Taming the Draft: Self-Editing (Part Three)

Okay, besties. I promised in my last post that we’d tackle the final polish of your draft next. At this point, you’ve reread the initial draft, bolstered your crumbling structure, and resisted flinging yourself back into your Animal Crossing game where you can have an existential crisis while a capitalist racoon gives you bigger and bigger home loans. You’re still with me, and we’re ready to move into the fine art of line edits.

This is the moment we zoom in and make your sentences sparkle. I think many people believe line editing means looking for typos, but really, it’s about analyzing each and every one of your words. 

Line editing is also less about fixing grammar (though, you’ll be doing that, too) and more about making sure every word of your manuscript is pulling its weight. 

Line editing answers these questions:

• Does this sentence say what I mean?
• Is it understandable?
• Is it interesting?
• Is it strong? Reflective? Emotionally weighted?

These are some of the things I look for during a line pass:

How often have I repeated myself? 

I have a tendency to overuse certain phrases. His heart pounded. His heart skipped a beat. His heart stopped for a moment. Listen, my characters all have anxiety, and their hearts do a lot of heavy lifting. But if you can find new ways to express the same idea, your story will be stronger for it.

Have I cut all the clutter? 

Clear unnecessary words like just, very, really, kind of, suddenly, that. This doesn’t mean you have to cut every single usage of the word—just that it’s a really good idea to kind of be intentional about it. (See what I did there?) [Giving me a headache. ~Ed.]

Are my verbs strong? 

Instead of “She was walking,” try “She walked.” Or go even stronger: she strode, darted, raced, stomped. Think of each word as a chance to build character and tone. 

Have I looked at all of my filter words (words that distance the reader)?

“He saw a knife wielding demon spring from the bushes” is a great sentence. But “A knife wielding demon sprang from the bushes” is better and more immediate. Less distance for the reader. Instead of filtering through the “he saw,” they can experience it directly. The reader already knows the character saw it, so we don’t need to repeat it.

Wrapping up:

Lastly, and probably most importantly, my goal in this editing pass is to make it as perfect as possible while preserving my voice. Do I sometimes use awkwardly long sentences? Yes. Am I going to leave most of them in? Also, yes. (Note: Hello to my favorite beta reader who often tries to truncate my long sentences, and yes, they know who they are, and that I love them.) [What am I, chopped liver? ~Ed.]

By the end of this multi-part process, you are going to have a draft that feels both fully familiar (perhaps overly so) and also entirely fresh. That’s the beauty of editing. It’s not about fixing something broken. It’s about finding the beauty under the mess. 

And remember, if you made the mess, you can clean it up, too.