The Power of Self-Editing: Transforming Your Draft into a Masterpiece with Amie McCracken

So, you've written the first draft of your book? Yay! Congratulations! But...does that mean it's ready to go to your editor? Does that mean it's ready for publishing? 

NO!

On this episode we're talking about your first round of self-editing, and we're going to lay out a process and an approach to help you get from here to there. I'm with Amie McCracken for this conversation. Amie is a publishing director, author, editor, typesetter, and proofreader. 

"Break down the daunting editing process into manageable steps to truly celebrate your progress and quantify how much further you need to go."  —Amie McCracken

In this episode, you will be able to:

• Break down complex layers of novel revision, learning processes for self-editing your manuscript.
• Learn the essence of structural editing, gaining insights into its role in maintaining the coherence and consistency of a story.
• Understand how to differentiate between scenes and chapters.
• Discover practical self-editing tools 
• Master the art of setting achievable deadlines, understanding the significance of time management in the self-editing process.

The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:00 - Celebrating the First Draft
00:03:06 - The Reverse Outline
00:08:21 - Structural Analysis of Chapters
00:12:26 - Questions to Ask About Scenes
00:15:23 - Scenes vs. Chapters
00:17:55 - The Importance of Editing and Drafting Separately
00:19:23 - Self-Editing Before Seeking Professional Help 
00:20:56 - Consistency and Smoothing
00:25:42 - The Final Polishing Stage
00:27:49 - Setting Deadlines and Stopping Editing

The resources mentioned in this episode are:

• Check out Amie McCracken's website https://www.amiemccracken.com/ to see her credentials as an author, editor, typesetter, and proofreader.
• Listen to more episodes of The Ingenium Books Podcast for valuable insights and tips on writing, editing, and publishing.
• Reflect on the importance of identifying your why before starting to write your book and the potential problems that can arise if you skip this step.
• Take the time to celebrate and congratulate yourself on completing the first draft of your book, as it is a significant accomplishment.
• Understand that even though you have finished your first draft, it is not necessarily yet ready for publishing or sending to an editor.
• Embrace the process of self-editing and learn about the steps involved in refining your manuscript.

Transcript

Transcription

00:00:00 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
You. So you've written the first draft of your book. You have a first draft manuscript. Yay. It is definitely time to celebrate, and congratulations. But does that mean you're ready for publishing? No. Does that mean it's ready to go to your editor? No. First you want to do at least one round of self editing. One of the questions we hear a lot at Ingenium Books with our authors when they finish their first draft is, okay, this is all great, but what do I do now? How do I tackle this mess? Well, we are going to talk about what you do with that first round of self editing and talk about a process and an approach that is going to get you from here to there. I am with Amy McCracken for this conversation. Amy is the publishing director at Ingenium Books, but that's not all. She's also an author editor typesetter proofreader, and she's also publishing director for Vine Leaves Press.

00:01:39 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
 Amy, welcome.

00:01:43 - Amy McCracken
Thank you. Happy to be here.

00:01:45 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
I'm so glad. Wouldn't it be terrible if you didn't want to be here at all?

00:01:50 - Amy McCracken
Totally.

00:01:51 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
We would have no fun. But we get to talk, know books and writing and editing and all that kind of stuff, which is, given the.

00:01:57 - Amy McCracken
Business we're in, it's my entire life and I like it. So I'm good with that.

00:02:02 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. Good. So it's a huge accomplishment for a writer, an author, to get to the place where they can say, okay, I've done my first draft. We're going to outline a process that can work for fiction or nonfiction. Some of it might sound a little bit more like fiction, but really it can work. But it's common, I think, especially for first time authors to get to that place where they have a first draft and then go, oh my God, there's so much left to do. I know that's I'm having that experience right now with my work in progress, definitely.

00:02:48 - Amy McCracken
But I think that's where breaking the process down into steps rather than thinking, okay, I have to write a whole new draft, or, okay, now draft two is what I'm working on, or draft three is what I'm working on, rather than thinking in that way because the project is so big, that can be really overwhelming. So that's why I kind of prefer this process of doing multiple rounds of different styles of edits, which then allows you to break it down into steps and realize how far you have come and be able to kind of quantify how much more you need to do.

