Fighting Draft Dread: How do you make yourself start editing that book you wrote?

You finished a book. Getting all the way to The End, no matter how long it took or how good you think what you wrote is, is a major accomplishment. You need to take a moment, pat yourself on the back and bask in a job well done.

Except that, at some point, you’ve realized that was only the first battle of the long war to end up with a finished book. You’re going to need to dive back into what you wrote to edit and polish it into something you can be proud to show around to friends, family and maybe even agents and publishers.

But, ugh, right? The thought fills you with absolute dread. You know it’s going to be lots of work, take a long time and that you really should have started it already. How do you physically make yourself start editing that book you wrote?

Let’s go into this step by step:

1. Let it sit. This is an important step. If you just finished the book yesterday, it’s too soon to start editing it. You need to give it some time so that you get distance from what you wrote and can see its flaws and merits. At the least, take a month or so and work on other writing projects without touching the new book. This way, when you are ready to start editing, you’ll have perspective and the ability to cut and rewrite when needed without being emotionally attached to your word babies. Of course, we don’t always have the luxury of time in this world of deadlines but time spent letting your manuscript age is time well spent. It’s much easier to edit words that feel like someone else wrote them.
2. Establish a master draft.  Because I subscribe to the philosophy outlined in the post called 5 reasons it’s better to spread the first draft of your novel out over multiple document files, it means that my first draft is usually many separate documents which I combine into a single file in this step. Even if you compose your first drafts in a single document or if you prefer to keep working in multiple files for another draft, you may still have other notes, scenes and chapters that you need to collect in one place. This is the time when you look at the four versions of Chapter 15 and commit to one. Don’t read what you’ve written at this point other than a quick skim, the point of this is to just get everything you think belongs in this book together in a central location so that you aren’t hunting around for it later when you’re knee deep in edits.
3. Read the entire book in one sitting. Or as close to one sitting as possible. Preferably do this either with an e-reader or by printing the draft out so you physically can’t edit as you read. This go-through is about reading the story as a whole, seeing the big picture and getting an overview of what needs to be done. Editing is a distraction at this point. Take notes as you go on separate paper. Forget typos and spelling errors; you have bigger fish to fry. What parts work? Which ones don’t? Are characters consistent? Did you forget a scene or other moment that is important to your vision of how the story goes? What’s so boring even you have trouble getting through it? Reading it all in one sitting is a great way to see problems that aren’t apparent when you’re only looking at a scene or chapter at a time. After all, that’s how you want readers to experience your story.
4. Write an Editing To Do List. What needs to be done to this draft to make it into book you see in your head?  Warning: This may be massively huge. This will be a cleaned up version of the notes you took while reading the draft and will change and evolve as you go through your edits and rewrites. Even though this won’t stay the same, it’s still a very important step because this is what makes this editing undertaking feel possible and will keep you from getting overwhelmed. Having a concrete list, no matter how long, of what you need to do with your book gives you tangible goals. It gives you a sense of how much work you have yet to do and also how much you’ve already accomplished which can help you get going when the editing gets tough.
5. With your To Do List by your side, start with the first chapter and slowly work your way through the entire book. The beauty of all that pre-work I made you do above is that by now, you’ve spent time familiarizing yourself with your book again and are just itching to get to work on it. You needed to analyse your work without being allowed to touch it to get back into the mood to want to touch it. Doing the pre-work gave you new ideas, a fresh perspective and the right tools to tackle the job. Now you can start to go through the book chapter by chapter making the fixes and changes that you outlined in your Editing To Do list. You’ll find new problems, better solutions and discover things about your book that the prep-work never showed you but that’s fine. That’s part of the magic of writing. But having the prep-work done ahead of time gives you something to fall back on when you start to get blocked by the strain of the editing process.

I recommend repeating all 5 steps above several times until you feel like the book is as good as you can get it. Once it’s the best draft you can make by yourself, start to show it to Beta readers. Their suggestions will lead to a whole new round of editing but, by then, it will be a much better book.

So, how do you edit? What works for you and what stops you cold?