How to Approach Story Edits
Congratulations! You’ve finished a draft and are ready to get editing.
If you haven’t read my blog post on how to approach self-edits in general, I suggest you read it. Making sure you separate your story edits from your language edits is important, and I go into more detail about that here.
Otherwise, let’s get started!
Decide what feedback you want to implement.
If you’ve sent your manuscript away to a beta reader or for editing, you’ll probably have notes from other people about what they liked and what you should change.
When you’re feeling good, grab your favourite beverage and read through the feedback. Decide what parts you want to take on and what you want to discard. (You’re never obligated to take someone’s suggestion!)
Reread your novel.
Once you know the broad strokes of where you want to take your novel, it’s time to reread it. Take notes as you reread of places where you can rewrite or rework scenes to make the changes necessary to your manuscript.
If you’re heading into this not knowing what you need to change, take note of the following:
Places you get bored
Places you got so into the book you forgot you were supposed to be working
Places that lack emotional depth
Passages that spew backstory for paragraphs
Place that just feel off or weird
If you have an idea for how to fix these in the moment, jot it down as well. If you don’t, leave it and let the ideas percolate.
One strategy you can use to keep track of all your notes is my colleague Hannah’s reverse outlining method. Basically, you outline your novel as it exists in this draft and add any notes about changes you want to make. Find her blog post on the topic here.
Top Tip: If you use Microsoft Word, I suggest numbering your scenes using headings so you can easily refer to and find them. (Here’s an article about how you can do that.)
Reread your notes and sort them into categories.
There will probably be scenes you need to cut, ones you need to add, and some you need to rewrite. Then, there will be scenes you need to add certain details to or check over.
I suggest sorting your notes and action items into the broad categories of story elements, like character, plot/pacing, themes, and world building.
Trying to work through all your notes at once as you go through the manuscript is often overwhelming. (Generally speaking. If you like to work chronologically instead, go forth!)
It can be easier to break up the work into different passes. That means going through your manuscript (doing a pass) multiple times and making changes to different story elements.
Here’s an example of how I categorized tasks in my own manuscript.
Creating this list tells me roughly which areas need more work than others. From here, I can create a plan based on different story elements.
Write out a game plan and work through it.
It’s easier to start when you know what you’re doing next. You can see the detailed plan I wrote for my own manuscript below.
Basically, I started with the category that required the biggest changes and each subsequent pass was smaller in scope. That way, I was refining each element as I went.
Here’s an example of my self-editing plan.
1. Pacing Pass
In this pass, I combined scenes that were too short on their own, added to scenes that ended abruptly, and rewrote scenes that had specific pacing issues.
2. New-Scene Pass
During this pass, I wrote all the new scenes I decided to add.
3. Hockey Pass
My book has a lot of hockey scenes. During this pass, I wrote the hockey scenes I left out, flagged the ones that are written for my fact-checker, and ensured there weren’t any glaring errors.
4. Info-Dump Pass
This was my first pass that didn’t focus on substantial rewrites. It was about rewriting passages where there were info dumps. The story didn’t change during this pass but its presentation will.
Note: As I rewrote the scenes, I was aware of the character changes I’d decided to implement and made sure to add character details where appropriate. However, I wasn’t going through the manuscript and making character changes to scenes that didn’t need to be looked at for pacing.
Keep track of your progress.
Keeping track of your progress not only helps you stay focused but also lets you see that you are making headway. It’s easy to feel like you’re just tearing apart your manuscript and nothing is happening. But it’s not true!
Keeping track of what you’ve done—whether that’s by word count or number of scenes/chapters edited—can motivate you!
There are lots of ways to keep track. You can use a spreadsheet that automatically updates your progress on a graph. You can print a progress bar that you colour in. Or you could print a cute colourable progress picture from Etsy and fill that out!
Do what feels best for you, but don’t forget to celebrate the little wins along the way!
Let your manuscript sit.
Once you’re done all your passes, take a break! I know it’s tempting to just keep going. But trust me, your brain is much too close to the story now. Let your manuscript sit for at least a week—ideally a couple—before you go back to it.
Read through your manuscript to make sure you’ve hit all the right beats.
At this point, you might send your manuscript out again for beta feedback, or you might be happy with it as it is! If you’re sending it back for beta feedback, consider writing down a couple questions for your beta readers to see if you succeeded where you made edits.
For example, if one of your tasks was to dig deeper into character motivation, you might ask a beta reader the following:
Did [character]’s actions make sense to you? Were there any times you questioned why they chose to do what they did?
If you still have notes about things you want to change or beta readers have more questions that you feel need to be answered, rinse and repeat. I know that’s daunting, but you’ll only make the manuscript better!
If you feel like the story is solid and any tweaks you’d be making are purely cosmetic, it’s time to…
Celebrate!
Yes! Your story is complete, and all the beats are hitting right. That’s an amazing accomplishment!
Take a moment to celebrate. Bake a cake. Go out for drinks with some writer friends. You deserve it!
I hope this has helped you with story-edit overwhelm! Just remember that breaking it down and writing out a plan can make a huge difference.
If you need help getting started, I offer one-on-one coaching where we dive into your story and come up with a plan that works for you.
Click below to start the process.