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...)
The point being, you need to think about, at face value, what your story is about and what you're trying to accomplish. Having thought about what actually happens to your character, you can move into editing with the thoughts of actually doing what you wanted to accomplish. Don't try to tackle your rough draft until you can actually describe what you've written.
The 1st Draft
I'd like to call this draft the tidying up draft. Many other editors will suggest that the next thing you must tackle is making sure the story, characters, and plot are sensible and make sense. You should have an idea of whether you achieved this after following what I suggested after your rough draft. If you find out your story is rich in plot holes, bad characterization, etc... major rewrites are in order. So, spending a ton of time perfecting grammar on paragraphs you're about to change or toss away seems like a complete waste of time.
And for the most part, I agree... but... when we're talking about writers on Wattpad, I think there is something that comes before plot and structure. That something is coherency. First off, spelling and grammar checks are a given. You should resolve every single squiggly line put under your words. If your word editor doesn't have a spell check, then copy and paste your work to one that does. I'd recommend at this stage that you use your native spell checker, and supplement it with a pass through of one of the free add ons. Hemingway app, Prowritingaid, Grammarly... any one of these as a pass through is great.
Finish that up with a readthrough. Don't obsess about the subtler errors. There will be a time where you can worry about punctuation and homophones. For the moment, focus on whether the sentences "sound right". If a sentence seems hard to wrap you head around, then that sentence needs to be rewritten. It can be tough. Sometimes, you just can't think of a better way to say something. I recommend flat out deleting the sentence. Don't allow yourself to dwell on it. Writing the sentence from scratch is a great way to force yourself to change it up and word it in a new way that is less painful.
Once you've established that your book is coherently written, you can graciously call that your first draft. I will say as an official capacity that most of what I post on Wattpad, I only consider at a 1st drafts stage.
The 2nd Draft
Getting to the second draft from the 1st draft is going to be the tricky part. That's because this is the draft where I want you start worrying about the characters and the story. This is the draft where you take on plot holes, justify misinterpretations, and clear up discrepancies. You can't really reach the 2nd Draft on your own. It requires someone else to get involved. You need critics. You need alpha readers. You need someone who is willing to tell you when a sentence causes them to instantly freeze and lose momentum in your book.
For those of you called editors, you should hopefully receive a completed 1st draft before you do anything related to editing. If you end up with something that can't even pass a simply coherency test, then you need to send it back and not waste your time. And for writers, don't waste the editors time by sending them something and expecting them to make your story readable. An editor's job is not to make your story legible, it's to help refine it.
You've already had the first draft to try to make the story coherent on your own. This draft is where you try to handle other people's complaints about your story. For me, that's the point of Wattpad. This is why I put my chapters only considered 1st drafts up here. I want people to question me. I want them to mention things that annoy, upset, or otherwise make the writing difficult to read.
Mind you, this isn't necessarily "editing" in the way you may normally think. Some of you might think an 'editor' is merely "the guy who fixes your grammar and spelling". If that's your opinion, then I hope you widen it a bit. An editor isn't there to dot your 'I' and cross your 't'. The expectation before it reached an editor is that you yourself have done the basics to make your writing coherent. At this level, they are trying to make it better. Better wording, clearer message, and reparation to all the things that made them stop and say "huh?'.
The thing with this draft is that it can take a while to make it through, because as you make the changes suggested, that can include rewriting new portions of the story. That sends you back to the 1st draft. A completed 2nd draft would have had you already consolidate all spelling errors, confusing sentences, and plot holes at a level that both you and your editor/s can agree on.
The 3rd Draft
My chapter Editing 201 - The First Things to Fix. Basically that. If you have the ability to go through your writing one word at a time, and catch all the mistakes, that's fine. You can try my advice in Editing 101 and try reading your story in reverse in order to catch the obvious mistakes. However, to me, the third draft is the draft where you filter out all of the hard to catch mistakes that even 80% of your readers won't catch. The they're, their, and theres (okay, only like 10% won't catch those), the homophones, the proper capitalization and punctuation in dialogue, the difference between on to and onto, proper colon, semi-colon use, and so on. (See Editing 201 for all of them)
It's a tough draft to make, but at this point you hopefully have a halfway competent writer who is looking for these items. If they're catching a common one, you may want to take the effort to use your find function and repair every single instance of, for example, poor comma use. Programs like Grammarly can catch some of them, but at some point, the only way you can be 100% is to check every single word.
Getting through this point requires tenacity, determination, and hopefully a competent editor. Before you tackle the third draft, it's a good idea to make 100% sure that you've made all of the other changes you wanted to make. Be confident you have a completed second draft before you start the third or you may find yourself back to step one.
The 4th Draft/ The Final Draft
This may come out as copout putting the 4th draft and the final draft together. The reason for this comes down to whether you need a final draft or not. The two drafts are different but depending on what you plan to do with the manuscript, a final draft might just not be necessary. What do I mean?
Well, naturally, your 4th draft is the draft where you finish making everything perfect. Ideally, you won't go back and suddenly add or remove things because of plot problems, but as this is your last chance to fix it, I'd say it's a good idea to if you find them. Just make very careful that you are not introducing errors when you make edits. That is embarrassingly easy to do at this stage in your edit. You can end up making as many errors trying to fix things as issues you actually fix.
So, the main goal of the 4th draft is a final readthrough. You're going to be sorting through the story with the intent of making sure nothing comes up. You don't want any hiccups, any confusion, any issues where you need to reread a line three times. This should be the case for the main author, as well as at least one other person.
So, what's the point of this so-called final draft? The final draft is the draft where you format the manuscript in the way you need it to submit. Maybe you can see why I included it as part of the 4th draft. For someone on Wattpad, you just copy/paste the text from your word editor or *shivers* write directly into Wattpad's editing platform, so there is no need to reformat.
However, that isn't always the case. If you are submitting to a journal, they have strict guidelines on the format of your submission. Page sizes, font sizes, spacing... all of these things can potentially be judged. If you are submitting a book that looks like a novel, then you may need to shrink down the page size, change the font, and make the beginning of each chapter look like the beginning of a chapter.
Hopefully, you'll have some awareness throughout your editing of where your manuscript is going to end up, so that word counts, and stylistic choices are on point. However, every submission is different, and the final draft is where you make your story ready to submit.
And once you submit, you're done. You just finished a work and it is no longer in your hands. Of course, on Wattpad, you can continue to edit and refine chapters. Even Amazon books someone sells can be changed and revised with relative ease. So, in the era of the internet, even a final draft might not be final.
Still, if you're stumbling along, here is a formula that works. Note that each draft doesn't necessarily mean each "pass-through". In order to finish draft 2, it might take 2-3 passes. To finish draft 3 might take a few more, from both you and your editor and maybe an alpha reader too, which is really just an editor who doesn't look at grammar. It really depends on you how many passes it takes. Some can do it in one, others require twenty read-throughs. However, hopefully explaining things as Drafts can help you set up short-term goals to help you move your story through the process from written to finished. That is the ultimate goal of editing. Good Luck, and Happy Writing!