That old adage, ‘it’s all in the edit;’ it’s totally true. As book four of my loosely connected series nears the finish, I have a new, tighter, stricter editing process. It’s make or break time.
Editing is a broad term for several stages of hard work.
Developmental editing
The big-picture, looking at the story as a whole. Some call it structural editing, or content editing. This includes:
- Plot: the sequence of events that take the reader from the beginning to the end.
- Structure: the rise and fall of plot-points and turning-points that make a satisfying story
- Characterization: how characters are presented, through their qualities. flaws, wants, needs and goals. Not forgetting their proactivity, relatability and competence.
- Pace: the speed at which the story unfolds, through fast and slow passages, through action and reflection.
- Viewpoint: understanding through whose eyes we perceive the story, whose emotions, whose voice we hear. And making sure we don’t break the limits of any given viewpoint during the story – even when there are multiple viewpoints in play.
- Narrative voice: the choice of first, second or third person determines a narrative’s voice.
- Tense: is the story told in the present or the past tense? In the moment or looking back in retrospect?
Line editing
Line editing is the down-and-dirty work revising sentence by sentence and word by word. Also called substantive editing or stylistic editing, this examines style, sense and flow. This examines the:
- Authenticity of phrasing and word choices in relation to character voice, genre and tone
- Character-traits at each stage of the narrative arc
- Clarity and consistency of viewpoint and narrative style
- Cliché, metaphor, overused phrases
- Dialogue as it portrays voice, mood, and intention
- Pacing and flow, readability
- Consistent use of tenses
- The balance of ‘Show’ versus ‘Tell’
Copyediting
When you’re done with all that, copyediting deals with the technical fit and finish of the manuscript :
- Chapter sequencing
- Consistency of spelling, capitalization, punctuation within the specific setting or genre of the story
- Dialogue tagging and punctuation
- Letter, word, line, and paragraph spacing
- Sense-checking the timeline, continuity, environment, and character traits for inconsistency across the manuscript
- Spelling, grammar, syntax, punctuation, hyphenation, and capitalization
- Standard document formatting
Proofreading
Proofreading is the final stage of the prior to publication. This is the quality-control check to ensure nothing is missed and that no new errors or inconsistencies appeared during the various edits. Proof-reading is the fine-comb check of spelling, punctuation, grammar, and for layout problems such as indentation, line spacing, page numbers, fonts and heading styles.
This is the past chance to catch errors before release. And somehow, typos and other errors still slip through the publishing process, even at the highest level.
The Long Game
I’ve gone through multiple rounds of each of these stages. And still it goes on. Across seventy thousand-plus words, there’s a lot to do, especially if your long-form prose starts as badly as mine. I don’t stop until I’ve got the manuscript as sharp as it can be. And I keep finding things to fix with each round. Sometimes one error of style or grammar sends me back around to the beginning.
But the edit is what turns shoddy, garbage-drafts into polished, satisfying stories without errors, inconsistencies and annoying typos.
It’s all in the edit.
Editing is so hard but so vital. How many drafts or rounds of edits do you go through?
Every time I think it’s the last one, I put the draft aside, come back a few weeks later and find more edits. So I don’t have a definitive process or number of drafts. Book One is up to five drafts now. No line edit or proofing yet.