Thread by @melisscaru

I'm working hard on edits for Book 3 right now, so here's a thread about my editing process. Because Past Me would be completely shocked to hear what's involved.

When I was young and foolish, I thought revising/editing was just what I now understand to be line edits and copyediting. Cleaning up awkward phrasing, picking stronger words, fixing errors, etc. And that's all great! But that comes pretty late in the game.

Working with a publisher, I have official cycles of edits where I'm turning in drafts and then I get feedback at increasingly granular levels from my editors, but on my own process was pretty similar, just without hard deadlines at which I had to stop and call it a draft.

The first big phase is structural edits. These include the main building blocks of the story. I'm looking for stuff like:

* Characters whose arcs need strengthening
* Weak subplots that need to be expanded, merged, or cut
* Pacing - major chunks that move too fast or slow

* Stakes: I can ALWAYS raise the stakes after the first draft
* Agency: I ALWAYS need to give my characters more of it after my first try
* Does what everyone is doing even make any sense
* Relationships: are they compelling & do they develop

I'm looking at the bones, the shape of the story. I try to pull WAAAAAYYY back and squint and see what it looks like.

At this point, if a story is a drawing of a dog, mine is a kindergartener drawing with five legs of all different lengths and googly eyes and OMG THE TEETH.

Book 3 (which I'm working on now) is probably, of all the books I've ever written, the one where I've done the best job on basic structure on the first try. So at the structural edit phase, I'm also focusing on some stuff that I might otherwise hit in a second pass, like:

* Internality: Making sure we're immersed in the character's FEEEEELINGS and I'm not just coldly describing what's happening
* Convenience: Removing coincidences that further the plot and making sure everything happens because of actual reasons that are driven by the story

Other things that I often wind up rubbing in deeper in a second pass (after the structural one) include:

* Voice (especially making sure my characters all sound different when they're speaking)
* Clarity (I need feedback to get this right—seeing what people are confused about)

* Transitions - I always write terrible transitions from place to place or arc to arc in early drafts and struggle to fix them later!
* Page-level pacing: tightening rambly bits and drawing out intense bits more
* Setting - makign sure it's immersive & evocative

My drafts used to get much shorter in edits as I found all kinds of redundant or unnecessary stuff I could cut. (I especially had this terrible tendency to write "let's talk about what we're about to do" and "let's talk about what we just did" scenes.)

These days my drafts tend to get longer as I add more emotionally meaningful scenes that advance character relationships and internal plot to round out all the OMG ACTION DANGER! type plot scenes. Draft 2 of Book 3 is probably going to be about 25K words longer than Draft 1.

Only after all this stuff (which can be 1-2+ full edit cycles with feedback from editors or beta readers, and 2-5++ full drafts) do I get to the level of doing line edits and polishing language.

Usually at this point only like maybe 20-50% of my first draft remains.

Since getting a publisher (YAY!), I'm lucky enough to have editors involved giving me feedback for each major cycle, which is incredible. But before that, I got feedback from beta readers & CPs at similar points, and then from my agent. Good feedback is essential for perspective.

In my teens and 20's, I would have been horrified to hear about all this work! Revision sounded super boring. But somewhere along the way, I realized that revision is just MORE WRITING, which is fun.

The first time I write a scene, it's like practice. Maybe I'll knock it out of the park on the first try! But at least as often, on the next pass I'm like "Nah, I bet I can do better than that." And usually I can.

And on that note, uh, I should really get back to these edits. 😁 Gotta work some more intensity into this scene!