When are you done editing?

This is a painstaking question that I would wager all writers struggle with. To be clear what I’m talking about in this article, its not the grammar corrections, formattin, ect. Its the editing on the content and story of your book. For example: Do the scenes still need revising? Are the characters as good as they can be? Does the climax need any more work? The questions are endless. As someone who’s had to give the final stamp of approval on one of her many book projects, and say “It’s done,” this can be one of the toughest decisions to make. So here’s some things which helped me to make that decision I thought I’d share.

Be realistic:

What do I mean by this? Many writers (of whom I was among at one point in time), look at their first draft and assert: “Yeah, this looks good. I’ve done everything I need to do to this.” This is wrong for a number of reasons but if its your first draft of your first book, theres no way a new writer can know this unless theyve done their research. Most people don’t know that every movie script underwent 10 revisions, every scene was discussed and shot twenty times before it was pproved, and so on. I spoke with someone who wanted to do writing as a side hustle and they’d only written one extremely long draft. At this point in time I’d already been rejected many times and written several books as well as had one proessiopnally edited. I knew how much was chopped away from a first draft and could now see things in my own work that I hadnt even known were errors. As I started to articulate these things to him, because writing and trying to make a career out of it are extremely hard–he seemed to think he’d already done all the editing that the book needed and he was good to go. By being honest with yourself in examining your own work, your saving yourself a LOT of heartache. I submitted two books to dozens upon dozens of agents and received all rejections, if I’d known better at the time I would have revised those books massively before submission. I have revised one of them many times and am still in the process. But I can see why an agent would have said no. But truth be told, I didn’t know what errors to look for.

A great opening hook. Something that hasn’t been done a thousand times which makes them want to read more. An agent may only ask for the first 3-5 pages of your manuscript. This is a common one but your language is very important, don’t use the same word twice in a sentence if you can help it. Leave enough interest that the reader has to make it through the first chapter to get some clarity.

Every chapter should pose 10 questions but only really answer 5. Meaning, you give the reader enough clarity that they aren’t stumbling around in the dark, but you leave enough that they have to keep reading. Every chapter should be like the sandwich example we probably all got in English class regarding an essay. 3 Parts:

- Introduction, setting the tone, time and place.

-Content, the relevant events in the chapters and meat of it as it were. Why is the chapter necessary? This will happen in the middle section most likely.

-The closing. The final layer which ties up the rest of the chapters content. It should again, answer some questions providing closure but leave enough for the reader to be intrigued.

Every chapter is supposed to work like a domino affect. It leads directly into the next chapter and if you remove it then the flow of the book is disrupted.

These are all things that I hadnt been aware of deeply enough in order to properly revise. To help with this I recommend Save the Cate Writes a Novel. It’s an extremely helpful tool I hadnt read at the time I was submitting my books. Also, watch quality. Watch and read what you consider to be great works of fiction and do it with all your mental cylanders firing. Don’t watch TV with your brain turned off. I’m generally incapable of doing this anymore, unless its a Disney channel show and I’m watching it to let my brain soak and not have to think–that would be one of the only exceptions. But mostly I have to watch things with my thinking cap on and it drives some people mad. Still, as a writer you should be able to watch things and ask yourself why they were done that way. Research behind the scenes of the making of the content and I promise you you’ll find the science behind it. You can’t help it if you didnt know all this when you did your first book, but be aware of it now. And be humble enough to set your book aside and know that even if you don’t see the issues now, they are there.

Are you happy with the story:

So you’ve been realistic in setting your book aside after the first draft and getting the help you need. You’ve researched what a book should look like and how to write a tight manuscript and you’ve applied those concepts to your work. Thats a quick breeze over of how that process looks, but you get the idea.

This next point is arguably the most important thing to remember. A lot of people can like your story and not everything will be everyones cup of tea, but you loving your book is what really matters. I’ve researched so many shows and without a doubt, there are the people who LOVE IT TO DEATH, and then there are those who aboslutely HATE IT. Your not writing for everyone, there will be lovers and haters and thats totally fine. We all have shows we love and those we cant watch for five minutes. But you have to love your work and then target it to people who love a similar thing. I could try to write a story that fills every modern trope which audiences love and without a doubt there would be people who didnt like it, so I’d rather write something that I and a similar audience are proud of.

So if you’ve done the story in such a way that when you think ab out the characters, the plot, and how everything turned out, and your happy with it–then your good to go. Can you talk about your book and story proudly on every point? Does it all make sense and you enjoy reading it?

Don’t be paranoid of the book needing more revisions. Give yourself room for mistakes:

Speaking as someone who’s redone the same scene fifty times, and still is asking myself “Is it good now??” This can be tough. You’ve redone a scene over and over, you've asked opinions and you’ve researched help and read about it. Now you’ve come to the final draft and your happy with it, but your worried if another person looks at it they’ll still find an issue with the scene. This is hard. Because you don’t know how much of someones criticism is valid and relevant to your specific scene, or if its a creative difference.

For example, you might choose to play a scene as more of a sad conversation with thick tension and another writers finds it would be better played for comedy. They don’t think its necessary but other readers have told you they love the scene. What do you decide? Ultimately this goes back to the last point, what do you love and what do you want in your story? Once you’ve decided this, and done it to the best of your ability, then you call it good.

Now if a year or three years from now, you reflect on something in that story and go “oh…I could have solved that problem better.” Accept that it’s totally fine and normal. So many writers didn’t have the whole story planned out when they wrote the first book. And sometimes if your responsible for creating a hundred problems in your own fictional world and solving them all, you inevitably write yourself into tough spots. Give yourself some grace to shrug it off and laugh about it later. You can’t make yourself have the best solutions to everything at the time you wrote it. I’ve come up with solutions now to stories I wrote with my sister years back. I still love those stories and how they played out, but now I know I could do things differently. That doesn’t make the stories bad (not all of them anyway) but it means I’ve grown and learned. That's a good thing, and you should be ready for that possibility. So when you finish a book and decide it's the best you can make it, close it and move on. These things helped me out and I hope they do you as well on your writing journey.

-Jubilee