How I Plan And Organize My Edits As A Writer | How To Edit Your Novel: Part 6

hey guys welcome back to heart breathing's this is the final video in my how to edit your novel series and this one is the most personalized in terms of actually going to show you behind the scenes of how I organize and plan my own edits so there's gonna be a little bit of a mix of like planner stuff and you know the actual like process of how I edit in this video and I'm going to take you through basically all those stuffs that I talked about in my first video on how to self edit your novel or how to edit your own novel and I'm going to show you how I go through that process and the tools and things that I use so hopefully you're excited about this one it's gonna be a little bit of a long one so sit back and enjoy first of all I will go ahead and pologize for the giant mess that is behind me I had partially recorded this video previously but then needed to re-record some of the intro and everything and we are moving on Saturday so this is just the state that my office is in it's a little bit of a mess because things have to get Messier before they can get organized so just bear with me on that one but let's get into how I actually organize my edits so what I'm talking about by edits is basically when my rough draft is completed these are the steps that I follow and it really is a step by step process for me and how long it takes depends on what kind of shape but the book was in in the first place one of the novels that I'm gonna be kind of walking you through right now it was book 9 if my shadow demon saga which was beyond the darkness this book was in terrible terrible shape so it needed many many editing passes and I'm going to kind of show you the process for what those passes looked like today sometimes when I finish a novel though it doesn't need quite as much editing but I still follow the same basic steps so I'm gonna walk you through that and all the tools that I use but editing is really such a personalized experience it's really just you working through your process when I finished beautiful demons which was my first novel that was actually going to be published I was nowhere near in this you know organized state but I'm hoping that with the knowledge that I've gained over right more than 25 books over the last nine years I can kind of show you a little bit of like tips and tricks things that might help you go a little bit faster or organize that when you feel like you just aren't sure how to organize your own edits or where to even start and that sort of thing hopefully this will give you some ideas but just know that I'm not saying this is the way everybody should do it because I don't think there are any rules like that in writing or in editing there is no should or shouldn't there is no right or wrong it's just what's your process and what works for you but I'm hoping that giving you an inside look at my process will kind of give you some ideas and spark some ideas so let's get started yeah so let's start off by looking at some materials that I love to use obviously you're going to need printer paper if you do want to print out your novel you're gonna need something to print I also use color coding in my novels so I've got color coded stickers color coded index cards markers and pens and which pens I use kind of varies on the project but right now I'm using some Erin Condren markers and pens so this is really the beginning of my editing process is getting all those materials together once I have all the materials together where I start is always creating an outline of my scenes and I talked about this briefly in my how to self edit your novel video which I'll have linked Tauri down below which is the first part of this editing series but I pull up my main document which is always in Google Docs so it doesn't matter which computer I'm working on at the time but I pull up that doc and I will begin with just a blank sheet of paper I usually do dot grid paper which you can't really tell from this angle and I will pull out some sort of color coding method so I have four points of view in this novel that I'm talking about today which is beyond the darkness and I often do write multiple POV stories so I like to color code my edits and in my plotting so that I keep a good eye on just at a glance can tell whose chapter I'm dealing with what character I'm dealing with so I have my four different colors for the four POVs and I'm just using a set of circle stickers that I like to use then I will make sure that I pull up my document which is my rough draft in Google Docs and I will begin creating an outline of my scenes now this is different from what I did in the plotting process and I'll kind of show you a closer look at this in just a minute but basically what I do is I just go chapter by chapter and write out what each chapter is about what's happening in the chapter you know if there's any sort of special plot point that happens in this chapter whose POV it's in according to the color code so chapter one in this particular novel is Harper and her color is always purple for me so I will take out you know a purple sticker and purple pin and I will write out just a brief description of what's happening in this chapter and you know that this is the opening chapter so this is often what I call the disturbance or the hook and I will mark kind of how that plays out in the rough draft not what I want to happen or anything like that but what happens in the rough draft and so then I will just go through scene by scene and I'm not necessarily at this point reading through the entire novel but I'm just creating a list of scenes because when I was plotting I likely created a list of scenes I intended to write but I don't have at this point a complete list of the scenes that I actually wrote that exists there then I'm also marking down things like what didn't feel right what chapter I know isn't quite good enough or isn't exactly how I want it to be and then I will also mark in there like if I know that a scene is missing pieces or it was just more of a brainstorm scene or a placeholder scene and I know that that scene needs to be filled in and I'll show you in just a second how I mark those different things on the sheet but this is the first step of the process for me is to create an outline of the scene sometimes if I have color coded note cards I will also create note cards of these scenes that I can flip back and forth through them but I don't always do that it kind of just depends on if I feel like it but I always create this sort of outline because it gets me reefa Miller you know at this point it's probably been weeks or months since I've worked on these first few chapters so it gets me reefa Miller with how the story was in the big what still needs to be changed and as I'm making this list of scenes I'm already thinking about the big picture of what needs to change in the novel what is in place and what still needs to be put in place what needs to change and all of that sort of thing on a big picture so at this point I don't just jump into making changes in my novel I just go ahead and make this outline first so I'm going to show you what that looks like on the actual paper okay so that was the beginning of my process I also use this plotting notebook which is a big happy planner in a deluxe planner I covered up the word hustle because it's not my favorite word with this little decal here that is coming off so I need to remake that so pay no attention to how terrible that looks but inside here is where I keep all my plotting notes and I have another video on how I organized for this and how I've been using it so I will link that down below I've got some other things in there that I'm playing around with right now but basically I realized as I was getting ready to record this which was the last video in my editing series of course that I actually since I'm packing to move I actually packed up some of my like old plotting stuff and I don't want to use my current novel because it's gonna have spoilers and things like that so we're just kind of improvising and just giving you guys a basic example of how I organize my edits but when I'm ready to plot a novel I will put a new tab in my notebook and I usually only keep the novels that I'm like working on now or about to work on so I can keep notes in here and I will just write any kind of notes on paper in here I also will have these are actually happy planner calendar pages that I have covered with whiteout and washi tape and everything else just to be able to use old happy planner pages where the dates have already passed by so I didn't have to throw them out and waste them because I had a planner that was basically from a previous year that I wanted to reuse so I've been using this kind of system for my plotting for a long time but this is not the book that I've been kind of showing you guys which is book 9 of my series that was booked three of my eternal sorrow the series which I was working on for a long time this year and it just wasn't coming together but this will kind of give you an idea I don't have much of the actual plot grid filled out but it's all in other notes so at least I can give you an idea of what the plotting grid looks like now normally when the book is finished and I'm starting my edits this entire plotting grid is already filled out and as you can see I like to use these stickers these are teacher creative resources and they have eight different colors and of course you've got two greens here I wish they had a different color than two greens but at least you have eight different colors to use with your color coding and there are nice round stickers I have been kind of looking maybe for some smaller stickers to use but for now these are good you can also if you don't want to buy stickers just use the fat tip of a marker like these are the Erin Condren dual tip markers and they have these bigger kind of fatter ends or you could use Crayola super tips which are really inexpensive and you can just use these to create a little dot that looks kind of like a sticker I mean you don't need a sticker so you can color code in that way with little dots with your markers so I color code and give a different color to each one of my POV characters so you can see in this book there are eight POV characters and so a lot of different POVs going on in this one but when the story is done and I'm moving on to the editing process this will already be filled out with the things that I have currently written now this plot will usually change quite a bit in the editing process but I'll at least have the scenes that I wrote written out here to some degree and usually this is something that I would fill out either along the way as I'm plotting or before I begin writing so a lot of what ends up on these two sheets and my happy planner notes changes quite a bit so the way I have this marked off is I keep Act one in this column the first part of Act one and then the second part of Act one so the climax of Act one would be down here in the second column then I have the first part of Act two and then the second part of - which is kind of like leading up to the midpoint which would be here and then ACTA - continues with what I call part three of Acts - and part 4 where the black moment or all is lost like dark night of the soul would be down here and then all the Act three usually fits on this last a little bit so this would all be filled out so imagine if I was working on edits for beyond the darkness that this is all already filled out but my next step in the process is what you just saw me working on which is going through I usually will have my current rough draft pulled up on my desktop I just go down my index and I will write out the scenes as they stand right now and any notes that I seem to have on them so I will mark if it's like the disturbance or it's something like the point of no return the Act one doorway the argument against transformation the inciting incident stuff like that I will mark that in black but everything else goes in the color code of the actual character so like I said in my demon series I have four main characters forming POVs and they have their own color so Harper is always purple for me Jackson is blue leah is green and Ayrton is red and so I just keep that as my color code usually I will also have note cards that have their scenes on them and there will be these four colors as well but I already packed those note cards another solution if you don't want to buy colored note cards is you can either cut up paper if you don't want to buy note cards at all or you can get like regular white ones or whatever you have access to and use your stickers or your markers to color code them so if this was an aired in chapter and I wanted to color code it that way I could just do a red circle here or I could write his name here at the top and know that it's color coded to him another way that you could color code your index cards if you didn't want to buy them or you didn't have like the right colors you wanted to use is to have washi tape available in each of the colors and you could put a little washi strip on top of the index card or on the side just kind of depending on how you tend to go through them so let's say we're going to put it on the side and what I could do is like all of our dens that are red could go here in the middle but all of harpers that are purple could go here kind of on the edge so that when I'm looking at my stack of note cards I could see whose was whose based on the washi tape so that's just one little trick that you could use I pretty much tend to always have markers pins index cards stickers and washi tape in my coordinating colors sometimes they have patterns sometimes they're plain but this just helps me visually and it makes it more fun for me which makes me more motivated to actually get my head it's done which I know can sound silly but some of my planner babes out there you guys understand what I'm talking about so usually like I said I will have at the end of a rough draft I will have this chart all filled out and I will also have a stack of note cards that already have like basic ideas of the scenes written on them but my first step in my editing process is to go through the rough draft as it is currently mark out what characters have which chapters so this is chapter one two three and four and I will mark anything like in bold with a bigger marker if it's like a missing scene or something I still need to work on so for example in the rough draft of beyond the darkness the second chapter is Jackson at the Cypress gate