What It REALLY Means to Make Progress Editing Your Novel

Editing progress doesn’t always look like you’d expect. Here’s how to recognize it.

If your editing is going great, you’ll enjoy this episode. Honestly, though, if editing feels like the worst thing in the world right now, you’ll love this episode even more.

Here’s what’s in store: How do you know whether you’re really making progress editing your novel?

In the episode, you’ll learn:

• Why editing progress does NOT look like what you might expect
• What counts as editing progress
• The two things that DON’T count as progress
• And more!

If you’re feeling stuck, stagnant, or overwhelmed, don’t miss this episode.

I hope it gives you just the boost you need to start this year of writing and editing strong.

One more thing: This year, I’m moving Your Next Draft to a biweekly podcasting schedule. Rather than sharing a new episode every week, I’ll have a new episode every other week.

I’m making this shift to allow me to spend more time with my editing clients. You’ll still get to hear from me on the podcast! I’ll still be sharing the same actionable editing content designed to help you navigate your own novel editing process.

It’ll just be every other week rather than every week.

To hear more about this shift, check out the episode.

Links mentioned in the episode:

• Join my email list for weekly editing tips: alicesudlow.com/sceneworksheet
• Join my waitlist and be the first to know about my openings for new editing clients: alicesudlow.com/waitlist

