The grueling editing process - and why it’s necessary

So you finished your first draft — what now?

Photo by @dariuszsankowski from Unsplash.

“Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god.”

— Dark Jar Tin Zoo

I feel like I write about editing more than I write about the actual process of writing. Maybe that’s because, to me, writing is the easier thing. Writing is just pouring words onto a page and praying that they come out in a semi-decent, partially legible state. Editing — that’s the real demon.

But why, you may ask, am I writing about editing today? Isn’t my new book coming out in a few months’ time? Shouldn’t you preorder a copy?

Preorder Just Us now!

Yes and yes. But, in case you missed it, I wrote about that last week! And while I want to brag about my new book all the time, I can only do it so much before it gets, you know, old. But feel free to subscribe to my mailing list if you want to hear me gush all the time about Just Us.

What were we talking about? Ah yes, editing. And why it’s so important. And why we’re talking about it in the first place.

Well, simply, I finished my first draft of my latest WIP, TGOFT, last week. It was a grueling process to write it, harder than I initially thought it would be, but, in actuality, it took me approximately three weeks to write the 70,000 words it ended up being.

So, yeah, I wrote the first draft. What’s next?

I’m going to do what every good writer does and not look at it for two weeks to a month. I’m gonna let it stew. I’m gonna let that manuscript wait in terror over what I’m going to do it. Ah yes, I can taste its fear from here.

But I do this because I need to get my brain away from it. I’ve been staring at that manuscript for weeks, and I need to avoid looking at it for a bit. That’s the best way for me to edit it from an impartial place. Or as impartial as I can be.

My editing process is one that requires a lot of patience. I don’t know how you all edit, but I go through about four rounds of initial edits, and depending on what I’m editing, I go through four more. Here’s what the rounds look like:

1. Grammar/Typos

2. Sentence Flow/Paragraph Blocks

3. Dialogue/Characterization

4. Revisions

For each round, I reread the book and look for those specific items. It really streamlines the editing process and helps me not to get lost in the process, or madly drunk trying to reconcile all the missing pieces and plot holes. But I digress.

It can also be a particularly grueling process. I read the WIP a ridiculous amount of times, to the point where it gets hard to believe that I wrote it in the first place. I recently speed-wrote a romance novel for a side-project, and when I read it over again, I was shocked that it had come out of me, for a lot of good reasons and a few bad ones heh (Want to hear more about that? Head on over to my Patreon).

The editing process for my romance novel. Yuck.

But it still required a lot of edits. And, in my several rereadings, frustrated rounds, and occasional beers, I discovered a missing side-plot that adds a lot more urgency, color, and depth to the story. While I’m not planning on giving it another four rounds of edits (since the revisions were minimal and, to be honest, it’s not super important to me at the moment), this process, which is still relatively new to me, worked out exactly as it was supposed to.

So I’m curious — for you writers or other creatives out there — what does your editing and revision process look like? I wanna know, so give me a shout in the comments!

Thanks as always for reading! Even though I’ve been working on this blog thing for a few years, I’m still figuring out the ins-and-outs obviously. But I super appreciate the loyal following of readers I’ve built on here so far — you all are the best.