History That Never Was

Photo by Unseen Studio on Unsplash

One of the WriteHive online conference panels I watched was a presentation on How to Self-Edit Like a Developmental Editor. Even though I am an editor, developmental editing is one of the places where I’d like to increase my skills, and getting some tips and tricks that can help me practice these things on my own work will help me get better at it for client work as well!

The presenter gave several lists of things that an author should look for in their work when they’re self-editing, related to the structure, the characters, the world-building, and more. She also recommended looking at your goals for the piece (the age range it’s targeting, the genre, and the tropes) along with the concept (or themes), as well as your concerns about the piece.

One important recommendation was that you should read the work and take notes before you start fixing things. This can save a lot of time, so you can see the big picture of what changes need to be made, and it ensures that you won’t start making changes that you later have to undo, when you realize how those elements might fit into the larger whole. Another good recommendation for pantsers and plotters alike is to outline (or re-outline) the draft to find plot holes. Even as a serious plotter, doing this for Promise Me Nothing showed me a bunch of plot threads I’d inadvertently dropped, and also made me realize my book had two Thursdays in the same week. Oops.

Another important reminder for those self-editing their work was to remember to love your work and don’t always look for flaws. It’s totally okay to mark things you really like in your work while you’re self-editing, as a reminder of stuff you’ve done well, and also to flag those as things to keep if at all possible!

I’ve only scratched the surface of this valuable presentation with my summary, but you can watch the whole thing, along with other panels from this year and previous years, on the WriteHive YouTube channel!

Tags: advice, character development, conference, editing, online, panels, self-editing, types of editing, writehive

This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Monday, October 2nd, 2023 at 6:00 am and is filed under Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.