00:03:27 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. So those steps would be, oh.

00:03:35 - Amy McCracken
I.

00:03:35 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Want to go back a little bit, because the first draft that you now have, optimistically speaking, may be as a result of pantsing, just writing it out as it comes out of your head, or it may be a result of plotting. Maybe you took great care to develop your ideas and figure out what was coming 1st, second, and third and how the arc was going to work. And then you wrote to that plot, It doesn't matter either way. However you get to your first draft, this process can work. However you get to that first draft, your first draft is likely a mess. And that's just the way it goes, right?

00:04:28 - Amy McCracken
Yes. But that's okay. And it's still worth celebrating, and it's still worth you might find when you get to the end of that project we've talked about this before that you might have a little bit of a downer hangover type feeling of like, okay, I'm done now. But I think that's a matter of you've worked on a really long project, you've poured a lot of yourself into something, and now it's quote, done. And you're kind of like, now what? So, yeah, be a little prepared for that hangover feeling. But, yeah, I think you can still celebrate that accomplishment, for sure.

00:05:15 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. And then once you're done celebrating, what do you recommend is the first step?

00:05:22 - Amy McCracken
First step, and this is great for, like you said, either pantsers or plotters or anything in between, is to do a survey. So you're going to do a reverse outline, which means skim reading, not detail reading. My favorite ways to do this are to send it to your Kindle or read it on a computer, but in PDF so you can't be touching it. The idea is you're trying to skim as fast as possible to be able to write down an outline of what exists in the book, what actually happens. This will help in nonfiction if you want to make sure that you're transitioning into the different topics in the proper direction. But it will also help in fiction to make sure that your arc is working and to make sure that the characters are getting somewhere in the story and making progress both emotionally and physically. So it's just this you're taking the book and making sure it has an outline so that you can work from that higher level, that structural level, and be able to see it as a complete thing rather than word for word. We want to be paying attention to the big story and not the little things. And this is especially important because if you start fixing details and then you end up deleting those scenes later anyways, your heart will break, right?

00:06:56 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Oh, I did so much work to that chunk, and now I have to cut it all.

00:07:00 - Amy McCracken
Yeah.

00:07:01 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
So what does that reverse outline and the survey look like? So you've talked about skim reading, but what do you do with the skim read?

00:07:14 - Amy McCracken
This really depends on the person and what feels right for you. I know some people write a bullet point list. I know some people will write entire paragraphs explaining their scenes. This probably also depends on how you like to plot. If you're a pantser, you probably want to write like ten words explaining each scene. And if you're a plotter, you will have an extensive reverse outline. The main thing to keep in mind is to keep it viewable at a glance. It needs to be quick so that you can see the whole thing, the whole picture, get an idea for everything that's happening without having to constantly detail read things. So for some people, they'll put this back on note cards so that they can pin it up on the wall again and move things around. That's definitely what I do because I also like to take that and then I'll cross out the scenes I don't need anymore or I can write new note cards to put in if I'm missing scenes. So, yeah, you kind of have to find your own preference. But I would keep it as simple as possible in order to be able to view the whole story.

00:08:32 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. My most recent experience with this process, I had a goal of 100,000 words, and I got to 92. And there's a couple of chapters at the end that this first step needs to settle because it's like, oh, is that going to resolve there that way or is that going to resolve that way? Actually, I got to the point where it's like there's no sense in me writing this because I need to now go back and do that kind of structural survey first. But I want to talk about what came up for me, which was fine, but I could see how it would be difficult, was that this survey and reverse outline thing revealed to me that my book did not start where I had started. It actually started eight chapters in.

00:09:25 - Amy McCracken
That's awesome, though. That's excellent.

00:09:28 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Eight. And many of the earlier ones are going to go in a different place, but literally, you might still need that.

00:09:38 - Amy McCracken
Information, just not right there at the beginning. And honestly, when you're writing a first draft, you tend to write your way into it because you don't even know the story. So that makes total sense to me. And I say that to a lot of people. Not necessarily eight chapters. I know that's a good amount, but yeah, usually I'm like, Are you sure? Chapter two, chapter three. You sure that's not your start anyway?

