Self-Editing Your Novel: Part 1

This is the first part of a new series aimed at teaching you how to become a better self-editor.

I have been a developmental editor for about twenty-five years in total, and during this time I have seen countless authors carry out self-edits with varying degrees of success. The problem authors face throughout the editorial process is that they are always fighting against what they don’t know they don’t know. After all, if an author had known a problem existed, they would have fixed it at the writing stage.

This series will teach you an approach to self-editing that will allow you to find problems, diagnose the issues and then formulate a robust approach to fixing them.

This is a variant of the approach I use in my editing practice and is based on the same basic editorial principles I teach new editors.

In this article, we focus on diagnosis.

Trust your gut

When professionally editing a book, an editor will take a two-pass approach. They will use the first read-through to identify potential issues and the second read-through to find evidence and determine whether these are real issues that need correcting.

You are going to mimic this approach when you self-edit your book.

The first step is very simple. You are going to read your book with an open mind, like a first-time reader. You are going to start at the beginning and then systematically read the book chapter by chapter.

As you read, you are going to do one very important thing: monitor how you feel.

You will then record these feelings.

There are two things to record.

1. As you read each chapter, you will note any moment when you have a strong feeling.
2. After each chapter, you will write down how the chapter made you feel.

Positive feelings are worth monitoring, but negative feelings will give you the most information.

You are just going to trust your gut to find the problems.

Feelings to observe

Below are the main feelings to watch for.

• Bored — your attention starts to drift.
• Confused — you struggle to understand what is happening or why.
• Frustrated — you feel the story is withholding information or making events unnecessarily difficult to follow.
• Impatient — you want the scene or chapter to move on.
• Disconnected — you stop caring about the characters or what happens next.
• Unconvinced — you find a character’s actions, a piece of dialogue, or a plot development unbelievable.
• Lost — you are unsure where or when the scene is taking place, whose viewpoint you are following, or what a character wants.
• Overwhelmed — you are given too many characters, ideas, or pieces of information at once.
• Underwhelmed — an important moment does not have the emotional impact you expected.
• Irritated — repetition, inconsistency, or unnatural writing begins to distract you.
• Disappointed — you feel the story has failed to deliver a promised development or satisfying payoff.
• Reluctant to continue — you feel tempted to put the book down.

It is worth noting that some of these feelings are hard to track because you understand the full story. If at all possible, try to approach the book as a first-time reader. This means trying to ‘forget’ what you know and experience the story with fresh eyes.

This approach is going to create a ‘map’ of the points in your book where you felt something that might indicate a potential problem.

In the next email, we will look more closely at what these feelings might mean, but here’s a quick insight.

For example, you might feel bored during a scene in which the protagonist drives to work, makes coffee, answers emails and chats with a colleague. From a narrative viewpoint, the problem is not necessarily that these activities are ordinary. The problem is that the protagonist has no clear goal, faces no obstacle and makes no meaningful choice. Nothing changes during the scene, so the reader has no reason to wonder what will happen next.

The end result

At the end of the first-pass read-through, you should have created a list of the places in the manuscript where you experienced a feeling worth investigating further.

Not all feelings are triggers for change; they are simply part of the diagnosis of potential problems. That said, it is important to record them at this stage. You are not fixing anything during this read-through; you are just noting areas that may need more work.

I just wanted to say one thing about how you create these notes. The process is your own, but I suggest using the commenting feature in your word processor. I would create a copy of your manuscript, call it something like ‘first-pass edit’ and then use embedded comments to record what you felt, where the feeling occurred and anything else worth considering. This makes it easy to return to the manuscript and review each note in context. I would also add a comment at the end of each chapter recording your overall feeling about the chapter.

For example:

In-chapter comment: I am starting to feel bored here. My attention is drifting during the description of the protagonist’s drive to work and her morning routine.

End-of-chapter comment: I felt bored during the opening pages while the protagonist drove to work, made coffee and answered emails. My attention returned when she discovered the threatening note on her desk. Overall, the chapter felt slow at the start but became engaging once the threat appeared.

This read-through should not be rushed. As I have said, you are trying to approach it from a first-time reader’s viewpoint. The comments you create will be key to understanding potential issues with your book.

In next week’s email, we will look at how to use these comments to diagnose potential problems.