Revising and Editing

Finishing anything is kind of a big deal. So, when you finish your novel, short story, poem, blog post; anything. The first order of the moment is a (short or long, depending on the piece of writing) celebration. Then, it’s time to get down to brass tacks with revising and editing.

I will focus on novel editing and revising, because it’s the biggest, hardest thing to do. However, these can apply to other things. Most of the ideas here can be easily applied to any other thing. I will make a note about revision poems: they’re different. The things that matter for poetry don’t for other types of writing. So some advice may not be useful for budding poets.

Revising and Editing: Editing

Let’s start by talking about editing. There are several kinds of editing that can/should be done with a piece. The types of edits are: developmental editing, line editing, copy editing, and then proofreading.

Developmental Editing

This is the first edit, this is the meat and potato edit where you go through the entire piece and look at it with a critical eye. You will want to look at each part of the book and make sure that everything makes sense as you want it to. You can do this one of two ways, you can either read through the entire piece (hopefully with fresh eyes, meaning that you have put it down for a while, at least 2 weeks) and highlight each area in turn that you find you need to work on. Or, the other option is that you can read your piece several times, each time looking at each part in turn. The parts are:

Parts of a Story

• Plot: check that the story you want to tell is making it on the page. Does the plot flow from points A to Z? Can you tell why the characters are acting the way that they are? Do you question anything, any weirdness–make a mark, come back to it later.
• Structure: How you tell the story. Maybe it’s chronological, maybe it’s reverse chronological, maybe it skips through time and then doubles back. However, it does it make sure that it does it the way it’s supposed to. Wherever it gets confusing, make a mark.
• Characterization: Do the characters act “within character” the whole time? If there are places where you have characters acting differently than they should or making choices that are strange, make a mark.
• Pacing: How quickly/slowly does the action take place? Are there places where you are bored, places where everything is moving so quickly that it’s hard to keep track? Make a mark.
• Viewpoint: The POV character should not be ambiguous. If you have a work where you have multiple point-of-view characters, it will need to be apparent whose point of the story is from within a sentence or two. If this is confusing, mark it.
• Narrative Style: This ties into viewpoint, is the story told in first, second or third person? If it is in First, it shouldn’t switch. If the narrative style is unclear, mark it.
• Tense: Is it in past or present-tense. If it is unclear, or switches tenses; mark it.

Mark it?

What do I mean by mark it, and why am I saying “mark it” instead of change it? The very first step in the editing process is to let the work rest. If possible, of course. When you come back to read the work with fresh eyes, then, instead of changing it right away, you will want to make marks on it. These marks could be highlights, they could be changing the color of the text itself. My suggestion would be to mark each item with a different color.

Line Editing

As the name implies, line editing looks more closely at sentences. This type of editing should be done after the developmental edits are already completed. Essentially, the idea is to start big. Start with those ‘big picture’ changes before moving to the smaller, more fiddly changes.

Line edits will look at style, voice and flow. They will look at poor word choice, character-voice issues, inauthentic writing. Other things to look for are poor metaphor choices, overwritten prose, repetition, and this is also where telling v. showing will come in. So, don’t worry about it until you get all the way to the line edit phase of writing.

Copy editing

This is where you look at the formatting. The copy editing phase is where you would check the chapter sequencing, the spelling of proper nouns, all the grammar and syntax sentence level stuff, and the proper formatting of the document itself.

Sometimes the line edit and the copy edit are performed at the same time.

Proofreading

This is the last pass edit before a document is deemed “good enough.” This is where you look for any weird formatting issues that may have come up, along with searching for sentence consistency and any grammar errors that may have been missed. You pull up the work and make sure that it looks as good as it possibly can before either being sent off to agents or published.

Revising

Revision is the act of making the changes. So, while editing, you will make suggestions. Then, when you start revising, you actually make the changes. Revising goes hand in hand with editing, which is why they are typically mentioned together, although revising should be considered the act of the thing.

When you begin the process, it is perfectly okay to move as slowly or as quickly as you would like. There are people who will write a couple of chapters and then start to revise right away. Personally, I like to write to the end, without revision, and then go from there.

Revision may be its own post one day.

Let me know if you need any more information on revising and editing, or if you would like different information. Thanks for reading!