which is a demon gate in my town and he's casting a ritual to close it and free Eloise's demon and it works and she meets her demon so if you're a fan of my books you know that that is not at all what happens in the final book this is just the way it was in the rough draft but I would have noted here as I was going through it in the rough draft and say this still doesn't feel quite right to me and I don't know if you can tell but that's in a little bit of a thicker marker so that that note stands out and that's just the way I like to do it you can kind of come up with your own system but that way when I'm writing out the entire rough draft and everything that's there I can mark in bold anything that didn't quite seem right anything that was part of one of the major plot points that I talked about in my how to plot your novel series and then anything that's missing so I had some little notes here for what I wanted to write about Leah but she didn't actually have a seen here so I knew that I had skipped that scene because in my rough draft I actually say I'm just going to brainstorm here because I'm not exactly sure how I want to start her POV so I marked that here now once this first stage of the process is over I would have several sheets here with my color coded chapters and usually these books are about a hundred thousand words and they end up being somewhere around forty to fifty chapters because I write short our chapters and they would so it would be like maybe ten to a page so I'd have four pages full of this but just the process of going back through and seeing all the different scenes laid out and seeing what's missing and all that already gets me started and prepped up for part two of my editing process which is to look at the big picture so let's move on to that so when I move on to looking at the big picture the types of things that I'm looking at are the big overall story structure did I meet all the plot points did I get to where I wanted to go with each of the chapters what scenes are missing how should I fill those in just all these big questions and like I said in but you know in the first part of this editing series which I'll link for you down below which is how to self edit your novel I don't at this stage go through and correct grammar rewrite dialogue look at line by line picky little edits I'm not doing word choice and simple little things right now like picky little things what I'm doing is looking at big picture stuff so is the character arc in place what still needs to happen in the plot is the plot wonky in some areas does it surprise you there's a whole list of questions in my editing guide if you haven't downloaded that you can find the link for it down below it's just a free editing guide that has a bunch of questions and help in your editing process but if you've watched my guide series on how to plot your novel these pages might look familiar to you so I created this sort of plotting guide based on some of my favorite books on writing and plotting and craft and this just kind of brings it all together so this is the characters inner journey again color-coded with some washi said this would be Jackson's point of view if it was blue I have from Debra Dixon's goal motivation conflict her little box here for outer and inner conflict I have character arc this basically comes from one of James Scott Bell's book about write your story from the middle where's my character at the beginning where are they at the mirror moment and at the end and then I have all of my major plot points which comes from several books so if you'd like to see what books those are definitely go and download my how to plot your novel guide as well so hopefully that will be helpful to you basically before I start my rough draft I always filled this out to the best of my ability some of these little pieces might not come together until I'm actually writing but I will get this done as as best I can then I actually reprint this entire guide and I will fill it out again a lot of these things like name age I color that stuff does I don't even sometimes usually mess with that I just go through the things that really changed and especially the plotting parts for each character so I don't do characters that don't have a voice or a point of view if the whole story is from one character's point of view then she's the only one that I will print out but like I said in this story there are four major points of view so they each get this entire guide printed out for themselves and I begin looking at the list of scenes that I just made for each character and so I'll just if I'm looking at Jackson only I'll just look for these blue dots and I'll start filling out what actually happens in the rough draft and that way I can really begin to think through his character arc his plot arc his story and say what's missing where am I going wrong in this plot like do I have a really good like tests and challenges for him it does he see a pinch point now I talked about this a little bit before but every single character like all four of my characters will not hit every single one of these beats if they did this would probably be every book would be 300 thousand words you don't see them go through this and sometimes like for example aired in his storyline and his character goes through this whole process over the course of two books not one Harper is generally my main character so she will have a complete story arc and character arc in every book but some of other characters it their story arc will go over the course of several books and that is a whole nother video and can of worms to open up talking about plotting multiple POV between books so I'm not even going to really go there but I will just say I will fill this out to the best of my ability to what I know needs to happen for Jackson's character in this book so once I'm done filling out as much as I can here I likely have a lot of questions so I am not the kind of person who can just typically sit down and just think and be pensive about stuff I have to go on walks I have to talk it through with my friends or my husband or I have to actually write down my thoughts because if I just sit there thinking I feel like I'm just going in circles so a lot of times what I would do let's say I was working on Jackson's point of view because I really wasn't sure where I was going to change what he was doing next I will typically put his color washing tape and I will create a little page for Jackson and I usually try to make this really nice and pretty and something that I want to work on and I will put his name here at the top sometimes I use my tombow dual brush pens to to mark headers and stuff but I can't show you guys that because I already packed those but let's say this is Jackson's page and I will often keep a lot of little stickers and different things here in the front of my plotting notebook because I like to use these to make my pages look nicer and of course you don't have to use this step if you're not a planner person you probably won't use this stuff but since I said I was going to show you what I do I will show you what I would do so I might be out getting coffee and I'll put a little sticker there and then I will take my pins and I will begin to mark down the questions that I have so right now I might just start journaling