EDIT, EDIT, EDIT

I cannot stress this enough. Your story will never be good enough, but you have to keep on driving the story forward. Every time you edit, it should improve the story.

If you get a publishing contract, you will go through three editing processes:

1. Initial thoughts, an overview edit.

This is where your editor tells you what works and what doesn’t, with ideas as to how to improve the story. The overview can be long, and you might find yourself doing a whole rewrite.

2. Line-edit

This is what it sounds like, a line-by-line edit, with suggestions about changing a word, or deleting sections, or ending a chapter in a different place, and a more drilled-down setting out of likes and dislikes.

3. Copy-edit
This is an edit done by someone independent of the publishing house.

The principal aim of this is to check for inconsistencies, such as blue eyes in chapter three but brown eyes in chapter ten, as well as factual correctness. For example, if you have written a legal thriller set in Liverpool and you say that the Crown Court is on Minshull Street. There will be a note in the margin that the Crown Court in Minshull Street is in Manchester, not Liverpool.

This is the most brutal part of the editing process, as you will not know the copy-editor, compared to the working, even friendly, relationship you will have with your own editor, so they don't pull their punches.

The main point about the editing process is that every stage improves the story significantly. The writing sets out the story, but it is in the editing that the story becomes more polished, and becomes one that a publisher might want to buy.

It might help if I set out how I work.

I try to write a thousand words a day. Sometimes I’m in the mood, and sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I think I’m in the mood, but spend my time browsing the internet. Other times, I force myself to open my laptop, and some time later I find I’ve written many more than a thousand words. There is no way of knowing until I start.

Then, the first thing I do the next day is to go over what I did the night before. The morning works best for this, as the cold light of day makes me see thing a little clearer. It gets rid of some of the pomposity.

This method drives the plot forward.

A time will come when I don’t know what to write next, because although in my head I might have a general idea of where the story is going, and how it ends, the scene-by-scene direction is done about ten scenes at a scene. Once I get stuck, I go back to the beginning and edit, and by the time I get to where I was stuck, I have worked out where to go next.

When you have finished the whole story, follow the Stephen King advice, which is to go through it again and reduce the word count by 10%. Cut out unnecessary words. Make it leaner.

Another good tip is to print off your story, even if it is only a chapter.

If you read your story on your laptop, your brain misses things, because your brain tells you what it ought to say, as it is always in the same format, rather what it actually says. Print it off and you’ll find typos you missed. You’ll spot clunky prose. You’ll be amazed at how many scribbled edits will appear on work that you thought had been polished to perfection.

But be brutal with your edits. Don’t feel attached to a part or a sentence. If it doesn’t improve the story, get rid of it, because there are two truisms:

- No one is going to read an average story but say, “I didn’t really enjoy it, but I would have paid a tenner just for the second paragraph on page sixty-three”.

- No one is going to read a great book and think that it needed an extra paragraph on page sixty-three.

A publisher will only buy a good story. A reader will only enjoy a good story. Nothing else matters.

How do you get published? Go to the final section, of course.