00:10:04 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
And then because if I hadn't done this process, the point of me bringing that up is if I hadn't done this process, I would have got my instinct. So this is a fiction based on fact book that I'm writing. And it's my first fiction. I'm familiar with nonfiction. I'm familiar enough with nonfiction that I don't usually have to do that structural piece or it's more obvious to me. And then I dig right in right away with the detail. Had I dug right in with the detail, I would have worked away on those first eight chapters and then later gone, oh, I don't need those or I don't need them in that way. So, yes, it can really save, which.

00:10:44 - Amy McCracken
Then requires smoothing them into the other places that they belong, which is totally different than what currently exists.

00:10:52 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Right? Yeah. Okay, so reverse outline the survey. That's all done. Then what's the next thing you recommend?

00:11:02 - Amy McCracken
I would actually, from that point, take the same concepts and apply them to the chapters. So I would then look at each chapter and make sure it's doing what it needs to do from a structural perspective and make sure that it's flowing into the next chapter to lead to the next thing and continue the arc for the characters, continue the story. So you're taking a step further down, closer in, but you're not getting all the way to changing words yet. You're still working structurally, you're still making sense because you also might have found with that first review that you had, like I said, you cut scenes, you have missing scenes, so you might need to write some of those. You might need to rearrange where things go, like your first eight chapters. They need to move and you got to figure out where they fit in. And then it's a matter of potentially rewriting them now or just saying this is where they go. I'll get to the smoothing in the next step. But checking the structure, but on a lower level, almost chapter level, I would say.

00:12:19 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. And I have a list of questions you can ask yourself here and we can dig into this as much as makes sense. So first question that you would ask is why is the scene here and what is its function in the story? So it's kind of obvious when you apply it to fiction. It may not sound quite so obvious when you think about nonfiction. And I hear it's going to depend on what subgenre of nonfiction we're talking about. This is totally directly applicable in memoir. And if you're doing a how to nonfiction, it's going to ask you to make sure that this is the concept that the reader needs first before you move on to the next one so it can apply. Does the scene have oh, sorry, no.

00:13:16 - Amy McCracken
I think the only potential nonfiction that this might not make sense in is historical. If you're going in a timeline based story, granted, there's still some information that you might reveal that is not within that timeline. And so you have to decide where that goes. But yeah, for the most part with a straight historical timeline. You're going to follow that timeline.

00:13:46 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. And then the question about why is the scene here? Will be answered with some of the more detailed elements. So what is it that's happening to the character? What's the character's reaction?

00:14:04 - Amy McCracken
Fascinating.

00:14:07 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Does the scene have an arc of its own? Does change or movement occur? I know that in mine in particular, when I was looking and asking myself these questions like, oh, yeah, no, it's just a bunch of things happening. There's no arc. So really good to know that now.

00:14:29 - Amy McCracken
Yeah, you can say, So does that mean I really need this? Is this absolutely necessary? And if it is, how do I make it function better? How do I fit it in better? This does bring up the question I get this a lot from people. What's the difference between a scene and chapter? And in fiction, there's no definition. You get to choose when your chapters end. I would say that scenes are more definable than chapters are because scenes definitely have think theatric you have an entrance, you have a build up, you have an exit. And chapters, on the other hand, are more about the flow and the pace and what you want to make the reader feel, which is why you have cliffhanger chapters, which force them to turn the page. But that's really the only function of a chapter. A scene is actually used more to drive the story than a chapter is.

00:15:32 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah, that makes sense. Why is it important to ask if we are ending the scene in a different place than we started?

00:15:45 - Amy McCracken
This is to do with reader expectations and reader satisfaction. If your scenes are not going anywhere or if they're left open ended in a way that isn't answered fairly soon, you risk losing your reader. You want to make sure that questions that you introduce obviously not the major question of the story, because that's the entire story. But you have multiple arcs within your story. You have that main arc. You have these character arcs which might resolve before the end. You have scene arcs which need to resolve within that scene for the reader to feel like they can trust you and they want to keep reading the story.

00:16:36 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. And how does the scene make you feel? Why do we need to ask ourselves.

00:16:41 - Amy McCracken
That again for the reader? Because how it makes you feel is how it's going to make the reader feel. And if you cause no feelings, what's the point?

