Editing and revision is alternately my greatest joy and the bane of my writing existence. Sometimes both at the same time. Getting notes back from a good editor (see my post about Choosing An Editor here) can feel almost life-changing – there’s something so very satisfying about receiving advice from someone who loves your story as much as you do, and has spent serious brain power working out how to help you make it better.
That said, you then have to do the work.
For Merryshields, my middle-grade book, I chose a line edit, and the process has been really straightforward. I had a letter full of notes about overarching themes, the strengths and the weaknesses of the book as a whole, and then line-by-line edits which detailed everything from punctuation changes to continuity errors. I can simply go through these notes chapter by chapter, and watch the book grow stronger with each revision.
The Time-Travellers are a different kettle of fish altogether.
Firstly, I chose a different edit for this book. Quick tangent – there are many kinds of edits, and here are some of them:
- Editorial assessment – a broad overview on the basic plot, narrative voice and character arc.
- Developmental edit – plot holes, character development and narrative shaping
- Copy edit – punctuation, syntax, grammar, and stylistic consistency.
- Line edit – very comprehensive, from a bird’s eye view of continuity and structural issues right down to granular details such as use of language, narrative style, word choice, atmosphere and tone.
- Proofread – checking every single character, right down to the spaces and paragraph breaks.
Sometimes these categories can overlap slightly – for example, a line edit and copy edit can cover some of the same ground. For The Time-Travellers, I chose a developmental edit (sometimes known as a structural edit) because I knew that the thing I needed most help with was managing the timeline. In my notes, it’s known as The [Insert Your Own Swearword] Timeline, because holding all the changing dates/details/ages in my head felt nothing short of impossible at times.
That’s where the revision cards came in.
I’ve seen this method used by lots of other authors and just assumed that they had more organised brains than me. It turns out, with a bit of assistance and a lot of concentration, I can do it too! This was my method:
- I wrote a revision card for each chapter and laid them out so I could see the whole book in front of me.
- I highlighted which POV each chapter was written in, so I could see how balanced it was – or wasn’t.
- Then I went through the edits and wrote on each notecard anything relevant that needed to be addressed in that chapter.
- I retrofitted the structure, using the beats from the book Save The Cat! Writes a Novel, which takes the Save The Cat! screenwriting structure and makes it applicable to novel writing. (This could be a whole post of its own!)
- I added new notecards for new chapters, detailing information that needed to be added.
- Finally I rewrote the new chapter numbers and highlighted them, so that in the event of a technical malfunction (or me dropping them all over the floor) I knew what would be happened when.
- Voila! A plan has been made.
In many ways, this was the easy bit. Some head-scratching and decision making to be done (how old are they in this year? If they did this in 2002, what would that mean for 1970? And when exactly was everyone born?!) but nothing too challenging. And now I have a roadmap!
Now the actual work begins…
