Beginning Self-Edits

If you’re a writer, chances are you’ve heard of (or experienced) the dreaded “editing phase” that follows every completed rough draft of a manuscript. Editing is always time consuming, and it can often be difficult, especially for writers who are self-editing. When you’re going through an entire manuscript, whether you’re editing for yourself or you’ve found someone to edit for you, it will always be invaluable to know the two different types of editing: content or “developmental” editing, and line editing (often confused with proofreading).

Content editing is the first part of the editing phase. It’s often called “developmental editing” because it focuses on all the aspects of the story as it develops. Content editors focus on the large ideas and bigger aspects of story writing. Characters and story structure, for instance, are parts of the manuscript a content editor will focus on. If you’re editing for yourself, content editing is important because it focuses wholly on your story. It’s best to check and see if the story makes sense in itself before you worry about how it sounds. While you may want to find someone to professionally edit your manuscript before publication, here are some tips on how you can do a brief content edit of your own work:

• Characters—are my characters well-rounded? Do they have flaws and desires? What motivates them and sets them in motion throughout the story?

• Plot—is my plot clear, not just to me, but to the reader? Does the action rise and fall? Does the beginning of my story draw readers in, and is the ending satisfying rather than superfluous?

Once you’ve polished your story to its best, you’re going to want to start line editing—which is the type of editing most people think of when they realize they need to edit their rough drafts. Line editing has much in common with proofreading. Proofreading is the last-call for catching errors before publication, but line editing focuses on the phrasing of sentences and paragraphs, in addition to the more sundry rules of grammar—such as where a comma belongs, and if you should include punctuation inside the quotation marks of your dialogue (yes!). Even if you forget all the rules of grammar you learned in high school, you can still do a light line edit to ensure that your story is saying what you want it to.

• Phrasing—do all my sentences make sense when read out loud? Are there sentences that are so long they are better off split into two smaller sentences?

• Punctuation—do I have punctuation inside my dialogue quotation marks (“like this?”)? Have I given each line of dialogue a new line, instead of squishing several lines into a paragraph?

While none of these checklist questions are by any means enough of a list to edit an entire manuscript thoroughly, they will give you a better idea of what to look for in order to do some light editing within scenes or chapters. Editing is all about ensuring that the story you’ve written shines bright and clear to the reader. You might not be a professional editor, but going through you own work will help you know your writing, and your story, better.

~K