Editing

What type of editing you need and what an editor can do to improve your work depends a lot on where you are in the arc of your project. Wherever you are, a precision edit is what you want.

Scenes are a fundamental unit of fiction, and each scene has a job to do to keep the story moving forward. A scene-quality map can help you identify when and where things might not be at perfect pitch.

Transforming your work from “draft” to “done” can be daunting, and the process can differ depending on the needs of a project. Here are some strategies to consider when reviewing your text, regardless of context, when preparing your final edit.

As an editor or beta reader, when you highlight the best segments of a written work with your red pen, you give the author a map of the highlights of his/her work. As the author, there's a lot you can learn from this process.

When "Tidying Up" aired early in January 2019 on Netflix, hordes of fans clamored for more of Marie Kondo's animism when dealing with all their "stuff." Kondo peddles the concept of perfect control over your things instead of letting your things control you. Writers, we can take a page out of Kondo's book.

Publication-quality text is what agents, editors, and readers are looking for — and they can tell whether you have it in the first paragraph, or even the first sentence.

A self-edit should have you cutting what doesn't add to your written work. Strive for simple, effective construction of phrases to achieve a better final product.