3 Tips for Editing Your Own Fiction
I’m mostly a pantser when it comes to the writing process. Now and then I’ll know where a story’s going ahead of time, and may even do a bit of outlining for longer works, but my preferred approach is just to start writing and let the story tell me where it wants to go.
Because of this, my rough drafts don’t tend to be what I would call “finished stories.” They have a beginning, middle, and end (usually) but they still don’t have an effective arc, are riddled with inconsistencies, and have the kind of rambling pacing that feels like the author’s just making shit up as they go instead of intentionally moving from one scene to the next. Which makes sense, because that’s exactly what happened.
The editing process is when I wrangle these messy rough drafts into something other people can actually read and make sense of (and hopefully enjoy). I do have some help in this process because I have an incredible writing group. But even with a workshop group or beta reader, you can’t expect them to do all the heavy lifting for you. Most stories need to go through multiple editing rounds before they’re fully finished—more versions than you can realistically expect anyone else to read.
Besides that, while it’s helpful to get an outside perspective on your work, other people don’t necessarily know what you’re trying to do with the piece. Only you know what you want a given story to accomplish, and only you can actually write something in your own unique voice. A writing group can tell you whether that’s coming across, and can give you pointers for how to make it clearer if it’s not, but you can’t outsource your entire creative process to them.
Just like with the writing itself, every writer’s approach to editing is going to be different. But sometimes hearing how other people go through the process can be helpful, even if doing things exactly that way isn’t a good fit for how your brain works. With that in mind, here are some of my tips for editing short fiction.
#1: Start with the broadest focus and narrow as you go.
If you write like me, you’re going to have some pretty ugly sentences in a rough draft—as in, painful-to-read, make-you-doubt-whether-you-can-even-write level of bad. It’s highly tempting to immediately start fixing these when you go in to edit.
The thing is, when you’re still in the rough draft phase, the sentence-level stuff doesn’t matter yet. The scenes containing the bad prose might get revised until they’re unrecognizable, or even cut entirely. This makes it pointless to fiddle with word choice or phrasing until you’re sure the scene is basically in the right place and form.
This isn’t just about efficiency, either. On a first pass through a rough draft, you want to keep your brain in big-picture mode: the story’s structure and narrative arc, the development of the characters and world, and similarly high-level things. Getting too nitty-gritty too soon can mean you miss larger issues until much later in the process. It also makes it much harder to cut things that end up not fitting if you’ve already put in the work to make them pretty.
I like to use the analogy of building a house for this. Construction happens in a specific order for a reason. First the foundation is laid, then the walls are framed out, then they put in things like the electrical wiring and plumbing. All of that happens before they start doing things like painting and installing appliances. This makes sure that all of the key structural elements are in the right place before they move on to aesthetics.
You want to do the same thing with writing. Pretty sentences are the paint and furnishings—that’s the last thing you want to put in place, after you’re sure you have the right characters in the right setting, moving through the plot and in-story time in the right way to give the story the arc and pacing that you want for it.
#2: Let the story sit between editing rounds.
When you’re in the thick of writing or editing a story, you are intimately aware of what you want it to say, how you picture the world, and what defines the characters. This might seem like a good thing—and it is, in a certain sense. But it can also be a handicap. When you’re hyper-aware of what you want the story to be, you can’t see as clearly what it actually is on the page. Things that only exist in your head could be coloring how you read the piece. What’s fully obvious to you as the writer may be completely hidden from the reader, but you can’t always tell that when you’re so close to the story. A workshop group is great for spotting this, too, but you can see it more easily yourself when you have a bit of distance.
I understand the discomfort of letting a story sit. When you’re excited about a piece you just want to keep working on it. There’s also that fear that you’ll forget what you were trying to do and won’t be able to recapture the magic if you let it linger untouched for too long.
My response to this is two-fold. One: this is a place you need to trust yourself as a writer. If you are sure about what you want this story to say, trust that you’ve said it well enough that it will shine through, even if you step back from the story for a little bit.
And two: what you set out to accomplish with a story may not be where it ends up in its final form—and that’s okay. Nothing about a work of fiction is set in stone until that piece is published (and sometimes not even then). If the story wants to go in a different direction, sometimes you need to let it. That’s easier to do when you let yourself forget what you were trying to do, and shift your perspective to see what the story needs to feel complete.
This doesn’t mean you need to let the story sit between every editing round, but it is smart to insert some strategic breaks. For me, I may even do this as early as between the rough draft and my first edit, especially if it’s one of those stories that just kind of appeared without me trying to do anything specific with it. I have quite a few rough drafts in my queue right now, some of which have been sitting for a few months at this point. Eventually I’ll circle back to them, but at the moment I have other pieces I’m focused on—and, by the time I do get back to those stories-in-waiting, it’ll be like I’m reading them for the first time.
If I do jump right into the first edit, then I’ll usually take a break from the story right after it. This gives my mental pre-conceptions time to clear before I dig back in to big-picture things, letting me more accurately identify issues like plot holes, lack of world grounding, inconsistencies with the worldbuilding and story’s rules, or poor character development.
The other stage of the process where I’ll most often take a break is when I think I’m ready to shift into line-level edits. The length of this break can vary from a week or so to another multi-month gap, depending on how many other pieces I’ve currently got in the queue and if there’s a time crunch to get the story in publishable form, like if I’m eyeing up a specific open call to send it to. Often, this will also be the stage that I send the piece to my workshop group. If they have more developmental editing level comments, I might make those edits before setting the piece aside, but usually I’ll save any line-level stuff they bring up for my first post-break pass.
#3: Read the story out loud before you decide it’s finished.
Your brain approaches text in a different way when you’re speaking it aloud than when you’re reading in your head. During quiet reading, you’re more likely to mentally gloss over errors like missing words, incorrect words, clunky phrasing, and punctuation issues. It’s just like with the big-picture things—in your head, you know what it’s supposed to say, so sometimes your brain helpfully supplies that correction instead of really seeing the words as they are on the page.
Reading a story aloud is also the best way to get a sense for the rhythm and flow of the language. You can more easily spot places where you’re lacking sentence structure variety, or where the prose reads as choppy or, on the other extreme, too rambly. This is also an excellent way to fine-tune the voice and ensure it’s reading consistently from start to finish. In short, it’s one of your best tools for giving a story that final polish that puts it firmly in the “ready to publish” category.
I find reading aloud is best for refining at the line level, so I don’t usually do this in earlier stages of the process. Normally, I’ll save my first out-loud read for after I’ve done at least one sentence-level editing pass. I also find an aloud read can be a good litmus test for whether the story is actually ready to send out. If I’m able to just read through it, without stumbling over words or feeling the urge to stop and fix things, then I feel confident it’s as ready as I can make it and it’s time to send it out into the world.
To wrap up, I’ll reiterate what I said in the intro: Everyone’s process is different. I have some friends who plot first and write their stories painstakingly, sentence by sentence, so that their rough drafts come out remarkably clean. I have no clue how they accomplish this, but it works for them.
These tips are likely to be most useful for fellow pantsers. But the truth is, however you write, editing your own fiction is hard. Hopefully this advice helps some other writers out there find the approach to editing that’s the best fit for their process.
See similar posts: