Novel editing for first-time writers
A step-by-step editing plan for my first completed draft
Writing the first draft is the easy part. I have heard this so many times from so many different people. For a first-time writer — struggling through that drag of Act II, not sure how to make the finale worth reading the entire book and battling with characters who do not want to have clear developmental arcs — that’s a hard pill to swallow. Every time I heard this, my immediate thought was “THIS is easy? I’m doomed.”
I finished writing my first ever completed draft a few weeks ago, and as per everyone’s recommendation, I put it aside, so I can return to the manuscript with a bit of distance. But instead of sleeping in or indulging in other hobbies, the next morning at 5 am, I found myself back at my laptop, researching how to edit my first novel*.
Let me share with you what I found and the editing plan I created for 2025.
First, I want to disclaimer that everyone does this differently and the plan that I put together is something I think will work for me. You can go ahead and follow it exactly (then we can compare notes), pick and choose things you want to try or spread these points across more drafts. With writing, anything goes!
Second, I wanted to say special thank you to the people who helped me put together this plan:
Allison Tait has been incredibly generous with sharing her advice throughout the entire decade that I’ve been writing. She’s facilitated many Zoom calls where she answered my endless questions. Her website is filled with resources for writers and she has a wealth of knowledge.
I was lucky to attend a very intimate industry Zoom with Gabrielle Tozer, and she kindly told me about her own editing practices. She was also incredibly encouraging and relatable and was such a pleasure to meet.
I will do my best to point out the sources throughout this article. Aside from asking for advice from Allison and Gabrielle, I read countless Substack posts and watched many YouTube videos on editing. Researching writing software also aided my editing plan and inspired ideas. At the bottom of this article, I will leave a list of links of the resources I mention and writing software I plan to use in my own editing.
Third, before jumping into my second draft, I will spend a few weeks reverse engineering the world building. THE DARK TWIN (working title) is a smaller-scale story, so I could start writing with minimal world building prep. Now, it’s time to make the story more complex. This will inform some of my edits, so I will need to do this first. If you’re curious about reverse engineering your world building, let me know and I can write the next month’s feature on it.
Draft 2
I plan to dedicate this year to editing the story and making it submission-ready, so I want to start strong and tackle a lot of big issues while I still have the energy.
Draft 2 will be BIG. Lots of work, lots of changes, lots of figuring out solutions to big complex issues. I also have a feeling that I will need to practically rewrite my entire Act 1. So once again I want to point out that not everyone will do it this way and this might not be sustainable for every writer. Hell, it might not even be sustainable for me. But this is my first rodeo and I come with ridiculous optimism, so I shall try.
1. Scene by Scene
The first thing I’ll do is read through the entire story and create a card for each scene. In each scene card, I want to include:
A general synopsis. It should be only a few sentences long. What happens?**
What does my Main Character do in this scene? Is she in the driving seat or is she the observer? I want to make sure my MC drives the story.
Note which characters are actively in the scene and which characters are mentioned in the scene. This will be handy later.
The location of the scene.
The time of the scene. This is something I personally struggle with — keeping up with the calendar. One thing I noticed during writing my first draft is that I often mention the moonlight illuminating the room, so it seems like it’s full-moon the entire story that spans several months. I need to make sure these things don’t throw the reader out of the story.
What’s the point of the scene? Is it driving the story forward? If it isn’t, it shouldn’t be there.
What’s the conflict? Does anything actually happen?***
There are lots of useful tips on looking at the book on a scene level. I found this video by Abby Emmons really helpful.
She focuses on the idea that each scene should have a similar structure to the entire novel. It should have a beginning, a middle and an end. Or a set-up, crossroads and the outcome. What are the characters dealing with at the beginning of the scene, both internally and externally? When we reach the crossroads, the scene can go two ways. What decision will the characters make? And finally, where does this leave them? Each scene needs to raise the stakes and pose a new question.
NOTE ON SOFTWARE
I use Scrivener for my writing and love it. But with editing, I found myself really drawn to Plottr. It focuses specifically on scene cards and timelines. Its different timeline view modes let you see the story on a different scale, at a distance. Since this is the first time I edit a book, I decided to test it out and see if it’s going to be as amazing in application as it seems in theory.
It will require extra effort, but I’ll create these scene-by-scene synopses in both Scrivener and Plottr in case mid-way I realise that Plottr might not be what I was hoping for. This might end up turning into a fun software comparison/study and if so — I’ll write a feature on it 🙂
2. “Brand Guides” for Characters and Locations
This is an adjoining task that I’ll be doing at the same time as I’m working on Scene by Scene. Even though I am more of a plotter than a pantser, I still like to discover my characters as I write them. So in the finished draft, one of my main characters changes eye colour every other chapter, and the description of each location grows and evolves with the story.
Rereading the story will give me an opportunity to note down all these details about each character and each location and create a “Brand Guide”** of sorts for them. So I can make sure I am consistent in my descriptions.
