7 Tips From 7+ Years of Editing

The title is not clickbait, I’m here to give you 7 different writing tips, from my own experience editing my novel. I am currently making efforts to publish my YA Thriller novel, while the first draft was complete June 2017, over 7 years ago.

My work started as a 10 page short story months before, and both the short story, and the complete first draft were completely written by hand. Today, it is over 340 pages that I am immensely proud of, however, it took a ton of pass throughs, edits, learning, and trial and error. I’m creating this post to help aid those in this process, to save some piece of mind, time, and to help direct writers towards the right path.

Through my 7+ year process, I have learned many things. About writing, about craft, about procrastination, organization, and much much more. Here are the top 7 tips for editing your novel.

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1. Find a goal that works for you, not against you

Writing, editing, and still have a busy life? Most of us are juggling work, or perhaps school, maybe extra familial commitments, or a combination of things! However, we shouldn’t allow our manuscript to sit and grow mold! Most people waste a lot more time on their phones, or on other time wasting tasks than we would care to admit, so try your best to find time in your schedule. Work with it, and try to make a consistent goal you can keep up with. There were times in my journey when my manuscript wasn’t worked on at all; all I had to do was just organize a few hours a week on the project, and I would have been able to make progress faster. We have to find a goal that works with our schedule, not against it! 1 hour a day is better than 0, 1 hour a week is better than 0, so make sure to chisel out a bit of free time for writing. If you want to make a book, you have to put in the work! And the best way to do that is through consistency.

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2. Give yourself room to make mistakes (and improve!)

This may mean setting aside time to really research the mechanics of writing, as there is always more to learn about our lovely craft. Mechanics like active voice, less adverbs, less repetition of the same pronouns in your writing, creating real conflict, managing realistic characters, creating realistic dialogue. All of this takes mountains of time to get good at, and on your first novel things will be a learning process – that’s by design. Give yourself time to research the things you need, and incorporate them as best you can along the journey. By adopting a mindset that it is okay to make mistakes, you allow yourself room for your own writing to breathe, we can always edit later! Improving is an active process, give yourself the room to improve, and watch as your novel comes to life.

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3. Complete writing exercises with mechanics: like dialogue

What aspects of your writing do you know need more attention? Perhaps the plot feels inconsistent, or there are plot holes; or maybe you tend to create run-on sentences, or aspects of your paragraphs need more of a read through to fix. One of the best ways to improve specific aspects of craft is through writing exercises, which you can find all over the web! For me, this aspect of my writing was dialogue, it can be a tricky beast to capture correctly!

Dialogue should exist as a medium for your characters. Characters can throw conflict at one another, and it should almost resemble a rollercoaster. Character A wants revolution, while character B likes the idea but they need to think about their kids, specifically their safety, and creating a safer world for them to live in. DING DING, who wins in the arena? Have characters talk out of turn occasionally, make it a bit messy, this is how dialogue in the real world exists! Are you showing a realistic version of your character? Does the way they speak change when their confidence rises or falls towards the end of the book?

Creating small exercises for yourself and for your characters, can allow your characters to shine their unique personality traits, and can help you as a reader and writer to better understand their needs. This allows them to be presented more dynamically on the page. Give your characters room to breathe and make dialogue an engaging battle of conflict that moves the plot forward!

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4. Be ruthless when editing!

Writers will say: “Write carefully and edit ruthlessly”. However, we must remember the words of the greats; “kill your darlings”, meaning just because you care deeply about a scene, does not mean it needs to be in the book! Sometimes the easy thing to do is to keep editing the boring scene… you keep the lack-luster aspects of your book and justify it because of the personal relationship you have with it. It makes sense to love aspects of your novel, but you have to care about the mind of the reader! Not everything important to us as writers, will be able to be pronounced through the page. Sometimes you need to cut pages and pages of work because the next scene you write will exist more fully, more authentically, and more truly to the story. If a line, paragraph, or an idea is not working even after you try to fix it? CUT IT. Make your writing stronger, rebuild it with lessons you have learned.

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5. Make copies, keep records, keep in a digital cloud!

