The Three Stages of Editing

Editing is the most daunting, frustrating, and labor-intensive part of being a writer. I often say that writing is just prep-work, and editing is the real writing.

If you've read any of my articles about plotting, you know I like a well-defined task, and editing is no exception. I don't just muddle my way through, reading my manuscript over and over, blindly feeling my way towards a stronger story. I break it down into three distinct stages, working the various issues from largest to smallest.

Developmental Edits

The big picture stuff is first. Once I finish a draft, I take some time to read the whole thing cover to cover. I usually convert the manuscript into an ebook (using Calibre), and read it on my phone. This takes me out of the writer's mindset; it makes it impossible to tinker and get distracted as I go. I have Google Keep or a blank Google Doc open, and I jot down everything that comes to mind as I read.

Mostly, I try to focus on big-picture issues like showing and telling, story structure, proportion, and how my characters are coming across. I do my best to ignore typos and grammatical errors because A) I will fix those over the next two stages, and B) the issues I find during the developmental stage usually require extensive rewrites, so a lot of what I read will end up getting cut out or rewritten anyway. It's a waste of time to tinker with the grammar in a paragraph I'll be cutting out later.

As a self-editor, this stage usually lasts the longest. Depending on the complexity of the novel, I might end up doing two rounds of developmental edits, because the more new material I write, the more new issues pop up during rewrites. This is one of the reasons I'm so heavily in favor of plotting. If a sequence of events clashes with a character's motivations, or if a particular chain of causality doesn't work, it's much easier to rework in the plotting phase. But, try as I might, sometimes I can't see the flaws until the manuscript is written, so there are always rewrites in the developmental stage.

Once developmental edits are done, I usually send the manuscript out to beta readers. It's essential to get another pair of eyes on your work, to catch what you can't. As a writer, you'll always know what you were trying to say, and sometimes that makes it hard to see what you did say. Beta readers cut through all that mess, and give you ammo for the next stage.

Line Edits

Once I'm sure the story is structured and proportioned the way I want it, I dive into the words themselves. Line edits are best done with tunnel vision; you want to ignore the story as much as possible, and focus on how well the sentences work. I look at paragraphing, word choice, dialogue mechanics, character voice, and a whole host of other issues. This can involve multiple passes, but usually by this point I know where my strongest and weakest scenes are, so I try to focus my energy where it's needed most. 

The hardest part about line editing is knowing when to stop. There is never a point where I can read a sentence and not imagine another way of saying it. Even if I'm satisfied with something one day, the day will eventually come when it sounds like garbage to me. I fully believe this is a fundamental law of writing. If you never stop learning, you never stop improving. If you never stop improving, the gap between your current understanding and your previous work is always growing, and that means your old writing will always look worse every time you revisit it.

So at some point, you just have to stop. Do it arbitrarily if you must, but for me there's always a point where I take a step back and realize I've tried a sentence or a passage five or six different ways, and I'm beginning to retrace my steps. That's when I stop.

Proofreading

Once I realize I'm torturing myself, the only thing that remains to be done is make sure I don't look like an idiot. Even nit-pickers like me make typos (I'm sure there are dozens on this site), but I do my damnedest to keep them out of published fiction.

Unfortunately, I fail as often as I succeed, which is why I like to use a program like ProWritingAid to help me clean up the mess. Editing software will always fall short of a human editor, but it has its advantages. Software doesn't get fatigued or distracted. Software isn't replaying highlights from last night's game while its eyes tumble over a mess of letters without comprehension. And software is fast. The burden still lies firmly on the writer, but the writer can do more with a little help from a machine.

Once I've dotted all the I's and crossed all the T's, I have myself a finished, polished story. And then it's time to send it out into the world, and risk starting it all over again.

But hey, that's the job.

Rules for Writing Numbers

Let's face it, most of us didn't become writers because we're good with numbers. A lot of us are the same people who got straight A's in Literature classes, but struggled to pass Trigonometry. We're writers! We're good with words.

But in many contexts, numbers are words. If you write long enough, you'll have to deal with them eventually. When you do, you might find out--like I did--that you aren't sure how to handle them.

Like many rules, the main thing is to be consistent. Whatever you choose to do about writing numbers, make sure you stick to it.

