Writing Advice: Editing
From @namenottaken12 on Twitter: “editing is my favorite part of writing. What is your process like and how many drafts do you go through before you consider a story complete?”
I feel like I’ve covered my editing process before, maybe in a book you can get for free, but since I’m currently in the middle of editing The Price of Thorns, why not revisit it?
I do a little bit of editing while in first draft mode, mostly because I have gotten to the point where I can recognize patterns in my writing (and words like “really” and “very” that I know I’ll end up hunting out later). When the first draft is finished, I’ll let it sit for a while until I feel a good distance from it (the time varies based on a lot of things but is usually at least a month). Then I go through it again from beginning to end to catch all the little things that I don’t want my beta readers wasting time on.
So this would be a second draft, technically. After that I send it out to a group of readers and get back a critique. I incorporate the critique into the next draft (third) and will usually send it out to another group of readers after that. When that critique comes back I’ll incorporate it (fourth), and by this point I expect that the changes will be getting smaller.
At this point (or sometimes between the third and fourth) I will sometimes do revision passes looking for specific things. If I’m worried that a character’s voice isn’t consistent, or that their arc doesn’t quite land, I’ll do a character pass. If I have worries about the tone of the book, I can go through with an eye to places where the language doesn’t support the tone I want. I have also done a description pass (because I frequently skimp on description) and a continuity pass where I wanted to make sure that all the days of the week happen in the proper order (this was especially necessary when I was writing alternating POVs over a tightly packed timespan— “Okay, it’s Tuesday for Dev and this says it’s Wednesday for Lee, but then they get together the next day for both of them and that’s Wednesday, so I gotta change Lee’s day or figure out what Dev was doing on Wednesday and make that Thursday”). I don’t count those as full draft revisions, but they’ll end up being 3.1 or 4.2 or whatever.
When I’m pretty sure the story is solid and I have run out of beta readers, I’ll do the final pre-publication pass, which is an out-loud proofread. It’s always tedious but also invaluable, because I catch things while reading aloud that I’ve missed in all the previous passes.
So usually there are at least five drafts, sometimes more, between the idea and the finished book. I wouldn’t say that editing is my favorite part of writing, because there’s an energy to a first draft that I really like and miss when it’s gone, but I do get into the editing process. Taking a story and figuring out a way to make it better is a really fun exercise, and a necessary one for any writer.