Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

Editing 301 - Drafts

A big part of writing is editing. Some people actually like editing. They are special people who seem to take pleasure in sentence structure and finding ways to say the same things in clearer, more concise, and just better ways. Unfortunately, the excitement and wonder of editing can be a bit of an acquired taste. Those who love writing may not be particular fond of that thing called editing. Those that edit might not be confident in their ability to tell coherent stories.

Thus, a relationship was formed between the editors and the writers. However, even editors have their limits, and no matter what you do, if you have any desire to publish anything worth its storage space, you are going to need to edit.

I've written several chapters already offering advice on editing. I've had chapters that give you certain points of advice on how to be a better editor on wattpad. I've given you a list of the things that set grammar Nazis off the most. I've written a list of many of the most obvious mistakes, allowing you to take your editing to the next level. Advice on how to write dialogue, lists of homophones, differences between American and British English, and even how fix formatting glitches... I've written chapters for them all.

The one thing I haven't provided in wattpad is a step by step on how to edit. What does each draft represent? What should you be worrying about?

Before I take to answering this question, I need to point out that every editor is different. There is no "right" number of drafts before something is final. Some people do it in two. There is advice on how to complete a draft in only one-pass. I've seen suggestions run from 2 and 11 drafts. How badly you write from the beginning is important.

I'll tell you right now, that everything I put on Wattpad on gets two drafts. I write it, do one readthrough, and then I post it. Naturally, I can do this because I know as a writer that I write well enough that I don't need extensive drafts to fix mistakes. And since I'm sure you noticed my grammar/spelling in these chapters isn't great, you can understand more drafts could probably have helped turn this book into something more refined than it actually is.

The strategy I'm giving you today is not the strategy you must take. Like with my Critiquing chapter ages ago, this is a guideline to show you the kinds of points you should consider when coming up with an editing strategy. Find a strategy that works for you, and then go with it. However, if you can't come up with a strategy, then I offer you my Six Draft Editing Strategy.

The Rough Draft

This is your first draft, otherwise known as "you wrote all the chapters of your story and the story is now done". Now, especially if you are a Wattpader, you've likely hosted chapters one at a time, and each chapter has gone through several revisions. If that is the case, I recommend that you perform this six draft editing strategy on each chapter as you release them (or like me, you can just get it to the 1st draft), and then perform the six draft editing strategy on the manuscript as a whole.

But the goal of the rough draft is to complete it, right? So, as long as you're sitting on something that needs to be edited before being published, you should be done with this step from the get-go, right? Well, I think there is a preparatory step that is worth performing before you actually start working on your 1st draft. You can call it an editing warm-up.

This chapter is linked to a post made by someone who actually knows what they are talking about when it comes to editing. That is the so-called one-pass editing I mentioned earlier. I think their chapter makes a lot of good points, and the advice I'm about to give you right now comes from a modified version of this post, so consider this my citation.

Before moving on from the Rough Draft, write down the theme, the summary, the main characters, and the character arc for each of the main characters. Give yourself no more than 25 or so words to do any given description. (Ie, summary in under 25 words, main character arcs in under 25 words, etc...)