The most widely accepted stance on writing numbers is that in non-technical writing, you should spell out the numerals. 1 becomes one. 43 becomes forty-three.

But what about 328,747?

When I first went looking for a rule on this subject, I read that you're supposed to write out any number under a hundred. But I found that didn't quite capture it, after all, I'd rather write "a million" than 1,000,000. So there shouldn't be some arbitrary point where you stop spelling out numbers and start writing numerals.

The rule I settled on is that I always write out any number that can be expressed in three words or fewer. 600 becomes six hundred. 47 becomes forty-seven.

That right there is enough to cover most situations, but there are a host of specific types of numbers that have their own rules; time, date, etc. And how do you punctuate numbers? Here is the best, most comprehensive list of number-related rules I can come up with.

• Write out all numbers that can be expressed in three words or fewer.
• Nine
• Twenty-three
• Eight hundred thousand
• Hyphenate compound numbers from twenty-one to ninety-nine, even when they are part of a larger number.
• Thirty-six
• Three hundred ninety-five (I wouldn't write this number out in fiction, but this example demonstrates the next rule
• DO NOT hyphenate orders of magnitude like hundred, thousand, or million.
• WRONG: Two-hundred fifty-two
• RIGHT: Two hundred fifty-two
• Using numerals and words combined is acceptable for orders of magnitude one million and higher.
• 34 million
• 5.7 billion
• However, if the number can be easily expressed without numerals, do so.
• Five billion
• Six trillion
• Hyphenate written-out fractions.
• Two-thirds
• Three-fifths
• Write out ordinal numbers, and hyphenate any between twenty-one and ninety-nine.
• First thing's first.
• For the thousandth time!
• Thirty-third place.
• Always use commas when writing numerals.
• 1,584,282
• 2,483
• But don't use commas when writing out large numbers.
• WRONG: Six thousand, forty-five
• RIGHT: Six thousand forty five
• Always use a zero before a decimal when using numerals. It helps readers catch the decimal point.
• WRONG: Voter turnout was only .5 percent.
• RIGHT: Voter turnout was only 0.5 percent.
• NEVER begin a sentence with a numeral.
• WRONG: 5,400 people were there.
• RIGHT: Five thousand four hundred people were there.
• RIGHT: Fifty-four hundred people were there. (Informal, but preferred, as it condenses the number to three words.)
• Currency
• Write out any amount that can be expressed in three words or fewer.
• Seven dollars
• Twenty thousand dollars
• Add a comma between dollars and cents (or between other currencies and their coinage):
• Nine dollars, twenty-two cents
• Five pounds, three pence
• ...unless you're writing it informally
• A dollar fifty
• Six and a quarter
• Do not add the name of the currency when using numerals, use the associated symbol.
• WRONG: $1,284 dollars
• RIGHT $1,284
• Time
• Write out times that are easily expressed in one word, unless you're being formal.
• Noon
• Midnight
• Nine
• Six in the morning
• Use numerals for all other times.
• 7:30 PM
• 1:25 AM
• It is acceptable to drop the :00 for the top of the hour (9 PM), but I don't do it because a) I usually just write out the number and skip the AM/PM, and b) I like the consistent look of having the colon in every time I write.
• Pick a spelling for AM and PM, and stick with it.
• AM and PM is the most preferred.
• A.M. and P.M. 
• a.m. and p.m. 
• and am and pm 
• are all acceptable
• Put a space between numerals and the AM/PM designation.
• WRONG: 7:30PM
• RIGHT: 7:30 PM
• Date
• Use numerals for dates when you're stating them formally.  Commas are required in this format.
• June 30, 2015
• The 30th of June, 2015
• Use words when stating them informally.
• The twentieth is a Friday.
• He was born March eleventh, right before me.
• Spell out decades.
• The sixties
• The late eighties
• Use numerals for centuries
• The 1900s
• The 2000s
• DO NOT use apostrophes to pluralize decades or centuries
• WRONG: The 80's
• WRONG: The early 1900's
• RIGHT: The '80s [Do use an apostrophe to stand in for omitted numbers, as I explain in my article on apostrophes]
• RIGHT: The early 1900s

Any awkward situations I missed? Any rules you disagree with? Drop me a comment!