This is another task I plan to do in Plottr and Scrivener. I also want to make sure I use Filters and Attributes in Plottr and Custom Metadata in Scrivener to track POVs, characters present in each scene, and main plot, subplots and the mention of clues throughout the story. The last one is especially exciting and will be so helpful to ensure things are mentioned early enough to build the tension and the discoveries/plot twists do not fall flat.
3. Chapter by Chapter
Most of my chapters have multiple scenes. Once I finish each scene card in the chapter, I want to make sure I answer these questions:
Does this chapter have a beginning, a middle and an end?
What happens in each chapter? Write a shorter chapter synopsis.
What are the new problems for the characters? Did it raise the stakes?
Is there a new choice to make or a turning point at the end?
I also want to take a note of chapter word counts and make sure I keep them relatively consistent for good pacing. This will help me figure out if I need to cut something out or move it to another chapter.
4. Character Arcs
Who is this character at the beginning of the story and who are they at the end? Now that I’ve written the story out, it’s time to look at my characters and make sure that each of them is pursuing a goal and changes by the end of the book.
This idea really changed the way I look at my characters and especially at my side characters: Don’t give your characters roles to play, instead give them goals to pursue. I found this gem in one of Abby Emmons’ videos, most likely on character arcs. I know for a fact that my main characters are pursuing their own goals, but my side characters? Oof. That needs a lot of work.
Writing out each character’s arc will affect the editing. I’ll be able to check if I’m mentioning their struggles early enough in the story, if their motivations appear often enough throughout, and if their change is clear in the end.
5. Plot Summary
Remember when we wrote a short synopsis for each scene? Now it’s time to create a plot summary of all events in the story. This is crucial for creating a revision map later on.
I’ll use The Hunger Games as an example. A plot summary will look something like this:
Chapter 1
Katniss Everdeen wakes up on the day of the reaping before her mother and sister. She walks through the Seam towards the fence enclosing District 12 and slips into the woods to hunt with her friend Gale. They talk of running away, but the conversation quickly becomes uncomfortable.
On their way home, they stop by the Hob and then the mayor’s house to sell game and berries they gathered. Mayor’s daughter Madge answers the door and Gale leashes out because Madge will not be chosen for the reaping. The odds are skewed.
Back home, Katniss and Prim get ready for the reaping and make their way to the square. Prim’s name is drawn.
Chapter 2
Katniss volunteers to take Prim’s place as a tribute. She keeps her own emotions at bay to avoid having them broadcasted on live television. Everyone in the crowd salutes Katniss. Haymitch makes a scene and falls off the stage. Peeta Mellark’s name is drawn.
Katniss thinks of her only interaction with Peeta, three months after her father’s death. Her mother could not function as she grieved, and Katniss had to keep herself and Prim alive. When the money runs out and Katniss and Prim are on the verge of starvation, Peeta burns bread at his family bakery, earning a beating from his mother, and throws the ruined bread at Katniss, saving them.
The first two chapters of The Hunger Games are written as one long scene. But for the sake of making my point clearer, I separated them into several scenes each.
6. General Questions to Ask at This Stage
Are all these POVs necessary? General advice is to have 1-3 POVs, unless I’m writing epic fantasy of course or having more POVs is truly crucial to the story.
Is there any head hopping? I am writing the story in the third person limited point of view. Meaning, the narrator can only see through the eyes and into the thoughts of one character. If another character in the scene is turned away from the POV character, then I cannot write that they smiled, because my POV character would not see that. If I wrote something about their facial expression at that point, that would be considered head hopping.
Does this make sense? Would my character do this/say this? **
Are all these characters necessary? If not, can I remove any or combine them? **
Does the middle of the story sag? Is there enough action, tension and conflict all the way throughout the book?***
Have I written a strong ending?***
Using Attributes in Plottr should help answer some of these questions. For example, in THE DARK TWIN, my main character’s father dies and we are not sure how it happened. Throughout the story, more and more information is revealed to us. This is a point of tension for the character and raises the stakes in the story. If I decide to track where in the story her father’s death is mentioned, I’ll be able to see how often it appears, and this will give me an indication if it provides enough tension throughout the book. If I notice that it hasn’t been mentioned for most of the second part of Act 2, I’ll know that I need to add it into additional scenes.
7. Revision Map
I learnt about creating a revision map from this video by Reedsy.
The point of a revision map is to make structural edits less terrifying. It is essentially a step-by-step manual on how to fix your own story. Once I completed the Plot Summary and asked myself the big hard questions, I should know what issues my story has. All I need to do is write solutions/tasks into my Plot Summary.
The trick is that I need to think of a concrete, specific solution to each problem I’ve uncovered. So instead of writing “Needs more work to explain Katniss’ resentment to her mother” (not specific enough), I’ll write “Insert a mention of Katniss’ mother shutting down after her father dies in a mining accident and Katniss wishing she could sign up for tesserae to save herself and her sister from starvation, even though it means adding her name into the Hunger Games draw more times.”