about like I don't like where his story started where can I go next so I'll start with the questions that I have like I don't like where this story started it didn't feel right where can I go with him and then what I might do is just start a long stream here of possibilities of where I might go so I might say you know what if he does this or what if he does this or what if he does this so I might come up with like five different four or five different choices of what he might do and that will spark a new idea and then I'll put up a new little flag here and I will continue on with you know like let's say I decide this is the one like what if he goes and like goes insane and starts questioning a hunter so I will put a little note there because that's the one I like and then I might make a little note that okay I like this and so on and so I will actually just journal my way through thoughts about Jackson so I wanted to show you that even though it's not exactly a perfect example of what it would look like but when I'm done with this stage of the process of like getting through all of the character arc and the big story parts of the edits I will usually have multiple multiple pages if you're curious about this all I do to create these pages is I bought on Etsy just dot grid printable letter pages and I have it in black pink green all kinds of stuff and I used to print them out in color-coded but now I just print them out in grayscale and it works out fine but I print out these pages just on regular letter sized white paper and then I use my big happy planner punch to put them in here so that's kind of a nice way to get sort of a bullet journal feel because I like using dot grid so I can draw headers and different things like that so I can give you guys kind of an example of how this might go so I'm working up currently on a book called the disappearance of Vanessa sha so this would be kind of how these pages start to look is like very much journal type pages that I put stickers on and all this kind of stuff so this is kind of how my edits end up looking and by plotting so I'll have a series of plotting sheets and a series of editing it's where I have just really thought through the process and kind of using stickers and color codes and different things like that just keeps me motivated to keep working on the story and then what I will do because I will usually print out a sheet like this which is also part of my plotting guide sorry I messed up some of the punching there but this again just has those four columns so you've got act 1 act 2 part 1 part 2 and then act 3 and this is kind of just a very simple story grid and I don't usually make this look pretty I don't even usually use my stickers but what I will do is I will usually go through again this entire process of going through all the different scenes and instead of just regurgitating what I have written down about what exists in the current draft I will go in now and I will begin to sketch out what needs to be done to fix this plot so I wish that I had a better example for this where I could actually show you and walk you through this but that would just take me hours and hours to go through but basically what I would do is I would say okay let's say we're starting back with Harper and I would have at this point decided if this opening scene is really where I want her to start and if it is then I will go back and I will add a little dot here and I will say like Harper's Harper Harper out the asylum and then sometimes I will leave myself a little note that says you know scene stays because that scene is going to stay exactly as it is but obviously Jackson's scene that didn't feel quite right to me is going to change so at this point in the process after going through his point of view and all of those sort of big picture things I should have a much better idea of what's going to happen with his point of view so now what I would do is I would take my blue marker and I would mark what is going to be different about his scene so if instead now I'm going to have him questioning a hunter because I don't want to have him do this with the Cypress gay and free her demon here that just didn't feel right so now I've taken him on a different journey and he's gonna be questioning a hunter and so now I've got that scene in place and I would just go through the same process and take the scenes that I know are there and now put them into a story grid and like I said I don't worry about if this is really beautiful or not I just get the story back in place the way I want it to be and this is a difficult process this takes me weeks to complete especially with a multi POV novel but this part of the process is so important because if your plot isn't there and your character arcs aren't there you don't really have a great story so it's all fine and good to consider that your editing is going to be like oh let me fix this word or fix this typo but you really need to have the best story you can be so don't skip this part make sure that your story is in place the way you want it to be by the time I finish two edits on beyond at the darkness this was almost a completely different story so just a lot of changes can happen so this is kind of the second part is I go through every character I look at what scenes didn't feel right I look at the plot and where I want it to be and then I make a new story grid so then I will go back to my computer and I will start to fix my story so let me take you over there okay so I'm going to show you guys kind of what my rough drafts tend to look like so first I write in Google Docs I've talked about this before if you're interested in hearing more about that I also have a video I'll link down below for you but basically I don't name my chapters in the beginning they're just 1 2 3 and I have this nice little index down here at the at the end but I basically have my entire rough draft sometimes it will not be in order you can see I've got all of harpers chapters here all of Leah's chapters here and I haven't even put them in the appropriate order that they will be in the final draft but at this point what I've done in the editing process is I've gone through each chapter written out what happens and how it fits in so for example here's just brainstorming stuff about what might happen with Lia which I told you was a missing scene and so on what I do next is sometimes I will have so I have some multiple things up here which I create a new draft or a new doc every time I start a new draft so my second draft of beyond the darkness I just called beyond the darkness second draft and it also has a similar outline but now you can see I have actual chapters here and this is a you know good start this is not the full novel but this is where I started and when I did the second draft to just get this first act down path so basically what I will tend to do depending on how the story goes and if it needs a tons of ton of rewrites this book from the super rough draft ended up being such a rough draft that it needed a lot of rewrites and had a lot of missing scenes so what I would do is I would I'm actually going to go ahead and do this now I would create a new document and I would call it beyond the darkness second draft or whatever but I'm just gonna write tests because it's not gonna be something I'm going to use now every time I probably could set up some kind of template but every time I start a new document I move this over to the point 1 9 so that I've got my little indent there automatic indent and what I would do is I would go through and I would copy the first chapter and let's see so I would take it all the way through I would ctrl C to copy it and then I would paste it in over here and what this does for me is it just gives me that one chapter and one chapter only to be dealing with at a time and you can just click this to get your outline or to make it go away so I just have copied over only the first chapter because as I'm working through these edits that I was talking about I am working on character arc I'm working on the overall plot and that sort of thing so I'm just gonna bring one chapter over at a time but at this point again I'm not reading through it for typos things like that what I will do however is I will do a search I just usually will do ctrl F which will bring up this find and document and I look for the xx's and I've mentioned this before but basically whenever I have a question while I'm writing and I don't want to stop the flow of my writing I will put in an X X so here's the first one right on the first page what would happen when the authorities arrived and found out that the owner and top psychiatrists of this private institution have been killed where would they take us and I was like do I want to you know I know this xx question mark is is she called us top psychiatrist is that what I want to call her you know that sort of thing so at this point in time I would deal with those kinds of questions I would go ahead and fix that even though I'm not looking line by line reading through the book I would check for those things so then I go to the next one and I would say oh she you know Harper says and I needed to find Brooke xx who were her other allies outside the asylum Nora who else helped her and so I would start to think about that look back in the previous book figure out how I'm gonna fix that and I would go ahead and start to fill in all of these xx holes and what I like about that is I would fix those kinds of holes but I only have the first chapter here to deal with which makes it a little bit easier and a little bit less overwhelming plus it gives me something that I can do in a small chunk of time so I could maybe just say I'm just gonna work on chapter ones X X's or questions and this one is like I said this was an extremely rough draft for me so this one needed a lot of changes and a lot of stuff so there were a lot of like XX type things as soon as I felt like this chapter was at least good enough like I said not line editing but just seemed like it was good enough this chapter is the way it was gonna stay just fix those little holes I would go in and I would think about this chapter now because like I said I knew that this chapter didn't feel right to me instead of pulling this chapter over and copy and pasting it I would actually start a brand new chapter so what I would do here is I would go down to the last word and I would hit ctrl enter group ctrl enter and I would start a brand new chapter so this would be Chapter two and this is Jackson's point of view so I would start that I would label the to go up to normal text and give that heading one so it becomes heading one over here in my edits and then I would highlight the word Jackson and give that heading two so that now he becomes a point of view so this get just creates my outline it makes it easy for me to switch between chapters or points of view or to see whose point of view it is so then at this point what I would do is I would rewrite you know whatever is going to happen here so after I've been through the stuff I just showed you where I've been through all my notes and all my things this is basically like a second rough draft I'm rewriting this is big parts of the edits big swaths of edits when that chapter was done I would go down and look at chapter three and if I decided this is where Harper was still going to be that this is still what's going to stay in the story again I would just copy it I would make sure to control enter so that I get a new page break and then I would control V which copies and which pastes the old chapter on so then I would go through Harper's chapter here and I would fix again these X X's that I had in the story and just fix the bigger sort of character arc things and this at this point I'm actually reading through the actual story and trying to fix what I can and replace what I can so hopefully that gives you an idea of how the edits would go once I feel like they are pretty good and I've got you know good start on where I'm going then I will move on to the next part so part three of my edits are usually to do actual line by line edits and at this point I create a another document so would go in I would create file new document and this time I usually call this one if I feel like it's going to be ready when I'm starting my line at it I will call this one the title of the book and then edits or betas because I know that this is the version that's going to my beta readers you can see I often will at first call these chapter one still or I will actually put in the title which you can see later on in my final draft I tend to in my demon series my process is to title the chapters based on something that comes from the book or from the chapter itself so I actually in my betas document before they got to it this would have had the title so when I'm going through before I give that to them I would have titled this into the past and it would be here now I'll explain why it says done here in a minute but so basically I go through that same process that I did with the second draft I will go through and I will copy chapter one only and paste it in over here and so now I have that same first chapter and I'm only dealing with this chapter now like I said one of the reasons that I love doing this is because it allows me to look at one chapter at a time without feeling so overwhelmed that I'm like changing the whole novel plus it allows me to just sort of build the novel back up again without having to like move characters around move scenes around what I can do is you know copy and paste them in the order that they wanted to be you know that they're going to end up in the story so let's say for example in my second draft I had Harper Jackson Harper and I decided that I was going to actually put Harper as chapters one and two and move Jackson to chapter three if I had copied and pasted or I was working inside this document I would have to actually like start moving things around now this is one place where Scrivener is really something that shines because you can actually just like drag and drop chapters to change them but you can't do that in Google Docs at least not that I'm aware of so what I like to do is I will change you know I will start a new document and then what I would have done is if I wanted Harper to be chapter 1 & 2 I would have copied chapter 1 done my edits all over here on that chapter and then I would have taken chapter 3 and copied it and renamed s chapter 2 and then I would continue to build the document or the novel in the way that I wanted it to be in the long run so hopefully that makes sense everybody