As I said last week, I’m going through the process of editing an old manuscript step-by-step. If you’re a new writer who is not sure how to approach the editing process, follow me along to see how it can be done, and maybe get some ideas of your own.

There’s no right or wrong way, really, just like writing, but it can help to see how others do it.

People sometimes conflate several types of editing. There’s editing for grammatical and spelling mistakes, which you might call proofreading, and is the last thing you do (several times over), once upon a time literally the last thing you did, reading the printing proof for errors. There’s editing for sentence structure, clarity of meaning and consistency of language, which is copy-editing. And there’s editing itself, which has to do with the structure of the work, its voice, its impact, its meaning. It’s about seeing how a scene fits into a chapter and a chapter into the book, how characters and events shape and develop the plot and how it might work with a change of point of view or a different outcome to a scene. Each area overlaps, but has a distinctly different focus.

Everyone has individual talents; being good at one type of editing doesn’t make you good at the other types. I once encountered an editor who made some great suggestions to improve my short story structurally, but who then went on to ruin the published version completely by introducing an unprofessional level of grammatical mistakes in his attempt to copy-edit (and by tacking on his own ending, but let’s not go there).

It’s also hard to apply editing skills to your own work, though time and distance – and practice – does improve your objectivity. You tend to read what you meant to say, not what you actually wrote down, so proofreading and copy-editing errors zip right past you. You might recognise that a work has structural problems but be unable to find a way to fix it – I feel this is my greatest challenge.

And therefore, obviously, the very first thing I’m going to do with City of Brass is edit it structurally…this first pass over will be mostly a critical look at the plot and characters, trying to work out what works and what doesn’t, which scenes need fleshing out and which ones need cutting or replacing, which characters work and which should be written out, and so on.

With this approach, the first step (given that it has been about three years since I read it) is to read the whole thing to remind myself of the story. I can then say, yes, I am generally happy with the direction it takes: the first half with the good man who does nothing with his power, the second half with the ‘bad’ woman who at least takes action with hers.

It’s obvious it needs a lot of work; however, once you know your story, you know what foreshadowing and plot developments you need and that will help your structural editing (by the way, this is why writers who outline their story can generally work faster than writers like me who have to write an entire first draft before they know what their story is).

Next week, it’ll be time to sink our teeth into the meat of the story and get the re-write underway.