Based on our plot summary, a revision map will look something like this:
Chapter 1
Katniss Everdeen wakes up on the day of the reaping before her mother and sister. She walks through the Seam towards the fence enclosing District 12 and slips into the woods to hunt with her friend Gale. They talk of running away, but the conversation quickly becomes uncomfortable.
Add a mention of Katniss’ mother failing them when their father died.
Add “If we didn’t have kids” into Katniss’ and Gale’s dialogue, meaning their siblings. This shows just how much responsibility they both took upon themselves.
On their way home, they stop by the Hob and then the mayor’s house to sell game and berries they gathered. Mayor’s daughter Madge answers the door and Gale leashes out because Madge will not be chosen for the reaping. The odds are skewed.
Back home, Katniss and Prim get ready for the reaping and make their way to the square. Prim’s name is drawn.
Chapter 2
Katniss volunteers to take Prim’s place as a tribute. She keeps her own emotions at bay to avoid having them broadcasted on live television. Everyone in the crowd salutes Katniss. Haymitch makes a scene and falls off the stage. Peeta Mellark’s name is drawn.
Add a mention that the mayor remembers Katniss from giving her the Medal of Valour after her father’s death.
Katniss thinks of her only interaction with Peeta, three months after her father’s death. Her mother could not function as she grieved, and Katniss had to keep herself and Prim alive. When the money runs out and Katniss and Prim are on the verge of starvation, Peeta burns bread at his family bakery, earning a beating from his mother, and throws the ruined bread at Katniss, saving them.
8. Action the Revision Map
Finally, it’s time to go through each of those tasks and action them one by one. At this point, I am going to consider Draft 2 done and I will put it aside for a month or so to give myself a break and to, once again, return to it with fresh eyes.
Draft 3
In the ideal scenario, my Draft 3 will not require as much work. Of course, I might be completely wrong. As I’m fixing issues from Revision Map, I might discover a better solution for something closer to the end of the book. Then, I’ll have to go back and fix it from the start again.
I have 3 goals for Draft 3, which seems nice and simple. But they’re hard goals.
1. Dialogue
This is where I need to look at the dialogue and make sure that each character has a distinct voice. Do they say things in a specific way? Do they have any catchphrases? Each character needs to sound different. This might also bleed into rewriting some scenes since the way a character speaks will also be reflected in how that character thinks.
I will try to tackle this one character at a time. And once again, tracking what characters are present and mentioned in each scene will be very helpful here.
2. Thinking vs Action vs Dialogue**
Do I have too much thinking and not enough action? Does too much of the scene happen in my character’s head? Too much dialogue without any breaks? The original advice I received was to get 3 highlighters and highlight the entire book this way, to have a visual representation of the divide. But I think I might try to use a ProWritingAid for this first.
ProWritingAid is another writing software on the market. I originally did not want to even touch it because one of their features is an AI-powered rephrasing/enhancing of sentences. But they claim they do not use customer writing to train their AI and this is also the only grammar checker that works with Scrivener. So I’m thinking of giving it a go and taking a look at their Writing Reports feature. This feature should also be helpful during line editing as it points out overused phrases and words.
I haven’t decided if I will be using this software yet and want to read about their customer data handling first.
3. Read the entire book out loud**
There’s not much more to it than that. Reading out loud (like reading a printed copy or reading on an e-reader) lights a new light on the story. Reading out loud is especially important to fix dialogue. But also, pacing and sentence structure.
Draft 4: Beta Readers and Actioning Their Feedback
After I do all of the above, I plan to send the book out to 3-5 beta readers with a list of specific questions. I am actually going to beta read for someone at the end of this month myself and they sent me a list of questions to focus on as well.
Once I’ve got their feedback, I’ll need to analyze it and see if there are any recurring issues that multiple people report and fix those. I will also be looking into how easy the book is to understand and if I get feedback that some parts are confusing, I’ll make sure to fix that as well.
Draft 5: Hire a Structural Editor and Action Their Feedback
Finally! At this point, I might be looking to hire a structural editor and get a professional’s help to fix any issues that are still there and make the book as best as it can be. I know not everyone will go this direction and plenty of writers skip this step. But honestly, I would love to collaborate with someone in this way, so I am really excited for this.
Right now, I’m still not sure if the book will end up good enough to become my debut. But I will give it my all and take it all the way through this process, if not to publish, then to learn.
And this is my plan for structural editing! Then, there is still line editing and proofreading to be done. I am really excited about line editing because finding out my patterns, working on rewording and making the story better on a language level lights me up. Ex foreign language major here! 🙋♀️
This ended up being a bloody long post, but I do hope that someone will find it helpful. It also helped me to solidify my own plans as well :)
I appreciate all kinds of writing advice so if I’m missing something or you’ve got a better suggestion, please do leave a comment.
Have a lovely day!
Daria
Links
Courtney Maum’s Friday Office Hours (incredible writing advice)
That writing space looks so cozy. I like the chapter by chapter analysis you described. A succinct and focused process to identify any narrative issues. Thanks for using Plottr, too! :)
So many good revision strategies here—bookmarking for future reference! Thank you!