I had a near heart attack when I lost a single USB. My laptop stopped working out the blue and my most recent draft was only in the device. I tried finding pages, or index cards where I wrote ideas or a small scenes upon, searched and rummaged for them. This all happened because I failed to consider the accessibility and organization of my writing. This should not be ignored!

If you can keep your writing project completely in a virtual cloud, you should do so. At the very least, you should be saving your manuscript on an external storage device, and save it frequently, every 30 minutes or more! It can be a heart wrencher to lose real progress on your book (that one paragraph you read through 12 times? Altered each verb to be intentional, painstakingly removed 5 “ly” adverbs from? It’s completely reverted back to its former mess… not good!) I was lucky enough to have my USB found by a coffee shop employee. Lucky enough that when my laptop died, they were able to rescue the storage from within it. Don’t follow my footsteps, losing a ton of your life’s work is not to be messed with! Use the cloud or consistently save your manuscript on an external device.

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6. Be as specific as you can, when making short term goals

Through my many years of writing, I really only figured out this useful tip towards the end. I mostly had vague goals, “Oh, I need to edit Chapter 3, probably focus on the dialogue”, then when I go to chapter 3, I read through it, get frustrated on the many things that need fixing, and sometimes even got overwhelmed and had to return later! My goal was so broad, so undefined, that it didn’t motivate me, and instead, it overwhelmed me into temporarily quitting that goal.

Instead, figure out exactly what you need to do, and how you will do it. For example “I am going to go over the first piece of dialogue in Chapter 3 to heighten conflict and introduce tension. Then I am going to ensure that my character’s actions correlate with the new foundations I am laying on the scene, focusing on pages 55-56” This is brilliant! Now I know exactly where to go, my eyes won’t wander around at pages 57, or 59, I won’t get lost re-reading multiple sections, I have a specific small mission and will accomplish it without fuss.

The more specific your goal, the more you will dive headfirst into your project with meaning and purpose. We should choose small chunks to edit and focus on what is in front of us. When we don’t assign specific edits within chapters, we can get lost and overwhelmed by how large our manuscript is. Nothing else in the world exists until Chapter 1 is your best work. Then, nothing else exists until Chapter 2 is your best work. Continue to work in small chunks, even smaller than chapters, smaller than pages if necessary, and be hyper specific when assigning your own tasks.

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7. There is more to do!

You finished your manuscript, and now you feel like the baddest writer on the block! Celebrate, but don’t develop a superiority complex when you finish your manuscript! Welcome to level 2, publishing; where you need to relay your book in many different ways to attempt to achieve an agent, a publisher, or begin your journey with self-publishing (getting your own book cover created, marketing, printing, and much more). To achieve representation you’ll need to make a template, or “Query Letter”, that represents your book (and yourself) well. You’ll need to customize the letter to each agent you’ll reach out to, you’ll need “one sentence pitches”, “a full book synopsis on a single page”, “similar titles”, to “state your target audience”, and research as much as possible so you know exactly what agent you’re talking to! Seem daunting? Everything is still one step at a time, and if you’re reading this while still finishing your manuscript, you may be able to get a small head start on the creation of your first query letter. We have to remember tip #2, give yourself room to make mistakes!

Knowing that you have more to do can help keep our goals in perspective. Publishing a novel takes time, and you need to be in it for the long haul. Keep your head up, as we dive into the next learning process of our publishing journey.

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To recap:

1. Find a goal that works FOR you. Consistency over everything.
2. Give yourself room to IMPROVE. Create your growth mindset.
3. Create writing EXERCISES. Character exercises can improve dialogue.
4. Be RUTHLESS when editing.
5. Keep RECORDS and COPIES of your manuscript.
6. Be SPECIFIC with your SHORT-TERM goals.
7. There is MORE to do. Welcome to publishing.

Now that you have a starting foundation to be successful, there is certainly more for every writer to learn and grow with. There are fantastic blogs, books, and techniques presented all over the place that we should learn from. Hopefully this post presented you with some helpful tips; mechanics wise, and even mentally when facing a daunting blank page or a large manuscript to edit.

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What’s one thing you have learned along your writing journey? Be sure to let us know in the comments.

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Thanks for reading,

Erickson