I have a couple of first drafts completed, one I've gone through several edits. I quickly found out I'm not fond of that process but it's obviously necessary. I'm looking for tips on editing as I am not really sure how to go about it effectively. Should I read through the manuscript and makes notes and highlights, should I make edits and rewrites as I go along... any advice, tips or personal preferences would be welcome. Thank you!
I always print out my first draft, doubled spaced with 1" margins and mark it up. I try to be organized about it - first review, SPaG; second review, dialogue and general word economy; third review, plot holes. I use colored pencils to mark up the ms, different colors for different errors. It's also very helpful to read it aloud or (even better) use a program to "read" it to you. There's a thread on this posted by @Catrin Lewis that I will try to find and reference.
I edit as I go (for obvious SPaG, continuity, etc.) Everyone kind of does things differently. This thread has a lot of personal editing details for many of us. Just remember not to take anything as gospel and find what works best for you.
Like @EdFromNY, I also print out my MS, because I find it LOTS easier to catch mistakes when reading off paper rather than a screen. I print mine single-spaced, but in two columns. In fact, that reduces the amount of paper by quite a bit, but also gives me three margins in which to make notes. One very important thing: don't just read your favourite chapters, skipping the others. You MUST consider the book as a whole. So start at the beginning and read straight through. Note where your attention flags, and mark that bit. That's where you need to do some real work. Keep going to the end, marking this kind of thing everywhere you encounter it. Ditto anything that screams 'plot hole' or seems inconsistent, or seems to convey the wrong tone for that part of the book. Any kind of error of this nature is very important to recognise and mark. I edit for specific things each time through, but SPAG errors are the last ones I worry about. Of course I'll correct them if I find them, but first of all I look for the abovementioned plot holes, any shifts of focus between what I started with and what I ended with, and any story flow problems—and tone. These are the things requiring the most extensive correction, and the most thought. I go back to the computer, make the changes, then print out the MS again, same format. Then I go through the second printout, looking to perfect my wording. This is where I cut where I've over-written or repeated the same information, look for transitional problems between scenes or chapters, work on sharpening the dialogue, catch over-use of certain phrases and find another way to express the throught. Once I've gone through the entire MS in this mode, and made corrections and printed it out again, then I go through the third printout looking specifically for typos, and also seeing how the changes I made actually read. I've never had my MS read out loud to me, but I will look into that for the future. I think it would be incredibly helpful. Note: Of course it goes without saying that you will be making multiple backups at each stage of this process, so you don't lose any of your work. And don't ever work on your original documents. Always work on a duplicate, in case you want to return to your original. Date each duplicate, so you'll always know where you've been. And develop a way to organise the duplicates so they make sense at a later date. Once I've been through at least three different printed versions, then is when I start looking for betas to give me feedback. A few at a time. And with their feedback in place, I start going over the MS again, with a view to making or considering the changes they suggest. Rinse and repeat. The last thing I do is formatting. I formatted my novel MS so I could export it to Kindle, so it would look like a book, more or less. For the formatting, I worked on the computer rather than a printout. I turn on my 'invisibles'—those blue notations of paragraph turns, spaces between words, etc—and make sure they are all in order. This is where I stop 'reading' for story, and simply look at these things and make sure they are all in place. Single space between words, single space after sentences, single paragraph turn, all the quotation marks in the right place, etc. This is kind of tedious work, but it's also the kind of work you can stop at any point and resume later on. You have to concentrate hard, but you don't have to think, if that makes any sense. Then if you're anything like me, you'll continue to go over and over the damn thing, still looking for imperfection! At some point I need to quit and get it out there.
With my novel, I've done it in phases. Jot down issues as I initially wrote, so that I wouldn't get distracted fixing them. This is often just 'fix XYZ' - future me can work out the hows. Once everything was done, let it sit for a couple days and then reread the entire thing, line editing (fixing SPAG, awkward sentences, some tone problems) and jotting down more notes. Go through and spot edit the easiest problems (continuity errors, usually, for me). Tackle the bigger problems one at a time. This led to rewrites. Get betas! Try to relax while they're reading. Fail at that, probably. Incorporate beta notes. This meant mostly spot edits for LAFS, but some minor rewrites and ... then some major ones. At this point I have to rewrite a good fifth of the entire ms, but that's just because I didn't do the climax right the first time It's a good system for me and I'm going to use it for other projects. Theoretically, step seven is 'get more betas' and repeat step six until you run out of people / reckon it's good enough to try to publish. I do plan at some point to do the print it out and listen to it tricks, but those'll come after betas, I think.
MS Word has a "find and replace" option, you can search for "sp sp" (two spaces) replace with "sp" or "^p ^p" (two paragraphs) replace with "^p". The first you can just do replace all until nothing is found. The latter you want to do "find next" to review each selection. If "^p^p" is a scene/POV change, it can stay, other select replace, which will move you to the next instance. Let the machine do the tedious parts. Maybe also "^t" (tab) in case you formatted some paragraphs with tabs, some with paragraph layout. Again use replace, so if the paragraph needs reformatting you can do it before moving on to next. If you have consistently misspelled words like it's and its this can also be handy. I changed the name of one character on first revision (I had two Gaiuses) but generated a lot of artifacts because he had three names, and he could occasionally be referred to by all three, the first two, the first, and rudely, by just the last. I had to use find and replace to track down all of the several hundred instances of the variations of his name to make sure they were all correct.
I think how you edit has a lot to do with what's wrong with the piece. Sometimes I can clean it up as I go through it a few times. Other times there's nothing that will save it other than a blank page and a second try.
