A Method of Madness & the Order of Editing

WWW 93 A Method of Madness & the Order of Editing

Writing a story will always go one of two ways. You will either plan out everything and create an intricate outline or you will be a pantser and jump into your story with no plan in sight. Obviously, the world's not black and white and a mix of both of these things will inevitably happen, but I like to push the idea that you should have a clear order when it comes to editing.

Why Do I Need to Plan My Edits?

Editing can be a mire of information.

If you just wrote a book, congratulations! But now when you start to reread it, it's easy to think you might hate everything and want to change it all. That is normal! Every writer will feel that way at some point. But what is important to know is that if you dive in and try to change everything at once, you are most likely going to get stuck. There is simply too much information to process.

What Should I Edit First?

I like to split the idea of editing into two categories: big ideas and small ideas.

• Big Ideas: characterization, structure, flow, voice, setting, direction, plot, meaning, and impact.

• Small Ideas: grammar, punctuation, word usage, and other sentence-level edits.

If you start editing and focus on all the teeny tiny commas and words you want to change, you will get stuck because that is a huge edit full of distractions when you have not done anything else yet. At the same time, those edits might be pointless if you have to make bigger plot changes later on! Imagine editing an entire chapter, word-by-word, only to later delete it because it is no longer important to your story. By doing so, you’ve just exhausted yourself and potentially made edits you never had to do in the first place if you just worked on the big picture first.

Types of Edits

There are content edits that focus on the big ideas, line edits for the sentence- and word-level edits and then proofreading edits for catching any last errors after your book has been edited many times and is finished. You can have specialty edits like a manuscript evaluation to see what state your book is in and what you should do next. There are also beta readings which is a reading to see how everything is working and what might need to be changed. That one can be done at any point depending on what you need help with.

One of my favorite kinds of edits that you, the writer, can do yourself is a spot edit. This is when you have a very specific need or area of the book you must focus on. Sometimes if you have one kind of problem, you might want to read through focusing on only that problem. For example, if you have edited your entire book and know that you overuse descriptions that do not add to the story, you might want to do an entire edit where you read through and mark every nod, turn of the head, unnecessary footstep, and smile that your character makes in order to improve your language. I totally support making that one round of editing if that helps you focus on that one idea and to avoid being overwhelmed by everything else you have to do.

Make a list and do one thing at a time! Breaking up the giant effort that is editing into smaller, actionable steps will lighten the load immensely.

Conclusion

You can edit your book however you want. There truly is no wrong way to do it. If you like diving in and trying to combat every problem at once and it somehow works for you... that's excellent! I'm here just to provide solutions if you find yourself having a hard time heading one way or the other.

As a young writer, I definitely did multiple rounds of editing where I tried to do everything at once but then I only found that my big ideas were never quite right. Nowadays, I create a basic three-step edit where my first one is all the big ideas, my second one is all the small ideas and corrections, and my last one is to catch any remaining mistakes. But I also add in little side quests and smaller edits where I focus on one specific problem at a time if there is something in particular I need to correct in the work as a whole.

I hope this helps you plan your future edits! If you need any assistance from me, be sure to check out my other writing advice articles or my editing services.