kind of has their own sequence of doing things so hopefully this kind of follows for you but I basically will rewrite redo and at this point once the book is pretty much done in terms of the plotting and the characterization and that sort of thing now I'm kind of fixing the scene water and I'm actually lined by line editing so would copy chapter 1 and this time I'm going to read through it with a fine-tooth comb and I would actually be making word changes at this point if you aren't sure what I mean by line edits or line by line go back and watch that first video in this series of how to self out at your novel and you'll see those kind of questions and those sort of things that I'm fixing but here I'm actually finally fixing grammar dialogue typos all that kind of thing this is where I'm really looking at it line by line making sure the emotion is there making sure that the words are the correct word choice and they're as strong as they can be and I'm going every single line at a time and being very picky and making those kinds of changes so I finish this sometimes I will wait until I finished like you can see this one has 53 chapters but sometimes I will wait until it's all finished and do one more read-through and then I will send it to my betas at which point I will just click the share button and email it to them but sometimes if I'm running closer to a deadline or I'm trying to get the book out more quickly I will wait until I have the first acts chapters in here and line edited and then I will email my beta readers and I will let them know that the first like five to ten chapters are up so they can start actually reading through this as I am continuing to build the document so I've talked about that before on my Google Docs and why I write in Google Docs video if you want to see that but sometimes we're collaborating on the same document at the same time then when I have finished all the line edits and everything has been copied over rewritten everything's finished on that next step I let the betas usually have it at this point and they're going through and they're fixing little things they're checking things they're fixing or letting me know if there's any characterization issues or more plot things so at which point I will wait and get their feedback from it so that's why I have the word done here because I will wait until they say to me they're done with a certain chapter or they're done with the entire book and I know at this point instead of just having a blank document I will actually have comments here so my beta readers would have gone through and they will like highlight this and they'll leave a comment and it'll be something like you know I don't like this you know just give an example and they would leave a comment so when I come back after my betas are done there will be all of their comments will be on this document and so what I mean by done is I will take it chapter by chapter after my betas are finished and I will resolve or fix any issues or decide if I'm going to change them or not and once it's done I will click resolve and then that is now finished and I can finish this whole chapter I will usually read through it one more time make sure everything looks good so once all their comments have been resolved I will create yet another document and this one will usually be called the title of the book and final so I know this is my final kind of my final version this is the last one I'm going to mess with and when I finish everything and later go back to look I know this was the final document so I'll create another final document and as I go through chapter by chapter I will again copy and paste the chapter into the new document and I will leave the title as it is but over here in my betas one I will mark it as done so I know that this chapter has been gone through you know fully it's been through beta readers I've read through it again and now it has been transferred to my final document then I'll do the same process with chapter two and I will look at you know everything that's happening here is this where we ended up and you can see in this more final version Jackson is not at all where we thought he was going to be he is now on the steps of in and Victorian staring at the ruined Hospital so he's definitely not where he was in the beginning so you can see there were some major major rewrites that were done when this one has been resolved and I feel like everything's done on that side of it I will copy Jackson's chapter over to the final one with the correct title hair dark purposes and then I will mark it done over here and I will go through every single chapter of the book like that until the entire book has been edited and re-edited and this is maybe the fourth or fifth draft by now and the book is finally done so believe it or not this is still only about halfway through my editing process so let's move on to the fourth step so the fourth step is to actually take that document that you just saw that was marked final and I print it out and just for funsies I usually print out a full-color photo as well of the actual book and then I will print the entire thing and I will go through it with a read aloud so usually I will just sit at my computer and I will have the printed version here with my four colors of pins in case I want to mark anything on the side to have it stand out against the black text and I will turn on usually naturalreader comm which I will link for you down below and I will input my document into naturalreader and it will read it aloud to me so I will listen to it as I'm going through it with my eyes as well and I will mark any changes on this document that need to be put into the final version okay moving on that of course takes some time but it's so worth it reading it aloud listening to your story is so worth it I highly recommend not skipping that step then what I will do is I will go through that paper copy that I just showed you and I will input any changes that I noticed needed to be changed when I was listening to the story I will go ahead and input those and for me I find it better to be listening to it and have a paper copy and read through it just because if I'm focusing on listening to it and being on my computer there's a lot more destruction that can happen like a some kind of notification can pop up so I like to have that one printed version where I'm seeing it in a different format it's not computer I'm seeing it with my eyes like in a printed format and then I will go into this final document and I'll make any changes any typos that I noticed any awkward words any repeated words like any of those little things I will input those changes then the fifth step is since I'm in a Google Doc right now I will go to file and I will download as a Microsoft Word docs and my computer is super slow this is an older Mac so it's just like that you can see it's naming it final one because I already have a copy of this but we're gonna just call it that and we're gonna click Save and then once that is downloaded I'm going to click for it to open and that's probably just going to take a second for it to open in Word and then I'm going to run through this entire novel in Word and I have mentioned this before in my Google Docs video and here on my editing videos but I don't feel like Google Docs has the