Hey everyone! We are here with the second to last post in this series. Can you believe that it’s already October? I hope you are all enjoying the beginning of spooky season and that those of you who are hoping to do Nanowrimo this year have your preparations going well. It’s been great for me so far! Today we will talk about the next step in the idea to book process. So, without further ado…
From Idea to Book: Editing
Editing is the next step in the process of taking an idea and turning it into a book. This is the part of the process that I hear people getting stuck on a lot. A large majority of my writing friends love the idea part of the process, or they love the writing part of the process but when it comes to editing they get stuck and they never get around to it because they hate it.
I’m not an expert on editing, I also have a hard time doing it for a lot of different reasons. I hope in this post to go over some advice that has helped me with my own editing process and also maybe give some of the advice that other writers have given me because it has helped them. Hopefully with this wider range of advice you might find the way that helps you to edit the best.
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received about editing is that you should never edit right after you have finished writing. Often times writers including myself just want to get all the writing and editing done now and get to the publishing part so they can start working on the next big thing. I understand this feeling. It can be exciting to be getting to the next big thing. But sometimes you just need to take your time. There are a lot of advantages to waiting to edit after writing. One of these is making yourself less familiar with your own writing.
There are two strong reactions that most writers have to their own writing. One is the belief that what you have written is the best thing that was ever written and a gift to all mankind. Or the belief that what you have written is utter trash and no one will want to read it. Waiting to edit your story can help both kinds of people.
If you are the first person than time away from your writing will help you look at it as a fresh reader, like someone who has never heard of or read your story before (or if you have a really good memory, like someone read the book a really long time ago and can’t remember all the details). This kind of distance can sometimes help you to realize that maybe your writing isn’t as perfect as you thought, maybe there’s a plot hole in chapter 5 and 7 or maybe you lost a character somewhere in chapter 19. Either way, it might need some work.
On the other hand, for those who always think their writing is bad, this can help you to view your own writing from a readers perspective as well and maybe help you realize that there are parts of your writing that are actually quite well done and maybe that fighting scene from the climax doesn’t need too many changes and maybe you were only kind of right about that secondary character and he might only need a few changes to make him bearable.
Another piece of advice that I have found helps me personally is to make an editing schedule when I do get to that part of the process. Scheduling when I am going to do the editing and making sure that my schedule is consistent can help to keep me from putting my editing off because I’m not really feeling it. This also helps me to spread out my writing so that it all gets done in the time frame that I need it to be done and not getting put off into eternity.
This next piece of advice is the part of editing that I struggle with the most. I have the hardest time with editing a manuscript/draft more than once. I’m the type of person who will do my writing, walk away, come back, do some editing and then say that it’s done. Really one of the best ways to edit is to walk away again after the first round of editing to come back to it again to edit. And again. Sometimes you need to edit as many as 6 or 7 times. Some people edit more, some people edit less but editing once is almost never sufficient for editing a story.
That’s all the big pieces of advice that I have for today. There are a lot of other things you can do to improve your editing or your editing experience. Even professional editors will try new things sometimes to change up their own editing to help themselves improve. If you have any other good advice on editing feel free to leave it in the comments and let us know your thoughts.
I hope that this week’s post was as helpful as usual. Next week we will have the last post in this series and then a few stand-alone posts. Stay tuned for the end of the idea to book process so you can more successfully make it all the way through. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, and follow me on social media at the link on the bottom of the page. And remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
Comentarios