One of the most important parts about writing any manuscript isn’t really just the writing part. Sure, that’s certainly important, but what’s truly important is the idea of editing and revision. This is probably one of the harder parts of writing a manuscript, but it’s also a vital part to the success of that manuscript. Editing and revision might seem a bit daunting at first, but with this post, you’ll learn how to edit and revise your manuscript like a pro and get one step closer to your publishing dreams!
1. First Things First: Take a Break
One of the first pieces of advice I can give is to actually step away from your manuscript and give it a day or so. Once you’ve finished writing, you’re more likely to still be really emotionally connected to the story, so it can be hard to view it with a critical and objective lens. It’s also easy to sometimes brush over things right away.
Taking a break gives you distance and allows you to return to it with a fresh set of eyes, even if it’s just a few days or so. When you come back, you’ll be much more able to spot any inconsistencies, plot holes, and awkward sentence phrasing.
However, if you’re feeling impatient and you want to hurry up and start editing, my advice is to do something else that can still relate to your work. For instance, read books in your genre, start plotting another story, or do some world building.
2. Focus on Structural Editing First
Before you get into the smaller details like grammar, it’s important to ensure that the big-picture elements of your story are in-order. This is often referred to as structural editing or developmental editing. In this phase, you’re making sure that the core foundation of your story actually makes sense and adds up.
You want to ask yourself the following:
- Does my plot make sense? Are there any plot holes? Does the pacing feel off in some areas?
- Are the characters interesting and well-developed? Do the characters have clear and identifiable arcs?
- Does the story follow a solid structure with a beginning, middle, and end?
- Is the conflict actually engaging? Does my story feel fun to read?
These types of questions and ones similar to it are helpful because you may need to make some significant revisions. Now, this might include cutting scenes, rewriting chapters, changing elements of the plot. This may sound painful, but it’s essential for improving the story.
3. Strengthen Your Characters’ Arcs
Characters are often the major part of any story and once you’ve dealt with larger structural issues, you want to ensure that character development is done properly in your story and that your arcs are actually strong and captivating to read about. Even if your plot is great and you feel like it’s exciting, if your characters aren’t well-rounded or interesting, then you might face some difficulties in getting readers engaged.
You want to think about if your protagonists have a clear arc and if they change throughout the story. If you want to learn how to write a proper arc for characters, then check out this post!
You want to think about character motivations, secondary characters and their purpose, if your character is actually dynamic or not, and if the dialogue and other elements related to your character actually make sense or not.
Characters are important to work on, so take some extra time in your revision to focus on this element because it’s vital to your overall story.
A pro tip I can give you here is that if you feel like your character isn’t that engaging, add some internal conflict and show moments where the character might feel conflicted about certain issues. If you want to learn how to write about internal conflicts, then check out this post!
4. Cut Unnecessary Scenes and Characters
I personally have had this situation with my stories before, but in The Fallen Age Saga, I’ve had to cut entire characters sometimes or change entire scenes because they felt unnecessary and overall, I had no desire to continue with them or see what happened with that particular character next. The idea here is that every character and scene and line of dialogue needs to serve a purpose in your story. Even if the scene is mellow or boring, does it serve a purpose? Does it show readers something?
Think about if characters are necessary or not. Why would this particular character exist and what are the repercussions if the character does not exist any longer? What would happen to the overall story?
Focus on the story and what benefits it!
5. Work on Dialogue Development
Dialogue is honestly something that I notice some writers tend to overlook, which is a big mistake! Dialogue is a huge factor in any story and when done well, it can add depth to characters, propel the plot forward, and keep your readers engaged. When it’s done poorly, it is definitely noticeable.
When it comes to making dialogue realistic, I’ve written up a guide on that, but I’ll give some tips below:
- Avoid being too formal unless it makes sense for that character, but most people aren’t really that formal in life
- Try not to include way too much small talk. Include some if it helps characterization out though!
- Make sure each character in your story has their own style of speech, vocabulary, cadence, etc…
- Add things like body language, tone, or implied emotions to add depth to dialogue. Not everything someone is thinking is always said aloud.
6. Fix the Prose
After all the bigger elements are out of the way, it’s time to really focus on the nitty-gritty details of your story! This is the part where you need to fine-tune your prose and ensure that each sentence is clear and engaging as well as concise and readable.
You want to ensure that you eliminate redundancy and make sure that you don’t have so many unnecessary words. This doesn’t make your story simpler, but it’ll make it a bit easier to read. Additionally, you want to ensure that things like your sentence structure is varied and that you don’t have too many long or too many short sentences.
You want to also work on cutting out fillers like “very” and “really,” which can be replaced by more concise wording. Try also using stronger action verbs, as they will bring your story to life a lot more.
Focus on the clarity of your writing. One thing I can say here is that reading out loud can help a lot because it’ll make it much easier to spot mistakes. If you don’t want to read everything out loud, try a text-to-speech software. Scrivener actually has one built-in that you can use, and if you’re interested in Scrivener, check out my review of it!
7. Get Some Feedback
Even while revising, it’s probably a good idea to get some outside feedback and see what other people have to say about your story.
One of the best things you can try and do is to get beta readers, which can be really anybody that is willing to read your manuscript and provide critical, genuine feedback from the perspective of a reader. If you want to learn more about beta readers, check out this post!
For the most part, you can also enlist the help of professional editors if you want. I know some people that don’t get professional editors to help them, but it might help you if you’re feeling stuck.
Now, listen, just because someone gave you feedback on something doesn’t mean that you automatically have to change that something. Maybe some people like that, maybe some people don’t. The idea is that if it’s not a jarring, story-breaking issue, then you can think about the feedback and decide to take it or not. Also, be open to critical feedback so that you can actually fix the mistakes in your story.
8. Proofread for Spelling, Grammar, and Formatting
Now that you’ve completed the big-picture editing and you’ve also finished the more detailed pieces of prose and even got feedback, it’s time to do your final proofread. This is basically where you’re going to have to check for things like spelling, grammar, punctuation, formatting, and other small details.
Spell-check is one way to catch mistakes, but it doesn’t always notice when you misspell something. Also, you may have used the wrong form of a word, which might not be detected. Grammarly is helpful, but not always since Grammarly is more tailored to nonfiction and academic writing, and it might not get certain things you’ve done in a fictional context.
You also want to take this time to review things like consistency with formatting, chapter headings, spacings, and even consistency in the character names, settings, timelines, etc…
Once again, try to read out loud or use a TTS service to do that for you because this can help you catch those little details better.
Conclusion
Revising and editing a manuscript is definitely not a fast or easy process. It’s going to take a lot of time, patience, and having a critical eye. This is, however, the most important stage before you publish your book or send that query letter. By taking it step-by-step, you have a much higher chance of success with your story and your story will also be much better by the end! It took me five rewrites of Soldat before I was satisfied, so yeah, writing can be a long process.
Before you head on out, be sure to check out my series, The Fallen Age Saga and don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter so you can get updates on all my latest posts, WIPs, book releases and more!