Editing

Editing: By Far the Worst Part

When it comes to the editing process, it was honestly a bit of a nightmare.

Since I had written 52,000 words in the span of one month, to say the manuscript was a disaster would be a massive understatement. I had tense issues, person issues; pretty much every single issue existed in this more than a handful of times.

This video and her entire channel was a huge help through the writing process

The first thing I did for editing was deciding what scenes needed to be added, deleted, or revised. This was painful because I had grown attached to many scenes that didn't make the final cut. I also decided to drastically change a romance subplot half way through the process, so that set me back even farther.

After the plot was fixed, it came down to the nitty gritty parts of editing. Word choice, run on sentences, extra or less dialogue; that sort of thing. This is the part that took me the longest, mostly because it was so tedious I found it hard to feel motivated. At this point I printed out a hard copy of my manuscript from Staples to highlight with color coded editing techniques.

It has definitely seen it's fair share of ware and tear, I spilled an entire water bottle on it and dried this thing out page by page

Though I wasn't able to 100% finish this stage in the process, I am extremely close to my goal and currently on my third draft. I'm proud of how far i've come and the story I have built. When it comes to publishing, the plan is traditional. This story, however, is quite unorthodox and deals with many issues that I'm not sure if a traditional publishing company will want to market. Either way, self publishing is still an option and Barnes and Noble Press offers paper backs that I can order at some point.

Here are some examples of what the printed manuscript looks like:

First, we have an average page with an average amount of editing. Most of the pages look something like this, with some variation.

Next, we have a page I was pretty happy with that didn't need much editing at all. In the final copy, it's pretty much an unaltered scene.

This scene, as you can clearly see, I very much hated. I almost gagged editing it I was so ashamed of it. This is the ugliest page of the manuscript that, yes, I did scribble on at three A.M in frustration.

This is an example of my favorite scene from the book. As a result, editing or changing it was difficult because I wanted it to keep the same awkward tone it was supposed to show. In the end, I realized it needed a lot more edits than I was willing to admit. A friend helped me see it's issues. An unfortunate part of the editing process is realizing the lines and scenes you thought were excellent, in depth analysis of the characters inner turmoil are actually just cliche texts you thought were genius subtext.

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