Being a Better Writer: My Personal Editing Process

Welcome back! So, very quickly, first the news, nice and quick: There's a Labor Day Sale. You should check it out. Boom, done, on to the next docket: The Dragon Award winners have been announced, and there are some who are very unhappy about it (guess who?). If curious, check that out here.

Now, onto today's post! Today's topic comes by way of surprisingly convenient request. Why the surprise and convenience? Well ... because as it turns out, I actually received a request for a post of this nature a week or so after I'd written it ... but as a reward for my Patreon Supporters, who usually get access to behind the scenes stuff and the like.

That said, it was a request for a Being a Better Writer topic, and aside from one caveat (that being that this is my approach, and other authors likely differ), it's worth looking at. So often with BaBW we talk about writing in one form or another: How to improve, what to watch out for, even how to take care of yourself while writing. But aside from my own personal commentary on what I'm up to during the fact or some Q&A responses, we've not really talked in-depth about the process and steps from start to finish of a novel once the first draft is done. And there are a lot of steps!

Now, that said, the particular steps presented here? These are mine. Not in a possessive way, but they're the steps that I use when taking my book from "finished draft" to "finished product." They're what I've settled on over years of writing and millions of words written. I bring this up because this is not the editing process that was used by any of my old teachers, from Sanderson to Kent (it's actually much closer to Larry Corriea's editing process). Each one of them, when answering a similar question, spoke of a different process than the one I use, with different steps, though—and I will stress this—we all still accomplish the same goal.

My point? This is the editing process I use. You can pick and select what steps from it you wish, but in the pursuit of making your work the best it can be, I would highly advise using it (and other's processes) as a template, not a perfect guide. Know your weaknesses and build a system that is designed to ferret them out and fix them as you edit. Find steps that work. This post isn't meant to be the way to do it, but a way.

So, that said, let's get to it! My editing process, in several steps, with examples.

You can read the rest of this post at Unusual Things