best grammar and spell checker in the business but I did notice when I opened up Google Docs just today that they had a little notification here that says we're now helping you fix your grammar and now you can see that it has these little blue squiggly lines and when I click on that it's giving me a suggestion to put a comma in there like over here it's saying and if I'd made any mistakes I could put everyone here in danger so it's suggesting that I just say put everyone in danger so these are actually pretty good changes so it might be worth it for me to actually take my current novels that are already published and run them through this new Google Docs version of a grammar editor I know some of you commented on my video and suggested grammarly which is another free I believe it's a free Chrome extension ok so as you can see my document has finally come up and so what I would typically do at this point is I am going to go to review and there is a read aloud feature here which you could use if you wanted to use that instead but I'm gonna go to spelling and grammar and it's going to basically suggest every single thing that it would suggest so into the past it's telling me to put this down like not capitalized but it's part of my chapter heading so I'm gonna ignore that once and so on and at this point I would just go through all of their suggestions on commas and that sort of thing but you really need to when you're doing these sort of automated grammar checkers you really need to read every single thing don't just click you know to change everything because they're going to be times where you don't want to make the changes because they're suggesting commas where they don't belong they're trying to change their what your voice and that sort of thing and so you just need to make sure that you're making the right changes instead of just blindly changing them all but I would go through a process this only takes maybe thirty minutes to an hour to check your grammar and your spelling and typos and that sort of thing to see last-minute little like typos and things like that once this part of the process is done I will take every little change that I made here and I will change it within my document as well so what I like to do since I'm working in Google Docs at the same time that I'm working in Word is I will have both of them up on my computer at the same time when I'm working on my desktop I have two different monitors so I'll have the word on one monitor and my Google Doc on the other monitor and I will just if I make a change that they suggest over here in Word then I will just go ahead and input it and make the change over in the Google Doc to this part is a little bit more of a pain but it's worth it for me to be writing in Google Docs and to just use this as an extra tool and there usually aren't that many changes that need to be made but I make sure that I make those changes at the same time because otherwise it would be too hard to go back in and see what I had changed so that's just part of my process then what I do next is I move on to what is getting very close to the final step in my process which is my final read-through okay so I don't have any good video clips of this but I'm just going to tell you briefly what the process is so I will usually do a final read-through before I send it to my editor' my professional editor on usually on my computer and i will usually pull out my Chromebook and do this because i like to be like sitting on the couch and on the bed and being comfortable and i will make changes in the document as i see them but i'm trying to at this point put myself in the headspace of the reader are going through and reading this and thinking does this surprise me and i try to do this read through all in one sitting as much as possible i may move around the house while I'm doing it I may switch to my phone which is one of the reasons I love Google Docs is I can switch between computers and things like that but I do try to complete this all in the course of you know a few hours so that I get a really good feeling of the cohesiveness of the novel then I will send it out to my professional editor at that point I will you know sit on it I will wait for the comments to come back from them and then when they do come back I will go through that same process that I did with my word document where I will take the document from the editor if sometimes I do have work with an editor who will edit in my Google Doc but most of the time they want to use word so I will marry the two documents I'll go through her edits in Word and then put them all into my final document and then everything at that point is ready for formatting and sometimes you know I do send it to a line editor and then it will be back and forth kind of thing where it will be also then going to a proofreader I never skip the proofreading process but it just kind of depends on how many edits and how many editing rounds but this is the stage at which it goes through the edits and the editors that I'm using and then it goes through that final process of marrying all the documents and then it's ready for formatting at that point we are getting very close to the end of this process and the end of this very long video but once I've inputted all my changes and I feel like everything is done and I am ready to publish this book I will format the book so I use this program called vellum and it was one of the main reasons well one of two main reasons that I ended up buying a Mac because I'm typically like a PC kind of girl I do a lot of gaming and that sort of thing so I love my see but I had to get a Mac not only because I want to publish directly through iTunes Connect to the Apple bookstore but also because of this program right here called vellum this is life-changing my husband used to format all of my books for me but now I have this amazing program that will format paperbacks and ebooks and it's just the easiest thing I highly recommend it it's maybe a few hundred dollars for lifetime access to it plus you need a Mac but it is so worth it it is amazing if you're planning on publishing a lot of books I highly recommend to this so what I would do is I would import my Word file here so I would go back into Google Docs I would download the final file as a docx and then I would import the word file to vellum so I'm gonna pull this up because this is the book we were talking about is beyond to the darkness so here you can see what it looks like inside vellum so once I have imported the book it's going to have all those chapters already formatted for me sometimes I do have to kind of play around with getting the right titles or you know making sure so the next stage of my editing process is actually to pull up again a copy of my final draft and I will compare the outline of the final draft to the outline of my formatted draft so I'll say into the past into the past her dark purposes her dark purposes will they remember will they remember and I double-check that every single chapter is there and is correct because sometimes when you import your Word file into vellum it will have two chapters in one and it won't have separated them correctly even if you put a page break in there so you can't just set it and forget it you really do need to double check that's the next step in the process