Introduction

Editing. Doesn’t everyone just love it? Well, some of us do. If you’re like me, one of your favorite parts of the writing process is actually the rewriting and editing stage, at least when there’s not a huge time crunch. I know, I know. It’s weird. Most writers really can’t stand this process, and most writers don’t have a clue how to go about it. Now, most of us are capable enough of catching the stray grammar error or glaring plot hole, but many times, writers–and even published authors–don’t know what it takes to make their book publish-worthy material. That’s the job of their editor. 

Which begs the question. How do you know what kind of edit your work needs if you’ve never done this or if you haven’t worked with an editor before? I’m glad you asked because that’s what today’s discussion is all about! Let’s get right into it.

If you’re a beginning writer, chances are you need a deep edit. A deep edit goes through several stages and looks at everything from story structure and big picture stuff to the gritty details of sentence structure and word choice. This is a quite extensive edit, and most freelance editors I’ve spoken to specialize in specific areas, so a deep edit from one editor may be difficult to achieve. This means that, often, a beginner writer may need to find two or even three editors to look at the piece. This obviously isn’t the most fun thing to work with, but if you can find one or two editors who are able to compliment each other’s skill sets to give your piece a well-rounded edit, that’s usually easiest. For those of you in this situation, the key is to look for an editor or editors who note that they’re good with content editing, structural editing, style editing, and presentation editing. For fiction, these areas may not be presented exactly with these titles, so read on to find out what kinds of things fall under each so you have a better idea of what you’re looking for.

If you’re not a beginning writer, you probably know what areas you struggle with frequently. Chances are you don’t struggle with all of them, though you may struggle with more than one. So I’m going to break down the stages of deep editing for both you and the beginners wanting to know what each stage entails. This way, you will have a better idea of what skill set you need to find in an editor to give your book an edit best fit for it.

Content Edit

A content edit is the first step a deep editor takes in editing a piece. In fiction, a content edit is going to take a look at the purpose of the piece, the genre it’s in, and what it contains. The point of this level of editing is essentially to ensure that every major point in the book or story revolves around the purpose, genre, and main idea of the story. This kind of edit gets rid of scenes that might be unnecessary or repetitions of previous scenes that made the point already. It will eliminate rambling and make the piece more concise. It will also focus on adding anything that’s missing. Practically speaking, a content edit is focusing mostly on the plot of the story in fiction and making sure that the book’s scenes make that plot work from beginning to end.

Structure Edit

With this type of edit, the editor is going to shift gears to look at the angle and narrative structure. Depending on the work, there may not be any particular angle, but there will be a narrative structure. This type of editing will make sure that each point in the narrative structure is ordered elegantly and works smoothly with the others.

Style Edit

Here, we start getting into the finer details. A style editor is going to look over the work to remove clutter in your scenes, paragraphs, and sentences. This edit fine tunes and refines the work so that the narrative style really shines. This one is, perhaps, one of the more difficult edits to do because it calls for someone who will really dig down into the piece to look at things like word choices, sentence structure, and pacing using more technical avenues like paragraph and sentence lengths. Having done this before, I can attest to how much work this is. Sometimes, it can be a hard call on whether something is clutter or necessary and whether to use one word instead of another in a specific sentence. However, these changes can make a huge difference in a piece, so if you can’t do this yourself, find someone who can.

Please note that an edit like this doesn’t focus on fixing grammatical errors or presenting things in a clean, professional way on the page. That’s saved for a presentation edit. What this edit will do is improve your narrative style, make your ending resonate with the reader, make your middle flow from paragraph to paragraph seemingly effortlessly, and make your beginning arresting to the reader. If that’s what your book is missing, this is the type of edit you need, so find an editor who specializes in this area.

Presentation Edit

Last editing stage, everyone! In this stage, your editor will worry about the nitty-gritty details of grammar and punctuation. They’re going to look for those pesky misplaced commas or fix misspellings. They’ll read it through to make sure that any leftover sentences that might trip readers up are removed, and they’ll trim the sentences you don’t need if necessary. This stage cleans up your manuscript and makes it ready for presenting in its final form to your reader. If you’re able to do the first three types of edits on your own, it may still pay off to have someone do this sort of edit for a piece. As humans, we’re prone to error, so having someone else take a quick look through our work to clean up any missed problems is usually a very wise decision. 

Conclusion

I hope this has been informative for you all! Next week, we’ll start talking about some of the specifics on knowing where your work is at, knowing when to self-edit, and knowing who to hire when you need an editor. This area is one that I see a lot of uncertainty about, particularly with writers new to the editing process, and a lot of mistakes can be made. My hope is that, in the upcoming weeks, I can take some of the stress and confusion out of the process for you!