Tips and Tricks for Editing
For many writers, editing can be quite a slog: if you’ve been over your story dozens of times and you keep finding issues, it might feel that no end is in sight. But editing is the key to cutting and polishing your narrative into something that really shines. So, let’s go through some things to try, organized by the level of editing involved. Use some of these tips to get more out of each round of editing, and to make bigger leaps towards your goals. And while editing can be painful at times, it can also be fun to see your work mature.
As with all of my tips and recommendations, you don’t have to do all of it. Try as much as you want and add whatever works to your process!
Level of Words
At this level, we’re looking at micro-edits, the kinds of changes that help your writing flow from word to word and sentence to sentence. You’re hunting for grammar and language issues but also making stylistic edits to refine your tone.
The reading edit: this has to be the most common form of editing: you read through your work, silently, and correct issues as you go. Keep up a steady pace and pause whenever you need to. Whether you get through just a paragraph or multiple chapters, any progress is great!
The read-aloud edit: this can feel really awkward at first, but I highly recommend it. I resisted doing this for a long time; after all, it’s pretty much talking to yourself in an empty room. How weird is that? But trust me: you will catch so much more when you hear the words aloud.
Use Comic Sans: this is super weird, but it may actually work. I saw this tip somewhere, perhaps on Reddit, and most commenters posted reactions that boiled down to, “this is so stupid, but it somehow works.” Perhaps it’s a placebo effect, but I did seem to catch more when I tried it. Just remember to switch back to a sane font before you send out your manuscript (and as an aside: make sure that your font and formatting match the manuscript requirements).
Eliminate words: you may need one or more editing passes dedicated to this, but if a word, phrase, or sentence doesn’t need to be there, get rid of it. Even if you’re trying to achieve a higher word count, it’s generally better to add scenes or character moments than to fatten your existing writing with extra words. The read-aloud will help a lot with this.
Color, highlight, or cut away: if you have an awkward or bulky sentence that doesn’t seem to fit, but you feel that it holds something important, you can change the text color, highlight it, or cut and paste it somewhere else. This technique helps you keep a steady pace. For instance, I kept getting stuck on the openings of new scenes, and I’d spend an obnoxious amount of time trying to tweak a sentence or two. To get out of that trap, I started changing the color of the opening sentences and skipping to the next part. With the rest of the scene fresh in my mind, I often have a much easier time editing the beginning. And sometimes, the answer was to delete the whole opening and start later into the scene.
Level of Scenes
At this level, we’re looking at the sections and chapters of your story. The Level of Words tips will help a bit here, and you will catch some scene-level needs as you read through your story, but when you’re going sentence by sentence, it’s difficult to detect what the overall scene is doing for your story. The goal here is to ensure that each scene makes sense: the characters, action, and setting should all be working together in the way you want, and that it all flows from the previous scene and into the next one.
Read the scene in its entirety, silently or aloud, to check the feel: you’re going to mostly catch word-level issues with this, but it’ll still give you a sense of the overall scene, so it’s worth it to do this with the scene in isolation.
Check the previous scene: how does the current scene follow up on the previous one? What is the transition between them? If you’re moving between perspectives, go back to the last scene that featured the current viewpoint and check it (and if you’re in that situation, double-check that you’re providing context to bring the reader back to the previous perspective, which you can do with tone, visuals, setting, etc.).
Check in with your characters: if you know your characters well (see the “People” section in the “Start Here” post), you’ll get a sense if the scene feels wrong. Are your characters behaving consistently? Are their decisions and actions in keeping with what you’ve already established (both in the narrative and outside of it)? For instance, if your character is typically soft-spoken and is suddenly shouting angrily in this scene, do you show how something has changed?
Check the dialogue: for many authors, dialogue is the hardest part of writing, but knowing your characters well will help a lot. And this is also when reading aloud comes in handy. Ideally, you want your dialogue to clearly indicate who’s talking through differences in tone and word choice. You want your characters to speak consistently (or to change gradually as the story develops). And you want it to sound authentic. Good dialogue is a tall order, really, and can trip you up, so take advantage of tip #7 below if you want to keep rolling through difficult dialogue.
Ask yourself some questions. Mainly, what does the scene do? Does it advance the plot? Does it bring about an important change in one or more of your primary characters? Does it change a relationship between characters? If the answers to these kinds of questions are “no,” the scene may not be worth keeping. I’ve had to cut so many scenes that I loved, ones that introduced a really neat aspect of the setting, answered a background question about lore, or centered on a humorous interaction between characters, but didn’t move the characters or narrative forward. The nice thing is that you can keep those gems, saved in older revisions or in separate documents, and use them (or pieces of them) in other stories. But for the one you’re working right now? Those scenes are dead weight.
Check the next scene: make sure that your current scene flows well into the next one. Do a read-through or read-aloud from the conclusion of the current scene into the start of the next. It should be very clear if the context, viewpoint, or setting changes.
Color, highlight, or cut away: if you’re not sure how important a scene is (or parts of it), try the same thing as tip #5 in the Level of Words: change the text color, highlight it, or cut it away into a separate area. This will flag the scene for you, and you can come back to it later. I did this a lot when I was cutting down my novel to a reasonable length, and coloring these sections made a big impact.
Level of Story
At this level, we’re getting into the structure of your story. Are the bones of the narrative solid and well connected? Do sequences of scenes flow together? Does the entire story piece together in a compelling way? Do important things change between the beginning and end?
