Found this fantastic resource and needed to share immediately!
If you want to publish a novel, you should get it edited. There are different types of editors. Developmental editors assess your novel for "big picture" characteristics, like Plot, Character Development, Scene Development, World-Building, etc. If you're being traditionally published, your publisher usually provides a developmental editor.
If you're looking to self publish, developmental editors charge $$ for their service, which is fair, as it is an involved one.
This video goes through what a developmental editor looks for and tells you how you can edit your own story with these things in mind. That's really cool and I took a bunch of notes. Highly recommend the video if this is something you're looking to do :)
oh ETA: the video ends on this slide, which is so cute and encouraging. so if it sounds like a scary thing to listen to, just know this lecturer is absolutely pro writers!
I wrote this in a reblog to one of @boy-who-can-fly‘s posts, but as I couldn’t add any tags to that that would make it findable to more than just my followers, I figured I’d make the same content in an original post because YAY TAGS!
Without further ado...
1) Take a break.
Some authors have suggested taking a break for six or so weeks, but I find anything longer than three makes me too distanced from my story, and I have to work a lot harder to get back into my protagonist’s head. During this break, don’t so much as look at your story. Instead, focus on something else. Maybe growing your author platform, planning or developing another wip, or researching the publishing industry if publishing is the end goal for your book (this goes for both traditional and self pub). The point of this is that without some distance, it’s going to be a lot harder to see larger developmental flaws.
(this is a very long post, so the rest of the steps are below the break)
2) The first read-through.
After your break has ended, and you’ve got to be a little stern with yourself not to extend it farther than what you set, or else you’ll never return to it, do a readthrough. This means either just reading it off you’re computer or kindle, or going to somewhere like staples and getting it printed and spiral bound (this costs money, but I found it helpful down the line). Two rules: 1) no editing. 2) look at the first rule. This read-through is going to help give you a general sense of what is and isn’t working in your book; the problems you notice here are likely going to be the biggest ones. (if you want, you can combine this step with step three, but I found it more helpful to keep them seperate)
3) Outline.
It doesn’t matter whether you outlined before, or whether you decided to pants it. By the time you get to editing, you need to have an outline that’s reflective of what you actually put on the page. Go through your story, chapter by chapter, and for each new scene write down
what is your character’s goal in this scene
what is standing in their way
what is the outcome of the scene.
This list should not go into depth; one short sentece per point, MAX. That being said, make sure to keep things specific, so “MC wants to convice X to go with them to Y.” is going to be a lot more useful to you later on than “MC tries to convince them to go.” This outline is going to help you objectively look at your story structure, as you can see a lot more of what’s happening at once, without being quite so overwhelmed by the sheer mass of the words you wrote. Yes, this step can be a bit tedious, but it is so, so worth it.
4) Sort out what you need to fix, aka start making a game plan for your edits.
Now that you’ve read through your wip at least once through, and probably twice, you probably have a pretty good idea of what you need to fix. The key here is that right now, you want to be fixing on the global edits - the things that span beyond just a single scene or chapter. The reason why is that you don’t want to be spending hours perfecting a scene that you’re just going to need to cut later because it doesn’t advance the plot.
In a new document or spreadsheet (whatever you think will work better for you, I liked using a google doc), write issues you see with:
Each of your main cast (regarding character development, motivations voice, etc)
Setting/s (consistancy, realism for your world)
General worldbuilding (consistancy, things poorly explained/set up)
Main plot (following a given plot structure, building tension, etc)
Each subplot (how it intertwines with the main plot, plot structure, building tension, etc)
Other major things you noticed during your readthroughs
These things tend to be larger scope, and generally are worth addressing first.
5) Picking your edit.
Look at the list of edits, and see which one is going to cause the most ripples through your story. This is going to be the first thing you look at to fix. If there are more than one edits that will all have major impacts on the story, think about which edit would make the other ones easier.
