Editing is Writing

How do you know when you’ve done all the editing you can on your story? Or that you’ve gone too far?

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As Many Times As It Takes

Editing is the working part of writing for me. I really enjoy the discovery of the story on the initial writing. As a discovery writer, I don’t really know what’s coming until I get to it. But after my first pass, the story isn’t over. There are holes in my story that you could drive a truck through and they need to be closed. Since I’m writing series, I need to check in with secondary threads. So my first editing pass fills in the holes and asks if things can be left off. I prune and fill in, reshape and move around. I actually enjoy this part almost as much as the first draft.

The second pass of editing is where the real work of looking for errors — spelling, grammar, passive voice construction, words I don’t need–begins.

The third pass is more of the same, but I run it through Grammarly to assure I didn’t miss any grammar errors. The fourth pass involves letting the computer read it aloud. I find a lot of errors this way and sometimes I hear sentence constructions that need to be revised that I missed when I was reading silently.

Then I send it to my editor who says she goes through it three times. She makes suggestions in the comments section rather than changing my writing and letting me figure out what she’s done. When it comes back to me, I do another pass and make the changes I think make sense and then I let my husband read the manuscript with a highlighter in hand. Sometimes he catches some stray errors.

When Has Editing Gone Too Far

In all honesty, I think I do enough editing passes, but I’m aware that you can edit too much. At writer’s guild meetings, I sometimes hear other writers talk about how they wrote 30 pages and then just deleted it all. I don’t do that. Although I change my manuscript, I save large passages in a slush document for later use — maybe. Sometimes I find gold mixed in on another pass of the dross and it shows up in a later book.