Rewrite, Revise, & Review

How do you self-edit your work?

Every writer who wants to publish their story should be going through this process. How you decide to go about these steps is totally up to you, but there really is no reason why you shouldn’t be doing them. And it doesn’t matter if you are able to afford all the editors in all the land. You should still make time for what I’m about to discuss.

I think it’s important for all writers to have a level of clarity and understanding of more than just telling the story. We need to be invested enough to want what we write to be as good as it can be before anyone looks at it, including editors. You might be asking, if we are perfecting our grammar and punctuation and typos, what do we need editors for? Well, because we won’t catch everything. Unfortunately, no one can catch all the mistakes in a manuscript. Something will always get missed. But that is not the point.

The point to writing, I believe, beyond just enjoying the story I’m writing, is to be able to make fewer mistakes than we did one our last story we wrote. I can’t tell you how happy I am when I get tenses right. Or my POV remains the same in an entire chapter. I know what my weaknesses are and just for my own personal growth, I want to be able to look back five years from now and say I’m better at my weaknesses or that they aren’t my weaknesses anymore.

I will get off my soapbox now and go into each phase I like to apply to my own completed manuscripts, how I do them and why.

REWRITE

I like to do my rewriting first and the only way I do my rewriting is by what I call my “red pen edits” phase. When my manuscript is completed, I will print it out, one-sided, double-spaced, and justified. Depending on the length I will print it from my own personal computer or just spend a couple of bucks and have OfficeMax print it and bind it all nicely for me. I find it’s well worth the cost because I love having my manuscript in my hands for the first time and this exercise takes my eyes away from the computer screen at least for a short time and that’s always good.

If you can’t afford to print your manuscript to do the red pen edits, I totally understand. I wasn’t able to do this until just this year myself. What I used to do was work on a notepad and instead of using a red pen as I do now, I would just make notes on the pad and reference back to page numbers. I would still export my document as a PDF and make sure page numbers are on each page.

But going back to my red pen edit phase which basically is my rewrite phase. For me, rewriting is what happens when I make big changes. I will delete entire scenes or chapters. I’ll change the names of the characters. I might even add a character or change the ending. Maybe I neglected to describe something or someone and I just put a lot of notes to myself in these lovely looking “[ ]” brackets. Anything in there I want to make sure I action during my red pen edits.

By the time I’m done my printed manuscript will usually be riddled with notes of things I have to remove, change, add. Anything I have to add I will usually put on the flip side of the page I’m working on. This way I have plenty of space to work with. Unless it can fit in the double-spaced margins. But for me that is rare. I always just use the flip side.

Once I’m done with my red pen edits the real fun begins because now I have to take all I’ve done and apply it to what I’m not calling my FIRST DRAFT. This is going to be a much cleaner draft than where I started. Something to note is I will usually duplicate my previous draft so I always have a copy of my original vomit draft just in case. Or if I’m working in Scrivener, like I am these days, I will create a new FOLDER for each draft version (see image below).

Now that we have our FIRST DRAFT ready, that doesn’t mean it’s ready for the public eye.

REVISE

I treat my revision phase a bit differently than I’m sure others would. This is when I take my first draft and upload it into an editing software program that I use called ProWritingAid. It is a bit pricy but I feel well worth it if you go for the Lifetime package. It’s definitely more cost-effective than Grammarly (which I use for my blog editing and the free version is more than enough that I need). But for a deeper dive into my writing, I like to use ProWritingAid. Because it is so detailed in the corrective suggestions it makes, I usually can’t get through it in one sitting. This can take several days especially if I’m revising a novel.

My suggestion, if you are putting your manuscript through any editing software, do it in pieces. For one thing, you don’t want to risk it crashing cause you’re putting through a 100K word novel and also, you don’t want to be overwhelmed with hundreds or thousands of errors that will pop up as your software program goes through your manuscript and points all your mistakes out to you. That can be overwhelming for anyone to see.

So, unless you’re looking to revise a short story that is under 15k words, I would suggest doing a few chapters at a time. Something else to always remember when you are entrusting your manuscript to another person or machine is that you do not have to accept the suggestions given to you. Only you know your work and how you best want it to be conveyed through your words to the reader. A program can only go by the rules it was given. Like any program, it will make assumptions about how your sentence should be phrased, but that doesn’t mean it’s how you want it to be read. With that said, don’t walk blindly into this step and just accept suggestions because you figure the program knows best. Trust your gut. Read the sentence over and over again. Out loud especially! And if you think their suggestion is good, accept it. But if you think it’s not right, skip it.

REVIEW

So far everything we’ve done up until this point has fallen under the much larger umbrella of editing. This review phase is just my last-ditch effort to really polish my manuscript and get it ready for someone other than myself to see it. I might send it off to a few beta readers or an editor. But before I do I want to give it one last review. And this is how I do it:

First, I export my document as an epub file. The reason I do this is that I want to read through my manuscript from beginning to end as if I was an actual reader and use Kindle on my iPad to read it. So I’ll open it up on my iPad and proceed to read my manuscript out loud to myself. Reading out loud allows me to hear errors in pacing and dialogue that I’m sure I would’ve missed during my previous two phases. Our brains are wired to just correct errors that it knows are mistakes and we don’t realize it. Reading aloud helps us to catch those pesky mistakes.

Typically, if I did the previous two phases well, then this will phase will not have too many issues to correct. However, if I find I’m making more changes than usual and you get to decide how to define more changes, then what I’d do is put this manuscript back through ProWritingAid one more time. Just because I’ll want to make sure the large amount of changes I made doesn’t have any sort of grammatical issues.

Oh, and before I forget, while I have my First Draft exported as an epub on my iPad I will also duplicate this file and make it the Beta Draft that I will have open in Scrivener so as I find any corrections I need to make from my iPad read aloud I can make it at the same time in the raw file itself.

FINAL STEPS

Now that I’ve done all of that and spent way too much time than anyone should spend with their work I will send it off to betas and editors and take much-needed time away from it for several weeks if possible. Sit back and wait for the feedback to come in because when it does there will be a whole bunch of steps you’ll want to take and some serious organizing you’ll want to do as well. But that’s for another post on another day.