Writing Tip #3: The Editing Process

The editing process. It can be hard. It can be difficult. But it can also be very exciting. When you’re editing, you have power to change everything and anything.  You can change the starting point and ending point. You can change characters, add characters, delete characters. You can add and delete chapters. The point of the editing process? It’s to make the book the very best it can be.
So here’s my top secret (not really) tips on making your story the best.

1: Your first attempt will never work as a book.
That’s the hard fact. The first try, the first attempt, most likely is going to stink. (Mine always do.) What’s the point of the first draft, then? To get the story finished. Don’t worry about grammar. Don’t worry about editing-along-the-way. Don’t worry about names, chapters, or if it makes sense. When you’re writing your first draft, you have 1 goal and one goal only, and that is to get it done.
Once your first draft is finished, I highly advise starting a new draft and rewriting the story—this time, worrying about all those things I told you not to worry about. Can you still use your great sentences from the first one? Sure. But make sure they really are great sentences first.

2: Feel free to change the story around!
Once you have a second draft finished, you may have a great idea for a new plot twist. If that happens in the middle, feel absolutely free to start again on a third draft. You may think your story is working fine and you don’t need a third draft. If so, consider yourself amazingly talented, skilled, and lucky, because I can’t get a really good story until draft 4 or 5. Mostly because I keep coming up with better ideas. (LOL.)

3: Once you’re finished with it, set it aside!
This is EXTREMELY important. When you have a draft that you think works, put it aside and DO NOT LOOK at it for at least a week. Why? Because after a week, when you look at it, you will find more mistakes or things you can improve. I can pretty much guarantee it. You should just see my third draft of The Hidden Amethyst, which I thought was the final one. It’s hilarious. I had a chapter where Amethyst (called Eliza then) and her friends are almost run over with an airplane! Not only was it totally unrealistic, it was ridiculous. I also had the Mochas be good people, because I added them in afterwords to get the names in—which leads me to number 4.

4: Do Not Get Lazy!
I got lazy in my third draft of The Hidden Amethyst. How it went was: I wrote all about “Eliza” and her friends walking along having an adventure and I’m sure I had multiple descriptions of their raggedy clothes in there. So later on, I add in the Mocha family because I need to get my friend Avery’s name in there, and my story leads to the Mochas giving them all these clothes. The problem is, later on, they have ragged clothes and I knew it. I got lazy. Instead of finding all those descriptions of their clothes and changing them, which would have been the better idea, I just wrote a chapter where they get robbed. Pathetic, right? DO NOT DO THIS. Obviously, when I went back to re-edit (that’s where Eliza became Amethyst) I deleted that part out, in the process making the Mochas evil. My whole third draft, come to think of it, is just me getting lazy. So take that as a lesson: if you find an issue like the one above with an easy way to get rid of it and a hard way, generally, the hard way will get you a better story.

These are the tips I’m following myself as I work through my next book, which should release next August. Hope they were helpful to you!