The Tidy Guide to Writing, Editing, and Publishing Your Novel

What exactly is editing?

"Editing" is a broad term used for various types of revisions made to a document. In its simplest definition, to edit a manuscript is to change it for the better. We often think of these changes as fixing grammar mistakes and typographical errors, but editing goes far beyond those corrections.

My debut novel was rough, but an acquisitions editor at a small press found promise in it and offered me a contract. My first editor taught me that editing was a process—a series of activities—rather than a single deliverable. It's easier to think about editing in how it's applied to fiction, where you'll most often see editing broken into three levels, or "passes," as the editor will take at least one pass through a manuscript during each level.

The first level of editing is called developmental editing, also known as content editing. Here, my editor looked at my novel as a "big picture" in terms of characters, plot, worldbuilding, pacing, and other end-to-end layers. Content edits are generally provided to the author via an edit letter, followed up with a meeting to ensure both the editor and the author are on the same page.

When I received my first edit letter, I was shocked, then angry. In that letter, my editor recommended I delete an entire chapter that added nothing to drive the plot forward—the same chapter I'd spent days crafting. As if that weren't enough, she pointed out how my protagonist often behaved out of character in dialogue. And she introduced me to the bugaboo of many new writers: Chapter One began in the wrong place. I loved my first sentence!

My editor recommended that I not make any changes until after a night's rest. And sure enough, I looked at my manuscript the next morning with a fresh perspective and realized my editor had pointed out real problems in the story. I had first taken the edit letter as an attack against me when, in reality, it was an objective list of expert recommendations to improve my story. After that "ah-ha" moment, I made the revisions with vigor and returned the document to my editor, who sent it on to the second level of editing.

Copyediting, sometimes called line editing, is where an editor steps through a document, line by line, fixing errors in grammar, style, word usage, spelling, and punctuation. My editor returned the "redlined" manuscript, which displayed the Track Changes and Comments features found within Microsoft Word. These corrections were much easier to make, and my confidence grew. Since I was a new writer, I had much to learn in style and word usage, and my editor performed two copyediting passes to ensure we caught everything.

By the time we'd finished copyedits, I believed my story was spotless. I learned just how wrong I was during the third and final level of editing called proofreading. This is what many new writers mistakenly believe is the entire editing process, but it's only the final, quickest pass. Proofreading focuses purely on typos and errors, such as missing words, incorrect punctuation, and misspellings.

When I received the redlined, proofed document, I couldn't believe the number of corrections the proofreader had made. I'd gone through that manuscript several times on my own before going through it another three times with my editor. This was when I understood why my editor brought in someone new to proofread: Both my editor and I were too close to the story, and we'd begun to skim over individual punctuation marks, letters, and spaces—we'd become blind to the little things.

Even after a complete editing process, a few small errors still made it through into the published novel. No editor can promise perfection. With your name on the cover, it's in your best interests to have your book edited, so that when your novel goes on sale, your readers can become absorbed into your story without numerous errors pulling them away.