NaNoWriMo’s been over for almost 3 full months now and many of you haven’t even touched your novel since then. In fact, that’s one of the biggest complaints NaNo participants have. Once the inspiration and frenzy of NaNoWriMo is over, how do you make yourself actually sit down and edit that novel you wrote in 30 days? It’s not uncommon for a winning Wrimo to never do anything with that novel they worked so hard to finish and that is a little sad, don’t you think?

I’m here to help with the two things you need to make yourself sit down and start editing that novel: deadlines and web badges. How do I know that web badges and deadlines are what you need? Because you’re a NaNoWriMo participant, silly! We live for deadlines and web badges! 😉

Seriously, though, one of the biggest reasons you’re finding it so hard to get down to editing is because of the open nature of it. After all, you have the rest of your entire life to edit that book, right? What’s the motivation to start on it today? By giving you a couple of simple, actionable steps and some deadlines, it should be just what you need to get that butt in the chair and start editing your novel.

Anyone can earn the following badges, even after the deadline. Once you’ve earned it, please feel free to download it and share it wherever you wish. And, of course, if you can get any step done early DO IT.

Editing Badge #1: First Blood

The bearer of this badge has completed the first task in their editing quest to bring honor to their 2013 NaNoWriMo novel. 

How to Earn: Read your entire 2013 NaNoWriMo novel. This is a read through ONLY. No editing, revising or making any changes. Just read through every single word to give yourself a picture of exactly what you have. If you don’t think you can stop yourself from editing it if you read it on your computer, print it out. Put your feet up, take a deep breath, and read through every single word.

Deadline: March 6th, 2014. That’s two weeks from now. So get on it.

Once you’ve read through your entire novel, post in this thread and share one of the worst sentences from your draft. Is it a typo? A grammatical train wreck? Just something that doesn’t make a lick of sense because you wrote it in a word sprint? Let’s all have a good laugh over it.

Editing Badge #2: Glancing Blow

The bearer of this badge has completed the second task in their editing quest to bring honor to their 2013 NaNoWriMo novel. 

How to Earn: Read through your 2013 NaNoWriMo novel a second time, taking notes and making a list of things that are good and things to fix (aka an Editing To Do list). We’re not talking about typos here, that’s one of the very last steps. Instead, go through your novel again and focus on the big picture. Does the plot make sense? Are the characters consistent? Does the book tell the story you were trying to tell?

We aren’t actually going to change anything in our manuscript itself yet. Just make a list of everything you want to remember to fix and don’t forget to note down your favorite parts as a reminder of what you want to keep. This list will be your blueprint as you start the editing process in earnest.  

Deadline: April 2nd, 2014. (Because if I’d picked April Fool’s Day, you’d never actually do it.)

Once you’ve completed your list, post in this thread and tell us three things you still like about your novel no matter how much work there still is to do.

Editing Badge #3: Killing Blow

The bearer of this badge has completed their editing quest and brought honor to their 2013 NaNoWriMo novel. 

How to Earn: Edit your 2013 NaNoWriMo until it’s the best you can possibly make it on your own. Start with addressing the items you put on your Editing To Do list in the previous step and then go through the whole project several times until you get your book to be as good as you can make it yourself. In short, you want to create a draft that you can get out to beta readers who can give you feedback that will guide your next steps. But any feedback you get from readers is going to be that much more useful if you take care of the big things yourself first. The better a draft you give your beta readers, the better the feedback you’ll get back so your focus is to edit it not to perfect but to as good as you can make it on its own.

When you reach the point when you know something’s still missing but you don’t know what it is, that’s when you know you’re done.

Deadline: September 30th, 2014. This way you can hand your draft off to beta readers and then throw yourself into NaNoWriMo 2014 while they read it. It will be a welcome distraction from the novel (which you’ll be fairly sick of at this point) and, once NaNo 2014 is over, you’ll be fresh and ready to approach your beta comments with a new eye after having worked on something else for a while. Then you’re just a few more edits away from a final draft.

Once you’ve completed handed your draft off to beta readers, post in this thread and commiserate about the editing process with everyone else who’s been there.

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If you post any of these badges on your blog, please share the link below so that we can pay you a visit! Happy editing!