00:16:53 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Right. I was going to say it's really interesting, but of course I find everything about this interesting. Boring to keep saying it's interesting, but this is really a we're playing a game of switching identities when we're at this point, which I'll speak for myself in the act of creating that first draft when I was not really worrying too much about, well, no, it's terrible. It's not good at all. But it's getting the guts down, and now it's okay. I've taken my writer self, my creative persona, which I needed to create the draft, and now I need to bring my ability to put myself in my reader's shoes right away, as soon as we're starting our editing.

00:17:55 - Amy McCracken
Yeah. The editing is an entirely different skill. It's an entirely different mindset. This is why I don't think you should be drafting at the same time as editing, because you are using totally different tools and skills, and you need to have that perspective when you're editing of how is this going to impact the reader, what is this going to do for the reader? Because that will give you so much insight into how to make it a better story. Whereas drafting is very much you pouring that emotion onto the page and finding the right words to say what you want to say. And hopefully when you get to the editing, you say, oh, yeah, that worked. That functioned. My emotion came through perfectly right there. Or you can say it didn't. Let's rewrite this and switch into drafting mode and bring that back onto the page.

00:18:53 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. I'm not sure that I did a good enough job outlining before we got here. So before we move to the next not outlining, but before we move to the next level, do we need to talk a little bit more about why you want to do at least one round of self editing first before you give this to somebody else? Whether it's an editor certainly not ready for publication.

00:19:23 - Amy McCracken
Yeah, definitely not ready for publication. The main reasoning behind I think you could give it to beta readers if you feel comfortable. I mean, for me, I want to give something to beta readers that I'm proud of. And I know my first drafts I'm not proud of yet, but in the case of an editor or agent or whoever you might be giving it to, they are going to be able to do more with it if it's already in great shape. I, as an editor, if I'm having to fix silly mistakes that you could have fixed before I looked at it, I can't focus on the deeper stuff because I'm seeing the silly mistakes. So that's why I would say if you're going to give it to a professional, it needs to be as clean as you possibly can make it.

00:20:24 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah.

00:20:25 - Amy McCracken
Just so they can do a better.

00:20:26 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Job and serve you better. Yes, exactly. Okay, what is next? After we do the we've done the big picture structural survey, the reverse outline, and now we've asked ourselves those questions about each scene chapter. What is the next thing?

00:20:46 - Amy McCracken
Then we get down into consistency and smoothing. This is where you're actually going to do lots and lots of rounds. It's not going to be one read through and clean up as you go. It's going to be I have a character who has blue eyes at the beginning and their eyes change to brown halfway through. So I'm going to do one read through for the eye color. It can be deeper things than that. It can also be things like diction. If someone has a specific dialect or uses specific terminology that brings out their character, you could pull out all of their lines and check that they stay consistent throughout. Same thing. If you have multiple points of view, you could read them in succession to make sure that they sound like a distinct character, a distinct and developed character. And so this is the hard work of editing. This is getting down into the very specific, detailed stuff, which is why the structure should be set at this point, because you don't want to be pretty everything up and then have to go and change again.

00:22:05 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. And how do you know what level of minutiae to take something through in one whole pass, for example? I know I have found myself doing this with manuscripts that I work on with authors that at a certain point, it's like, oh, actually this is fairly common. So. We're a Canadian publisher. We have Canadian authors and American authors. And rather than send off to our proofreader with all the American spelling when it's a Canadian, whatever reason that it's just like, oh, I can just do a quick search for or and I fix all of that. Is that the level of detail you're talking about? You're talking about something higher than that?

00:22:49 - Amy McCracken
Not quite higher than that. So we're talking consistency of the story and smoothing of the language. So you could be getting into sentence structure and making sure that it sounds nice. This might even be a point where you read it out loud to yourself to hear how everything sounds. But I would say that's actually the final step. The final step is the nitty gritty, nuts and bolts, making sure all your typos are corrected, making sure that there's no stumbling blocks for the reader, editor, agent, whoever it is. So I would say that those are actually two different rounds. I would say the largest editing round is going to be that third level of consistency and smoothing and flow. And it's a little bit vague. It doesn't have hard and fast here's. What you do here are the like that last level, you can look for words like right, seemed, smelled, thought, filler words well, so very lots of adverbs. You can get rid of your adverbs at that point. Those are fairly easy fixes. But that level above that for consistency and flow, that's more about the art of the writing. And so it can feel like a very heavy edit, but that's where you really draw out your voice and you really draw out what the story really means to you.

