The process, part 8 - Self editing

So we have a draft manuscript. There is a standalone story and it fits into the trilogy arc. I call it the first draft, but I have a confession.

All through the writing process I have been editing. It’s human nature. Every time I sit at the computer to write, I read the last scene, or part scene, to get back into the mind space of the character’s POV. And that’s where the mind worms take over. When I should be writing, I am refining, polishing and wasting valuable creative time.

And every time I find myself doing it, I tell myself to stop. Of course, sometimes it’s time well spent and the alterations take the writing, when I eventually get around to it, in a better direction; other times, it eats into the available time and occasionally takes up all the time.

But still, despite the editing-on-the-fly, the draft is far from being the finished article and months away from being readable by anyone other than me.

So begins the self editing process.

Now, my editing process for The Connickle Conundrum was unstructured., maybe even haphazard, and consequently inefficient. It comprised reading the manuscript over and over and saving the manuscript as an emnded draft whenever major alterations were made. Each new draft was run through a grammar checker. Until after seventeen read throughs and eight drafts, I felt it was presentable to my trusty beta readers.

Clearly, the approach needed structure and purpose to streamline the process. So for the second part of the trilogy, I adopted the following procedures which cut the editing time in half.

Creating a story summary

This was a very useful exercise made simple by my writing and tracking process. I wrote a brief precis, comprising no more than a short paragraph, of each scene, to ensure the story flowed and there were no plot holes. This resulted in the removal of one scene, adding two more and switching two scenes around. It also confirmed, to the best of my belief, that the manuscript would not need a developmental edit.

Checking the timeline

I had included dates for each scene in my tracker. But because scenes had been moved around, I had to ensure that any references to days or time were commensurate with the timeline. This revealed a small number of descriptive problems, in particular, where a scene was described as ‘next day’ when, in fact, three days had passed! And one issue when a scene was described as a Friday when the date was a Wednesday. Details matter!

Reading dialogue out loud

The manuscript has a lot of characters and a lot of dialogue! So I chose only conversations with conflict to ensure the discourse felt right and was in tune with the character ‘voices’. Although this exercise resulted in small changes, the use of action tags assisted with the separation of voices and added realism.

Refining and polishing

Finally, three more read throughs to check spellings, consistency of characterisation, removal of filter words and tweaks to pacing.

Grammar software

And after each round of edits, I ran the manuscript through a grammar checker, ensuring I didn’t use its AI function for suggestions.

Was my new process a success?

Well, I reduced seventeen read throughs by about two-thirds and eight drafts to a single manuscript. This was a testament to all my new processes but in particular, the editing stage. But was it a success? That will only become apparent after the next part of the process.

This week’s writer and musical artistes are -

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Author and Physician, creator of Sherlock Holmes

Temperance - Italian Symphonic metal band

Next week… Experts