For example, in my wip, Project Toxin, my plot was, well, a trainwreck and a dumpster fire’s love child. But my characterization for my MC was also a wreck. Still, getting the overall plot more in order would make it easier for me to edit my MC, so I chose plot first.
6) Make a game plan for your edit.
Before diving in and ripping through your first draft, come up with a game plan. Brainstorm possible solutions to the edit you’ve chosen, and look at what ripples it would cause. You want to make sure that what route you take isn’t going to upset something major or crucial to your story. Most likely whatever solution you choose will cause some other upsets, so just make sure to think through what makes most sense for your story.
For example, when working on my story, I was fixing plot first. Figuring out my game plan meant looking at my scene list and moving things around/adding/cutting content until I had a plot that was much more satisfactory, and that was, in my mind, not a wreck.
Possible game plans for different types of edits:
1. Plot:
Look at your scene list. What helps to advance the plot? What is dragging the pacing. Are there any elements that you are adding or cutting in your overall story that need to be accounted for? With this in mind, cross out scenes that you want to cut, move scenes around that need to come in a different order, add scenes that need to be added, and mark scenes that need to be combined into one.
2. Characters:
For each of your characters, look at their character development. It’s going to be hard to make them come to life better on the page unless you’ve got a grasp of who they are, even if you didn’t plan them out originally. If you have not, consider listing in a spreadsheet or google doc what their backstory is, what their goals are, why they want those goals, and what a few of their strengths and weaknesses are. Also think about their voice: what words do they use more often? Sentence structures? What do they sound like when they’re talking? Stuff like that. If your character is inconsistant, pick one version of them that you want to follow (knowing that they will likely change over the course of the story), and look at what parts of them you will need to change to accomodate that.
3. Setting/Worldbuilding:
I’ve put these together here as they’re somewhat similar. For poorly explained aspects of worldbuilding, look at where you might add in little details so you can better set that foundation (this is not usually a global edit). If things are inconsistant, look at what makes the most sense for your story, and like what we talked about with characters, alter the rest to accomodate that.
7) Making edits.
This is where you really get to dig in and really move things around. Using the edit you’ve picked and the game plan you’ve developed, go through scene by scene and make the changes. I strongly recommend having a seperate doc from your rough draft to store your second draft in. Currently, my process is to have both open at the same time, and if a scene is already fine, I’ll just copy/paste it over. At least for me, however, it’s usually not, and I’ll either make tweaks to fix it up, or, more often at this early stage, I’ll rewrite it. As an added bonus, I also find that rewriting it makes my prose a lot stronger, since I’ve grown so much as a writer since I originally wrote the scene.
Since you know your story better, you may find other elements that you want to change are improving as you edit. If not though, don’t worry - they’ll get their own editing pass.
8) Repeat steps 5-7
You made a list of edits you needed to make back in step four. Now, follow steps 5-7 to make all of those edits and changes.
9) Repeat steps 2-8
Two steps telling you to repeat in a row? Yes. The deal now is that you want to make sure you’ve cleaned up any global edits before moving on to anything smaller. If you’ve been thourough thus far, this will be a very fast step. If not, think of this step as a safety net. There may have been ripples that you didn’t notice earlier on, and it’s a good thing you’re catching them now.
10) Chapter edits
At this point, we’ve cleaned up all the big edits. Now we’re going to look at each chapter. Within each chapter, there needs to be a mini-arc. A beginning, middle, and end. This is the time to really focus on that. Also focus on things like tightening up prose, combining or compressing paragraphs, making sure you’ve adequately set the scene, etc. If you’re over the word count limit regarding your genre, also focus on cutting a certain number of words from each chapter to put your story back within those limits.
11) The little things
This is about combing through your wip to find all of the little errors that have made their way through edits. Typos, weird or incorrect grammar, useless adverbs, things like that. At this point, everything is on a more superficial level.
