How I Edit My Own Drafts (The Embarrassing Version)

Michael Culp

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Jul 11 • Weekly Challenges

Show Your Work Saturday

I preach the four-pass system and the skillroom teams. I want to tell you I follow it perfectly.

I don't.

Here's what my self-editing process actually looks like, including the parts that make me wince.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗜 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗗𝗼

The first thing I do is read the whole draft and run through the editorial room. I accept or reject their fixes and read it again doing the line level edits I see and ignore the structural problems I see. The teams are good but they don't now my story or what I want. They're based on sets of rules.

Sigh... Remember I'm a tangential speaker? I just remembered I promised two book son story structure that are stuck in the editing and adding graphics. The reason for the thought is the second book is all about breaking the rules of structure in WCP.

This is the wrong order. I know it's the wrong order. I do it anyway because the line-level problems are visible and fixable and the structural problems are large and scary. So I polish sentences in a chapter I'm going to restructure later and feel productive while avoiding the actual work.

I've started setting a timer for this phase. This is why we have a pomodoro writing timer! Twenty minutes of line-level impulse editing, then I force myself to stop and do the structural read instead.

I let the draft rest longer than I should.

The guidance is usually a week to two weeks before your first editorial pass. I tend to go longer. Partly because I need more distance than most people to see the manuscript clearly. Partly because I'm avoiding it. And partly because building something new and shiny for yo is more fun than line edits.

The draft that's been sitting for three months (or two years) is not better for having sat there. It's the same draft. The distance helps, but there's a diminishing return past about three weeks.

I do the continuity check in my notebook while I'm doing the line pass. Again the skill rooms are probably better at this than I am most of the time. But they slip up. In the Poroit story i posted here the other day they got the Female protaganist confused with the antagonist in the first Chapter. It's a quick find/replace fix but I have left it in to see if anyone first reads it, and second catches the gaff. (He's tricksy sometimes).

This is where I catch most of my continuity errors late, because I'm relying on memory instead of a system. I've started keeping a running list during the structural read of anything I need to verify, and then doing a dedicated continuity sweep with the list in hand. It's slower and more reliable than trusting my memory. Do you really want to see my lists? In 2014 one of my students at the College of Design at UK found my 1 inch thick printed to do list and wrote "Bible of Procrastination" on it. My to do list as been called that ever since.

The before/after that embarrasses me most:

In chapter four of the first Hazel book, I had a scene where Hazel goes to the county records office to pull property records. The scene was three pages of her navigating bureaucratic friction with a resistant clerk.

The structural pass told me the scene existed to establish that Hazel is resourceful and persistent. But I'd already established both of those things twice by chapter four. The scene was redundant. The information she gets from the records office, the chain of ownership on the sealed property, she could have gotten from the local historical society scene I wrote in chapter two.

I cut the three pages. They were well-written. They were unnecessary.

The book is better by three pages that I was genuinely proud of.

That's what editing actually is and OMG is this the hard part. I've slashed whole chapters in one book and I've just rewritten half of the first chapter in a completely new story that I really like from yesterday's testing.

And here I just edited the last three sentences in the last paragraph because they were too far off topic.

Have a great weekend!

Next week: genre, polish, and why the cover is doing more work than you think.

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How I Edit My Own Drafts (The Embarrassing Version)