Editing question for people who have written a novel

[Rae34]

Five months ago I completed the first draft of a novel - my first ever! Having left it to marinade for a few months, I printed out the first five chapters and edited them last weekend.

I found I was able to see my errors quite clearly and made a lot of edits. However, my writing tutor has since said it is much better to read through the entire draft before making any changes.

Do you agree with this? Could you tell me what your process has been like, including number of editing rounds roughly?

I feel able to cope with a few chapters at once and worry I would become overwhelmed quickly if I reread it all again at once.

My Hubble follows an adaptation of the King method. He writes longhand first so makes some major changes when transcribing. After that is done he pops it on the kindle and just reads, if he hits errors he highlights it and moves on, no pausing to fix, just note it. He wanted to just see how it read. He then went through essentially not reading. In this draft he revisited the highlights and scanned looking for technical abs stylistic issues, this helped repeated words jump out. Now it is with beta readers and he is letting it stew. After a week or so he will read again.

I do structural edits first, so read it through from start to finish and pick up where there are continuity errors or I can see that a scene would work better elsewhere in the book. And to make sure that dates etc work!

Then I do several line edits, changing punctuation and taking out any superfluous words to really tighten the text. After that I do one final read through for any typos etc. It's amazing how they slip through however many times you read it, I'm currently doing my proofs for my second book which is published this summer and although it's been edited twice by my publishers I'm still finding occasional errors.

I think it depends on how much of the big picture you can keep in mind when you look at individual chapters. Your tutor possibly has in mind the need for a structural edit and it's better not to line edit (polish) when there might be wholesale changes from a structural edit that makes line edit/polishing wasted. That said, if you can keep enough of the big picture in your head when you look at five chapter chunks and track how changes in those five chapters will propagate along the whole story then that might work for you.

Good luck.

I think you shouldn’t waste the productive freshness of coming back to the MS after months by over-focusing on detail. It risks being unproductive twiddling for me. I would read through the whole thing first making minimal notes of what needs revising, starting with the big, structural stuff, but not actually making the changes as I read. To be blunt, there’s no point in spending forever perfecting the prose of chapter two if you decide, after a full read-through, that in fact the beginning is unnecessarily baggy and you’re going to cut the first two chapters to start closer to the action.

I think it will be counterproductive to focus so much on past mistakes, if you don't want to publish your novel, of course. I also love to write, but I am quite lazy to edit my writings, plus I am not good at spotting my mistake as I always think that I write a masterpiece. This is why I submit essay for review www.essayedge.com/reviews/ (this is the service I use to review it), I like when I read others' opinions, especially that I can observe better where I still have to work. By the way, don't forget to share some of your novels with us!