Editing and revising can be the most tedious or the most exciting part of the writing process. On the one hand, you’ve completed your rough draft (a stage many never make it to) and are well on the way to finishing up. On the other hand, going over the same material again and again can be time-consuming and mind-numbingly dull. But in the end, however many professional editors you hire, you’ve ultimately got to take a good long look at your own work before you decide whether it’s ready to see the light of day or not.
There are a number of ways to go about this. In fact, every author may have a personalized method, and that’s just fine. As a general rule, though, my process goes something like this:
For Books…
Review I
Read through the entire work from beginning to end, making necessary corrections as you go along, and perhaps taking notes on some things you’d like to add to enhance the story or boost your word count. By the end of this stage, you should have something that you could potentially submit to a publisher or agent in a pinch, but that could still maybe use some tuning up.
Add-Ins
This is the point at which you add in all those ideas you came up with while reading the story through the first time. At first I did this kind of willy-nilly, but now I have a more systematic approach that seems to work well. I go through my typed manuscript and place asterisks in the spots where I want to add something, followed by a short description of what the scene will look like. Once I’ve placed all my asterisks, I can then go about actually creating the new sequences in whatever order I want. I then eliminate the descriptions but keep the asterisks for now to remind myself to pay extra close attention to these sequences on my next read-through.
Review II-Read-Aloud
After a minimum of a month after your add-in period, you can do yet another read-through, making more corrections and coming up with yet more ideas for new sequences as you go. I suggest reading this one aloud, as you can often find issues Pay particular attention to the scenes with the asterisks you left behind, as they missed out on the first edit, and so potentially contain more errors than the rest of the manuscript.
Corrections
At this point, I usually deliver my manuscript to my editor, who looks it over and gives me chapter-by-chapter lists of individual lines that should be changed, as well as summaries for entire chapters. I then go through and implement them one by one. While a relatively easy process (as it’s not necessary to reread the entire manuscript to find the errors), it can also be very tedious, and there are times when you simply won’t agree that some things need to be changed. Depending on the quality and honesty of the editor, you may be right on some occasions. On the whole, however, I tend to follow 99% of my editor’s guidelines–and I can’t deny that the result tends to be a much better product.
Review III-Proof
If your book is going to exist in print form, read through it this time in that print medium. Not only will you be able to look over your work from a new perspective, but also find any errors that might exist in the formatting of the cover, interior illustrations, etc. and point them out to your publisher. I suggest making physical notes to go along with the physical copy, whether written out on a notepad or written in the margins of the book itself, then implementing them on the computer later. By the end of this process, you should finally have a publishable book!
Final Edits
At this stage, you should have the story itself as done as can be. All you need to do now is use your spelling and grammar checker, and make any necessary corrections to give your manuscript that final layer of polish needed to impress readers and reviewers alike!
For Shorter Works…
For novellas, I recommend following the above process, whereas with short stories you should probably only need to go through it a couple times. But the numbers are just guidelines to try and keep production steady. In reality, you should go over your manuscript as many times as necessary to deliver a quality product! That is the golden rule of editing.