Using an outline: if you didn’t start with an outline, the editing phase might be a good time to make one. That might feel backward, but an outline is like an x-ray of your story, showing you how the entire narrative fits together without the distractions of grammar, word choices, and dialogue. To create or edit the outline, go scene-by-scene and write a quick summary of each (or even just a brief title). If you want it to be really helpful, identify how your main character(s) change or advance in each scene.
Compare your story’s arc to one or more standard narrative arcs. I mentioned this in the “Start Here” post, and I think it’s important to revisit it here. You may be trying to strike out in a new and unexpected way with your narrative structure, and if you can pull it off, that’s amazing! But for most of us, using one of the classic narrative structures as a guide makes for better stories. There are a lot to choose from: 3-Act, 7-Act, Hero’s Journey, Freytag’s Pyramid, Dan Harmon’s Story Circle, John Truby’s 22 Steps, and more. In general, they all follow a somewhat similar path that you’ll find familiar: the setup, an inciting incident/call to adventure, rising action, a turn for the worse, the darkest point, the climax, and a resolution. There are even guides out there that suggest how long each section of the structure should be! So, pick whichever version you like best and check your plot against it. It doesn’t have to match perfectly, especially if you’re looking at one that tells you how much time there should be at each step, but it should map decently well to at least one of them. If it doesn’t, you might want to adjust it, since these structures are so well-proven.
How does your main character change by the end? The vast majority of stories need to have the main character undergo a transformation between the beginning and end. The change can be subtle, but it needs to be real and recognizable by your readers. Maybe you have a stubbornly independent character that learns to rely on others. Or a wildly angry character that learns to control their emotions. Maybe you have a competent but shy character that finds an environment where they can be confident and proud. Or perhaps your hero only changes a little, but the villain has a drastic shift. There are many ways to do this. If characters aren’t changing, I’m not going to say that’s a red flag, but it’s awfully close. There are ways to pull off those kinds of stories, but something still has to change…
What else changes by the end? This is where Orson Scott Card’s MICE quotient comes in very handy. The acronym stands for Milieu (setting), Idea (the central question), Character, and Event. For a deeper dive, I’d recommend Card’s How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy. The central idea is that one or more of the following story aspects must change between the beginning and end. Here’s a brief overview:
If your story has a milieu plot, it starts with the introduction of a new setting and finishes with an exit from the setting or with a settling into the setting.
If your story has an idea plot, it essentially starts with a question and ends with the answer/solution to the question.
If your story has a character plot, it starts with the character having something of a crisis of self or purpose, and ends with the character undergoing a change, finding purpose, or otherwise claiming an identity.
If your story has an event plot, it starts with a major change to the world or character’s life and ends with a new status quo.
At Any Level
TK. I don’t remember where I learned this trick, but if you get stuck while editing, pop a “TK” into your work, along with notes on what you were thinking, and move on. The “TK” letter combination doesn’t show up in English, so you can find your stuck-points with a simple CTRL-F in your document (if you’re not writing in English, your language likely has a similar letter pair to use). This allows you to skip over problematic sections and continue editing. For example, say that you have a side character with a name you don’t actually like, but you’re having trouble coming up with a name that feels right: rather than sit there beating your head against it, just ‘TK’ the name and move on.
Be brutal. I said this in the “Start Here” post as well, and it’s important: be willing to cut like crazy. Any words, sentences, scenes, characters, places, or anything else that isn’t serving the ultimate needs of the story should be kicked out the airlock. Now, you can get away with taking a few pages to describe the history of a tree branch, but you really have to know how to do it, and it has to matter to your story. Otherwise: airlock. And don’t worry: you can always save earlier drafts or pop your favorite cut scenes into another document. For instance, I cut an entire sequence from a novel, but I decided later that it represented too much of a crucial pivot for my main character, so I brought it back. In-process literary necromancy is perfectly fine.
Use whatever markings you want to organize and highlight your thoughts. Use different text colors, heading formats, highlighting, bolding, and more, and do so liberally. If you have a critical scene that you’re building around, write a little note at the beginning or end of it that describes your plans. If you’re unsure of a scene, write a little note at the top about why. If you’re trying to track how your main character is feeling and changing as the story goes, pop some words in brackets to note how the character’s developing. You can build this kind of scaffolding anywhere in your story as you write and edit, just use formatting or key symbols/letters to easily find the scaffolding so you can remove it later.
Use a bookmark of some kind. When I reach a stopping point in my editing, I’ll pop an “EDIT HERE” on its own line and in a header format. It then appears in the document’s outline, making it easy to hop to when I come back to it.
Consider beta readers. If someone else reads your work, they’ll almost certainly find feedback points, both positive and negative, that you’d miss. You can start with friends or family: they’re easy to find, easy to talk to, and at least some will do it for free. But friends and family may not be willing to give you the critical feedback you need (or provide only vague critical feedback), and they may not have the background or skills to identify why they like or don’t like parts of your story. So also consider paid beta readers. I hired two through Fiverr, and it was a great decision. The first one took more of a feel-good approach, with many good things to say about my work and only a few pieces of light criticism - it was nice to get validation, but not as useful overall. The second one, who charged more (and for good reason), found some critical issues with the novel, gave plenty of constructive criticism, and also identified what worked well. That kind of feedback, coming as a report with detailed notes, can be enormously helpful in editing.
Conclusion
Editing can feel like a slog, and it can be discouraging to comb through you story over and over and over. But not only is it essential to refining your work into something more marketable and readable, it can be an enjoyable experience, as you shape your words closer and closer to what you truly want. Follow as many of these tips as makes sense for you, and if you find yourself treading water or losing momentum, I’d recommend moving to a different part of your story or even switching to another project for a bit to recharge.