How to edit?

[LadySnark]

I finally finished my first draft of a novel I've been working on for about a year now and it occurred to me that since I've never written something this huge before (the manuscript is 200pg double-sided), editing it seems a really discouragingly daunting task.

Needless to say there is lots of axing, adding and rewriting in my future. ninja

Anyway, I'm curious how you guys go about editing your big kahunas. Do you give it a read through before you start marking it up, do you edit in stages, or dive right in?

[Chiona]

When I edited my novel, I was surprisingly excited to do it. haha!

I made a goal of how many pages or chapters I was going to get done in a day. I usually ended up editing more than that goal and actually finished it in a couple days. I marked up the entire book on the first read and then edited the digital file. However, my novel was significantly shorter than yours! razz

[Sir Icehawk]

This is what I do. I take a break. Avoid it for a few weeks to month while I work on other things. Then I come back and hit it.

I mark it up as I read through it. Each draft I may have a few notes of things I want to focus on, but nothing is off limits. I try to do a scene or chapter a day. A few days later, I'll upload the changes to that scene or chapter.

Timing is important to me. A break between drafts, between marking up and uploading, and such freshens my eyes.

[terradi]

Disclaimer - my work tends to be closer to 65k, and I don't write a lot of fluff (I tend to cut things that don't work in the first draft because the story doesn't feel right), so I don't have the same sort of task as it sounds like you will.

I do a lot of the same things Icehawk does. The one big addition is probably that I mark things that I feel need changing as I'm drafting. For the story I've done round one of edits on, I still have a list of minor notes that I want to work into the story.

I like setting things aside for a while, then coming back and reading through the whole thing again. Sometimes I notice that a storyline needs tweaking or that there are some major things that need to be tweaked or altered to line up smoothly because I changed the direction of the storyline halfway through.

I don't print out copies. I do highlight, take notes on a separate document, or in-document if necessary. For the piece I'm currently editing, because I'm reshuffling a bunch of things, I've added in reading through the chapter I'm about to start editing first, then taking notes on things that need alteration, then starting in on the edit work.

I keep track of my plot arcs mentally, so there are a lot of observations going on in my head about storylines and whether or not a good balance is being made. I look to balance out a story and make certain that certain arcs have enough time and balance, and then sometimes I'll set out to fix a problem like a character not having enough mentions in the story, despite the fact that they should be in specific scenes. (I have a ghost in Mahala. Only my narrator can see her, and in round one of drafting I was much more focused on the main line of events than all of the mentions of the ghost that really needed to be there.)

I tend to spend most of the second draft working on the huge, sweeping storyline changes, and then add in what I consider finer details down the line. Adding in descriptions, making sure I don't just have talking heads is important, but it's less important to the story arc, so that's somewhere I tend to slack off because I have to put a lot of effort into it and it's easier to do that once everything else is settled.

[Sombre Veritas]

Firstly, congratulations of completely the first draft. I usually have a hard time trying to complete one, and my other personas can finish one first draft in a matter of months. So I am jealous of you at the moment.

How I usually edit is: two stages (first half and second half of the manuscript.) I read it through and try to find the missing words or explain something better if it confuses me. Once I have gone through the whole manuscript, I will try to print the whole thing out, if I can. I will then send those printings out to friends and family and let them read over it. I will apply their findings to the manuscript and move onto the final stage.
I take one or two days off and go back at it with a text reader. I listen to it and fill in missing words/sentences/paragraphs and again, fix up descriptions that leave me confused.

I do not know if any of that helped.
I do wish you luck with your manuscript and hope the editing process is relatively simple for you.
Good luck!

[SebastiansLittleDoll]

I edit in stages, I guess? I go from chapter to chapter, reading them and rewriting/editing parts as I go along :3 Congrats, by the way.

[BuiltWilt]

I'm seconding Sir Icehawk's method.

Taking a break in between drafts or edits is important when loosening up kinks. Writers often become too absorbed in their own writing that they don't notice straight away any oddities in their prose or poems.

During breaks I tend to pass out the draft to reliable readers for feedback. Some people start on another story as intermission--I'm too obsessed with getting it all perfect the first few times, so I don't do this. I often pick up a book to read; a good book often helps me in spotting my own flaws when comparing. When I'm reading, I tend to ask myself, "Why is this scene so effective? What makes this voice compelling?" or questions of the sort. If I'm not reading, then I'm depressed with my previous draft and I go dawdling and fiddling with games or Google until I receive the feedback from all I've passed the draft to.

Long breaks, for me anyway, tend to yield better results. The only problem is that time is wasted away. But this is more of a personal problem, because I get many depressive episodes about my own writing and how it's not coming out as I want it to be.

[DeviousBookworm]

As many others have stated before, taking a break after the initial writing can only benefit you, I think. It gives the distance you need to take a critical look what you've written from a more objective standpoint.

When I edit my manuscripts, I set a daily or weekly goal for when I want to finish to start, and work through it. Then, I'll usually send it off to an associate to look through, and I repeat the process over again. During the editing itself, I keep a notes file with all of the content I've taken out, as I hate to ever delete my writing in case it can be used somewhere else.

As I usually have a number of plot threads going on simultaneously, I like to color code my scenes and write up a summary of what I'm reading as I go. If Plot A concerns finding and apprehending the king's murderer, I make note of each scene that concerns the build up and resolution; if Plot B concerns the budding romance between my main characters, then I note that. Creating this reverse outline helps me have a point of comparison when I look back at my original outline and notes, which helps me eliminate plot holes and inconsistencies.