Beta Readers
Given that this has gotten quite long, I’m not going to go in depth about beta readers here, but around step 10/11, you’re going to start recruiting beta readers (you’re going to want to try and have multiple rounds of somewhere around 10 betas each, which is why having a good author platform is useful: recruiting is easier). Between each round, you’re going to look at their feedback and make the necessary edits. After several rounds of beta readers, you’re going to look it over a few more times, and then if you’re going the traditional publishing route, you’re going to query agents. If you’re going the self-pub route you’re going to look to hire a professional editor. If you’re not looking to publish, this may be the end of the line.
It’s impossible to explain how you should edit fictional structure without explaining what structure actually is, and certainly for the first-time novelist, that might not always be obvious. If you’ve dived into writing your first book without studying how fiction is traditionally constructed and now you’re looking at the end result wondering if it’s any good and what to do next, this is an absolutely superb guidebook. And if you haven’t actually started writing yet, or you’re struggling to finish off any of a dozen different stories you have on the go because you don’t know where the plot is going, I think this could be exceedingly useful for you too.
Here’s the good news; you don’t have to be a plotter to make use of this. In fact, I think it’s probably more useful if you’re a pantser, if you’ve just written your way through the story letting the plot go wherever it will. This book will explain how to find the ‘deadwood’ in the story and cut it out, sustaining the action and the interest of readers throughout the entire book.
Tucker does a great job of explaining what story structure is in simple, easily identifiable terms, using popular culture references ranging from popular anime to major Disney movies to illustrate what she means. There are comprehensive further reading lists in each section for you to do further research into anything you are curious about, but you can definitely do some massive improvements on your story’s structure, increasing its readability (and saleability) with this book’s guidance alone.
There’s some guidance about looking for alpha and beta readers too (and the difference between them) and what exactly you should be consulting with them about in order to improve your story before you finalize it. Learn how to fix issues with pacing, find out who your protagonist really is and why the story should both begin and end with them. Find out ways to make your villains more than one-dimensional, ensure consistency of your world’s rules (essential in science fiction and fantasy especially) and set your timeline to avoid confusing your readers.
I think this could be an exceptionally useful book, particularly for someone early in their writing career who hasn’t fully set their process in stone yet, or for authors who are struggling to complete stories because their understanding of story structure isn’t helping them get to a logical plot conclusion. It’s certainly made me think - after more than a dozen books completed entirely by the seat of my pants - about why some of them ‘work’ better than others, and about how I can improve the readability of all my work going forward by building in many of the concepts outlined here. Extremely good resource and one I’ll highly recommend. Five stars.
Editing Your Novel's Structure: Tips, Tricks and Checklists to Get You From Start To Finish is available now.
Disclaimer: I received a review copy of this title via Rachel’s Random Resources.
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Today I show you how to edit a video. My videos require a LOT of editing, so I thought i’d give you a look behind the scenes to see the whole process from start to finish. It may look difficult, but it isn’t. In a few short days you can go from being a beginner to an expert. Simply follow the step by step instructions.
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Editing is something we writers would rather not do because of the time and energy involved. But there’s not much choice since few, if any, of our initial drafts are perfect as written.
In his “The Complete Polysyllabic Spree,” Nick Hornby says editing is essential because “the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress.”
In a March 4, 2017 Guardian essay on writing, George Saunders says a good editor is “like the optometrist, always asking: Is it better like this? Or like this?”
To edit well, he urges us to adhere to a process:
“Enact a repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose (rinse, lather, repeat), through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts. Like a cruise ship slowly turning, the story will start to alter course via those thousands of incremental adjustments.”
More specifically, “Revising [editing] is a form of increasing the ambient intelligence of a piece of writing. This, in turn, communicates a sense of respect for your reader. As text is revised, it becomes more specific and embodied in the particular. It becomes more sane. It becomes less hyperbolic, sentimental, and misleading. It loses its ability to create a propagandistic fog. Falsehoods get squeezed out of it, lazy assertions stand up, naked and blushing, and rush out of the room.”
Great advice from two gifted writers for improving all our writing.
