I'm deep in edits on my first book for adults at the moment, armed with notes from my agent, a copy of Sara Grant's excellent book on editing, and a selection of coloured pens and pencils. And a spreadsheet. I do love a good spreadsheet.
When I teach writing, most people think that editing means line and copy-editing: changing word order, correcting mistakes, that kind of thing, and there are groans of dismay when I explain about structural edits. In fact, I find this the most satisfying part of the writing process. I'm always fairly methodical when it comes to edits, unlike my first drafts which are a write-by-the-seat-of-your-pants mess. I always keep some structure templates on my spreadsheet, but Sara Grant's THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO EDITING YOUR NOVEL came out when I was a few chapters in so I thought I'd give it a go and I'm finding it a very worthwhile investment.
This is a very practical book, with lots of exercises and checklists. I already do a lot of the things listed in the book - big picture analysis, character arcs, a scene-by-scene spreadsheet with a summary of the action, POV character, word count etc, but I've found it very useful to follow through as a guide and Sara, being a children's author, includes helpful advice specific to children's books. I can see it being useful as a teaching guide as well as for my own edits.
Here's a snippet from my spreadsheet for Tapper Watson and the Quest for the Nemo Machine.
The action column is copied and pasted straight from my scene headers in Word. The easiest way to do it is to put all your headers into Header 1 style, select any of them, then go to the home tab and under 'Select' choose 'select text with similar formatting'. This will select them all and then you can copy them out. You can probably do something similar with Scrivener, though I've never got to grips with it.
In the Importance column, I make a note of the big structural points - the inciting incident, mid-point etc and make sure they fall in roughly the right places - and also the defining moments for the character plot arcs.
If you only have one POV you may not need that column. Because I use multiple POVs, when I've completed the spreadsheet I can filter by character and see how many words I have in each point of view and if I need to balance it out at all.
Timeline is a godsend because I don't write in order and I keep losing track of who did what to whom when. And of course you have to keep track of wordcounts so you can celebrate milestones with cake.
Finally, I like to see how I'm making progress because often I feel like the book isn't moving at all. A friend gave me a notebook with squared paper last birthday and I decided to colour in squares, with each square being 100 words.
Here's the start of June.
And here's today's.
That page makes me feel a lot happier about the fact that I've got another 20,000 words to go.
Happy writing!
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