I’ve been travelling through the murky world of editing lately. Okay, to be completely honest, I’ve spent a lot of time avoiding. Editing a 13,000 word story is very different from editing an 80,000 word book, and the sheer enormity of tackling the second task had me overwhelmed.
Like with any other aspect of writing, however, we learn best by working through it. I’ve been reading various bits of advice on how to handle edits to a book and have learned that, just like anything else in life, different people have different ideas of what works best.
I’ll admit I’ve been stuck on the idea that I should be following Holly Lisle’s wonderful one-pass manuscript revision process, but that process also terrifies me! I can’t help but feel that I am, at minimum, a two-pass editor. I feel as though I need one pass to go through the book and move chunks of it into its proper order (already, at page 10, I’ve come to a section that should be moved to a later point in the book.) To make notes on scenes that should be added/changed/deleted. This would be the “examining the narrative and character arcs” stage.
Only after the major structuring is examined and fixed (if necessary) will I feel comfortable polishing the text, one scene at a time, until it glows.
Maybe I can look forward to a one-pass revision process with my next book. Until then, I’m just happy to have worked through the block that kept me from working on these edits.
Does it ever get any easier?