is formatting which again is super easy but definitely making sure that everything that's in the outline in the right order showed up here and then I actually will do another step and I will go through and I will count these chapters all over again and make sure that if it said 60 chapters here that I actually have 60 chapter's plus an epilogue over here so a little bit of just like sort of detailed work but again you don't want to skip any of these types of steps when you're formatting and this kind of thing becomes very important but basically once this step is over I will go one step further and I will compile this so you would say generate and I will generate it so right now it's set for print but you can go in here and you can say I want to generate it for Apple Kindle Nook Kobo Google and so on and you can put specific links and for each of those vendors so I would go ahead and I would generate and click continue and then once I had let's say I like to read through my books like on my phone in Google Play Books app so I would just Google do the Google version of it and I would put that on my phone and I would just thumb through it to make sure all the formatting looks good on my phone which I know it's not part of that like editing your story but it is part of editing your final draft of your novel before you self publish it and then I would upload it it would be ready to go and I would publish the book at that point so that is pretty much my editing process okay guys that is it for my organization of my own edits this is kind of the process that I follow this and don't feel like you need to have it all figured out right from the beginning this is something you're gonna figure out as you go in the comments I would love to hear what stage of the writing process you're on and if you enjoyed this editing series and would like to see more things similar to it in the future so have you finished your first rough draft have you already edited and published multiple novels or is this the first time you've jumped into edit or are you know where new you're close to edits because you're still plotting I would love to know just to kind of get an idea of where my subscribers are in the writing process I do also want to let you guys know real quick that my HP 90 planning bootcamp which is all about 90 day planning figuring out your vision for your life and coming up with step-by-step process for how you're going to move toward that ideal vision for your life this is a seriously a life changing course it's a three-day course but once you have paid for right you have access to it for a lifetime so even if you can't go through it in three days or you're very busy this summer if you go ahead and purchase the course you will have lifetime access to it but that course only opens a few times a year and it is open for registration now the live bootcamp kickoff call will go live on June 20th which is coming up a week from Thursday and then we will boot camp it up for the rest of that weekend next weekend but I would love to have you join me I have had over 200 students take this course so far and so many of them have seen their lives changed and seen their productivity just skyrocket because it's not just about figuring out your ideal future it's really about prioritizing the things that are on your to-do list so if you've dealt with feeling overwhelmed feeling like you just have so much to do to you'll never get it done comparing yourself to other people and feeling like you're almost getting whiplash from like looking at what they're doing and trying to run over here and do that and do this and do this or you're just so busy you can't figure out time management this is a great course for you whether you're a writer or not there gonna be a lot of writer specific examples given but it really can apply to everything in your life to losing weight to managing your day job to managing your home and your life with your family all the way through reading more books getting out and taking care of yourself more because like I said it in my live video this weekend I hit a point where I was really struggling with my own productivity and feeling super overwhelmed and developing this program over the course of several years really is what opened my eyes to having a balanced life where I'm realistic about what I want to get done I'm still you know working toward my goals I'm still making progress I'm still heading toward that ideal life but I'm actually so much more joyful and so much less stressed than I used to be because I know exactly what needs to get done I know where I am and I feel really in control of my schedule at all times so if that sounds appealing to you you will get a free copy of my HP 90 method planner for q3 and you will get live kickoff call and closing call with me as well as access to the entire bootcamp course which is intense and amazing and you'll get access to a Facebook group which now is going to be over 200 people of support every single week you get support from me every week from now on so it's not just during the course but reporters and quarters to come so I would love to have you come join me and the links to join are down below my q3 planner is going up this Thursday so look out for that if you've been looking forward to the planner as well another question that I've had is when does my self-publishing course launch so publish and thrive is my course on self-publishing it is going to be an affordable course that covers everything from idea to strategy to how to upload what the difference is between all the vendors and whether you should use Kindle unlimited how to price your novels whether you need ISBNs how to market your novels just pretty much everything I know about the business in a very affordable course that course will launch on July 8th but it is already up for sale now so I'll include some links for you down below as well the sales page isn't complete yet so if you go check that link it's not going to be completely live until probably tomorrow but I'm also going to be offering a special bundled package if you want to take both courses this summer that will be a special price with an additional discount so keep an eye out for that in my next video I'll talk about that on Thursday alright guys thank you so much for letting me talk about these courses and these opportunities but also thank you for letting me be a part of your writing process and your editing process if you enjoyed this video series I hope that you'll share it with a friend subscribe to my channel and click that like so that I know that you enjoyed this video and want to see more of them other than that I will see you in my next video bye [Music]

Channel: Heart Breathings

Views: 10,934

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: how to edit a novel, how to edit a first draft, how to write a book, writer, books, heart breathings editing series, heart breathings plot, editing a novel, editing for writers, how I edit my books, how to write a novel, writer blog, how to edit a novel manuscript, how to edit a novel quickly, how to edit a novel first draft, editing a novel tips, book editing tips, how to write a book and get published, editing tips for writers

Id: yuK2idr4nxM

Length: 59min 43sec (3583 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 11 2019