Tips and Tricks for Editing
This post goes a bit deeper than the few bullet points on the “start here” page. For many people, editing is a slog, and it can certainly feel discouraging if you’ve been over your narrative dozens of times and you keep finding issues. But editing is 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.
Level of Words
At this level, we’re looking at micro-edits, the kinds of changes that help your story flow properly from word to word and sentence to sentence. This is where you’re going to be catching grammar and language issues, along with stylistic edits to shift the tone to what you ultimately want.
The reading edit: I feel like this has to be the most common form of editing, and it’s the one I do most. You read through your work, silently, and correct issues as you go. Keep up a steady pace and pause whenever you need to. I usually put an “EDIT HERE” tag wherever I stop, and use a heading style for it to pop on the document outline.
The read-aloud edit: this can feel really awkward to do, but it helps enormously. I resisted doing this for so long; after all, it’s basically like talking to yourself in an empty room. How weird is that? But you will catch a lot more when you hear the words.
Use Comic Sans: I mentioned this in the “start here” page as well, and it’s weird, but it may actually work. I saw this tip somewhere, perhaps on Reddit, and commenters seemed to mostly have the same reaction, which was basically “this is so stupid, but it somehow works.” It may be some kind of placebo effect, but it did seem to help. Just remember to switch back to a sane font before you send your manuscript anywhere (and make sure that your font and format matches 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 writing to achieve a higher word count than you’re at, 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.
Targeted edit: perhaps there’s a
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 things as you read through your story, but when you’re going sentence by sentence, it’s difficult to detect some of the scene-level items. At this level, we’re looking to make sure that scenes make sense, and that your characters, plot, and setting are interacting well. You’re going to spend a lot more time at the Words level, but this level is honestly a bit more difficult:
Read the scene in its entirety, silently or aloud, to check the feel
Check in with your characters
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 that relates to the plot? 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 or answered a background question about lore or centered on a humorous interaction between characters. The nice thing is that you can keep those gems in older revisions or in separate documents, to use pieces of them in some other story. But for the one you’re working right now? Those scenes are dead weight.
Level of Story
At this point, we’re getting into the very structure of your story. Here, we check to see if the bones are solid and well connected. At the micro end of it, we’re looking at transitions between scenes. At the highest view, we’re looking at how the entire story pieces together.
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 an x-ray of your story, showing you the how the entire narrative fits together without the distractions of things like deciding if “affect” or “effect” is the correct choice for that one sentence in the eighth scene. To create or edit the outline, go scene-by-scene and write a quick summary
How does your main character change by the end? The vast majority of stories need to have the main character end up different at the end than they were at the start. 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 and use their emotions. Maybe you have an extremely competent character that finally finds an environment where they can be confident and proud of what they can do. 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?
At Any Level
TK. I don’t remember where I learned this trick, but if you get stuck somewhere, pop a “TK” in the area, along with notes on what you were thinking, and move on. In English, the “TK” letter combination generally doesn’t exist, so you can find your stuck-points easily with a search through your document. This allows you to skip over problematic sections and continue editing.
Be brutal. I said this in the “start here” post as well, and it’s important. Be willing to cut like crazy. Any sentence, scene, character, place, etc. that isn’t serving the ultimate needs of the story should be kicked out the airlock. Now, can you get away with taking a few pages to describe the history of a tree branch? Yeah, 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 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 fine.