00:24:41 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. This process helped me discover that I have two minor characters that I've assigned the same name to. It's like, oh, hadn't even noticed that I was writing. Oh, that's not going to work.

00:24:53 - Amy McCracken
I've actually worked on two short story collections recently where multiple characters were the name was used in multiple different stories. And we're like, is this the same person? They're like, no, we need to change that.

00:25:09 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah, well, and they happen. That's what happens. Okay, so we've done big structure, reverse outline. We've done the questions at the scene level, and now we are looking for those consistency things and what the book is about and what kind of elements and details and characters you have in there is going to tell you what levels of rounds you need to do. What's the last thing? We probably already talked about it.

00:25:36 - Amy McCracken
Yeah, that last is the prettying it up. You can use all the tricks. So you can search for adverbs. You can search for if you have a word that you use over and over and over again. If you use very a lot, if you use really a lot do a search for it. Yes, just do a search for it. Cut it out. This is potentially where you're going to cut thousands of words because you can go online and find these lists of words that shouldn't be in your book and you can just do a search for them. I would say don't replace because this is where you get into I don't have any good examples. There's funny examples of replacing a word, but it's like inside another word, then you have this, I feel like, imagination, like somebody was replacing something and it's within the within a longer word, and then it just really messes up that word. So, yeah, don't do replace unless you absolutely know you can. But yeah, this is just nitty gritty. Clean things up, make it look nice and really clean.

00:27:03 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
And how long might this self editing process take?

00:27:10 - Amy McCracken
I think this is also something that you need to almost set a deadline for. Maybe set a deadline for each part of the process once you understand how much work is actually necessary. Because we writers have a tendency to say, it's never done, and I could always change it, and I could always make it better, and I could always do more. And there comes a point where you need to just say, no, I'm done, and it's okay, and it's good as it is. So that's where the beauty of a deadline comes in. It will push you to finish and say, I'm done, or okay, I'm going to give myself one more week or two more weeks, and that's it, and then I'm done. I do think you have to kind of train yourself to stop.

00:28:05 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah. And to go. And what I mean by that is I am noticing my own tendency. I had a very good rhythm because I had a deadline for when I wanted to have my first draft created. And I had a very good daily routine. I got up in the morning, I would spend an hour, hour and a half on my writing. I get my word, count in, and that was all good. Now I'm in the editing phase and I'm like, oh, this morning, I'm going to do that instead. I'm not as disciplined and I need to get that done. So it's great advice about set the deadline for when the edit is going to be done and maybe I'm actually going to plan out what I'm going to focus on each day.

00:28:50 - Amy McCracken
That might be helpful.

00:28:52 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
That could if you're crazy.

00:28:56 - Amy McCracken
I know that when I'm writing, I find editing a lot easier than drafting. So I don't have that problem of not really wanting to sit down and do it or not knowing what to do. But when I'm writing, as long as I know what the next session should be, and I can usually plan that at the end of a session when I've already gotten going and I'm excited and in it, and then I get to the end of that session and I go, okay, next time here's. And I just kind of brainstorm for two sentences what the next scene is, and that way when I sit down next time, I can just, oh, I'm supposed to do this. Okay. And you could totally do the same thing for editing. You could say, all right, I got this far and this is what I want to do next time.

00:29:40 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. Self editing. I wouldn't say this is necessarily 101, but it could be 201. I guess it depends whether you've gone through it before, but an interesting structured approach that I actually believe will get you from here to there more efficiently, effectively, and ultimately with a better product. So, Amy, thank you so much for joining us.

00:30:11 - Amy McCracken
We will be back.

00:30:13 - Boni Wagner-Stafford
We know we'll have you back. So, yeah, we hope this has been helpful. And until next time, thanks for having me. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode of the Ingenium Books podcast, please, like, share and subscribe subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, but also consider subscribing to our YouTube channel where you can see these episodes in addition to hearing them.