopefully) do when you finish the draft.
But you don’t need to give them a month or two.
Just give your thoughts time to settle and breathe a bit.
Maybe for a week.
And then you’re ready to go in again.
I like to do this between each draft version I make as I find it helps keep the story fresh and positive inside my mind. It feels like I’m resetting my mind and getting ready for the next task on the list.
Also with something as intense as novel editing, it’s important to give yourself a small break to avoid burning out as well.
Now just because you put the story to the side, it doesn’t mean you aren’t spending time on it.
In the week you’re away you’ll most likely spend time experiencing something new or exploring another source of creativity. Use these to your advantage and let them influence and help you edit your novel, give it a breath of fresh air, and boost your desire to write/edit.
It’s a patience game.
This might be the most important point. If you only take a single point away from this post, let it be this: You need to be patient.
As I stated earlier, I hated editing in the beginning. It was the one thing about writing I just couldn’t see myself doing, but now I’m having the time of my life.
Did something revolutionary happen? No.
Did I have some sort of revelation? Absolutely not.
I just decided to slow things down and make it more structured.
Editing is like a gigantic puzzle you need to solve. The problem is, unlike real puzzles, you don’t know how many pieces there are and where they are.
It’s a puzzle you need to explore one little section at a time, and I struggled damn hard with in the beginning.
And therefore, I can’t recommend more than enough that you try to find some of order and structure to the whole process.
I already talked about finding an order to the things you edit, but finding a system to actually getting the editing done is equally as important. (If you need help: here’s my 3 step process to build a system that works)
How you structure your files and folders, which documents you need and how you do things. It’s all an experimentation game.
And if you’re currently going through your first edition of your first novel and you feel a bit lost, then let me reassure you: It’s absolutely normal, but it gets better with time.
You’re allowed to add to your story
I know the accepted standard is to remove while editing, but don’t be afraid to actually sit down and do a lot of “after writing”.
I have used 10,000+ minutes just editing and at this point I have only added stuff.
Just because you have reached the editing phase doesn’t mean you have the end product. You can (and should) add the missing pieces if you feel like they can make your story stronger. Even if it means writing 40 extra pages.
This can be anything from you missing characters, character development or even plot.
If you think it’s missing you need to add it. Of course while keeping the folder structure.
Personally, I do all my “adding” inside separate files before adding them to the main story as I feel it allows me to avoid getting distracted.
Editing is your platform to be wild and you’ll spend a lot of time doing things. Which at times might not make sense before they finally make sense.
Go through it like you’re the intended reader (bonus)
A massive tip that helped me gain a better insight on my story is to read your novel like you’re the intended reader.
It might seem trivial, but as authors we tend to look it from a perspective of feedback.
We don’t want to look dumb in front of others and we would rather change the novel to our liking instead of the intended the audience than having people tell us it’s shit.
(Which is paradoxial, becaue if we truly wanted the best piece we’d write for our readers. But we truly don’t. Just an important point to keep in mind)
Therefore, go read through your novel like you’re your audience. Go into the experience as a fan, enjoy the story, and you’ll find it helps tremendously with enjoyment of editing (and writing)
That’s a wrap
Editing is overwhelming. You know there’s somethings that need improvement, but you just don’t know what.
It’s a long process and you might find yourself spending more time editing than you’ll ever do writing, so why not try to make it as simple and fun as possible?
I like to keep multiple editing drafts. In fact for the novel I’m editing now, I have 4 drafts:
- The first editing draft is just the story as it is now.
- The second editing draft is you filling in the holes you have found.
- The third editing draft is you expanding on the story.
- The fourth editing draft is you finishing the story you like before it’s time to actually start building the final product.
(Okay, the number of drafts might differ from novel to novel, but I hope you get the point)
And before you know it, you’ll end up with the one final novel draft, polished and ready to being published.
Until next time – Hope you have a productive and creative day.
Your writing buddy,
Jack