Transcript

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as long as you're open to changes, you are making progress. The only ways to stop making progress are to hold on. So tightly to what is that you can't make space for what could be, or to quit. Don't quit. You've got this, Welcome to your next draft. This is the first episode of 2024. And I've got a good one for you today. As a topic, that's come up several times with my editing clients lately. And it's something that I'm always thinking about as I edit novels. But before we get to the good stuff, I first want to let you know about some adjustments that I will be making to the podcast this year in 2024. As you know, I'm a developmental editor and a book coach. I hope writers take their first or second or 10th drafts of their novels and revise them into manuscripts that they're proud to query or self publish. I do this every day in my work with clients writers hire me to read their outlines in their drafts and give them feedback and to coach them through the editing process. And I do this here on the podcast where I share the strategies that I'm using with my one-on-one clients, with you, so that you can edit your novels to. Both of these tasks are important and I've seen firsthand how they're both helping writers, craft great stories. And of course, who both of these tasks take time. That's how work works. At this particular moment in my editing career in January of 2024. I'm at a point where I both want and need to be spending more time with my clients. So I'm making some adjustments to make this possible. And one of those adjustments is here on the podcast. This year, I'm moving to a biweekly podcasting schedule. Rather than sharing a new episode every week. I will have a new episode every other week. Don't worry. I'm still here. I'm still podcasting. You'll still get to hear from me. I'll still be showing the same actionable editing content designed to help you navigate your own novel editing process. It'll just be every other week, rather than every week. Now, along with the podcast, I also send out a weekly email newsletter right now. I'm planning to continue sending out that newsletter weekly. And that means that there will be content that I put together for the email newsletter that will not be on the podcast. I'm still working out what that content is going to be right now. I'm thinking it'll probably be super quick, short editing tips. So like the podcast, but a two minute read rather than a 20 minute. Listen. That's subject to change, of course. And it'll probably evolve over the course of the year. Honestly, I'm kind of excited for it. Like I think that there's some cool stuff that I can share within the context of an email, a quick, short little email that maybe doesn't lend itself to the podcast, or I don't have the space to expand it into a podcast episode. The point is this year, you've got two ways to get free editing resources for me first there's this podcast, which is moving to a biweekly schedule. And second, there's my email newsletter, which will stay on a weekly schedule. If you're not subscribed to my email newsletter and you would like to join, go to our subtler. Dot com slash scene worksheet and fill in the form with your email address as a thank you for subscribing, I will also send you my most popular editing worksheet, the scene analysis worksheet. That's our hello.com/scene worksheet. And of course that link is in the show notes as well. All right. That's all for the housekeeping. Let's get into the episode. Today. I want to explore a really big question. What does it actually look like to make progress in your editing? And what does editing progress actually look like? And I want to start off with an analogy. Imagine you're going on a long road trip. Let's make it a really long road trip from New York city to San Francisco because books take a long time, too. You get in your car in New York city, you start driving pretty soon. You cross the state line into New Jersey. And then soon after that, you cross into Pennsylvania. The road is a little wiggly. So sometimes you're going more Northwest and sometimes you're going more Southwest, but you're generally going west the whole time. Maybe you stop at a gas station for a few minutes and fill up. But you probably don't turn around and go back to New York city. Maybe you do, if you forgot something absolutely essential. And it's still pretty early in your drive. But you probably just keep on keeping on into Ohio and then Indiana and the no Illinois. The trip is going to take you about 45 hours of driving. So you'll stop a few times along the way to spend the night. You might even decide to pause for a day or two at the high points along the way. So you can explore the cities you're passing through and see the sites. It might take you a week or more to cross from Utah into Nevada, and then finally into California. But all along the way, whether you press forward with as few stops as possible or slow down to enjoy the sights along the way. You're generally going west. Your route is essentially a straight line from New York city to San Francisco without backtracking or changing paths. You start at the starting point and you go until you reach the ending point. Progress is easy to track. You're just watching the miles ticked down between you and your destination. Editing a novel. Is not like this road trip. Much as I suspect that we all wish that it were. It's really, really not. Here's what editing is like. I've got three stories for you. All of them, representative of what the writers that I work with are actually doing in their novels right now. Editing story. Number one. The recursive chapter edits. Here's how it goes. You sent me chapter one of your novel. I read it. I give you feedback. You revise chapter one based on my feedback and you send it to me again. I read it. I give you more feedback. You revise chapter one again, I read it and I say, you know what? This is great. I think there's still some changes that we can make to it, but it's doing what it needs to do right now. So let's move on to chapter two. So you send me chapter two of your novel. I read it. I give you feedback. You revise chapter two and you send it to me. I read it and I say, great, let's go on to chapter three. You send me chapter three, I read it and give you feedback. You revise, you send it to me. I say. I actually, I see some major adjustments that we can make here to strengthen this. Let's really dig in. We dig in for a couple of rounds of revision on chapter three, Midway through chapter three starts shedding light on chapter two, and I spot an opportunity to revise chapter two based on what we've just discovered. You go back and revise chapters two and three, and you sent them to me. And as I read them, I see connections between them and chapter one. So I send you back to revise chapter one and two and three. You do all those revisions. I read all three chapters. They work so much better. And I tell you fantastic work. This is really working. I think there are still some opportunities that we can explore in these chapters in the next draft. But they're doing what they need to do now. So let's head on to chapter four. This is progress. Here's story. Number two. The outline revision revision. Here's how it goes. You write a draft of your novel? I read it. I do my analysis on it and I give you my feedback. You take your draft and my feedback and you turn them into an outline to plan your next draft. You send me the outline. I read it. I do more analysis on it and I give you feedback. We identify a couple of key areas that we need to develop in order for this new plan to really work, we spend a couple of weeks exploring those concepts together and building out that week. Part of the story to make it really strong. You take all of those ideas back to your outline, you revise it and you send it to me. I read it again. I do more analysis on it and I give you more feedback. You revise the outline again, you send it to me. I read it. I say this is awesome. I have some ideas for things that I will want to watch for in the next draft, but for now, this is everything you need. Go turn this outline into a full draft. This is progress. And here's story. Number three. The page one, rewrite. Here's how it goes. You write a draft of your novel. You send me the manuscript and I read it. I make some notes on some big picture areas that we need to develop in order to create a strong foundation for your story. We get on a call and we talk those things through. We really dig into why you're writing this story, what the story is really about and some big ideas for how you can structure your story so that it matches those two things. You take all of those notes and ideas and you sit with them, you go on a walk and you think about them. You do some character development exercises and you researched some key elements of your story. With all of that, you put together a new plan for your next draft. It's a serious overhaul. You're cutting a few characters. You're starting later in the story and you're completely changing the ending. This new plan is way more aligned with your original vision for this book. But it's so different from your previous draft. But you decide to start your next draft with a blank page. You saved the previous draft and a folder. So you can always go back to it. If you need to, then you open a new document and you begin a page, one rewrite. This is progress. Because here's the truth about editing a novel? The thing that we miss when we picked your editing, like a really long road trip. Editing. Is recursive. Back in college. I took a class on how to work in the writing center. It was my first real training ground and how to work with clients to edit writing. And the professor who taught this class would say this all the time. Writing is recursive. Shout out to Dr. Sinsky. If she ever listens to this podcast, it's been more than a decade since I took that class. And I still think about this and say it all the time. Writing is recursive. That road trip from New York city to San Francisco. It's linear. You start at point a and you go in a relatively straight line until you reach point B. But editing is recursive. It's cyclical. You write a draft, then you go back to the beginning to revise it. You revise the outline going over and over it from the start to the finish until it works well enough, which is to say. You've solved the set of problems that you need to solve. At this point in the process, there are more problems that you'll deal with later, but you've tackled the things that need tackling right now. Then you write the draft and you create a new outline and you test that to see how it's working now and what problems you need to solve next. Usually I'm in from the whole story to the first act and you revise that until it's set, then you use what you've learned from the first act to restructure act two and then act three and then act four. You discover something critical in the climax as you revise act four, and you go back to act one to set it up. You zoom in from the act to the scene, you revise a scene until it works well enough for now, you move forward and revise the next scene and the next and the next you put all those scenes together in a sequence. And as you edit the climax of that sequence, you discover what it is that's missing in that first scene. The thing that makes it work just well enough, but not totally nailing it yet. You go back to the first scene and you revise it again, and then you make cascading changes down through the next three scenes based on what you just changed in the first one. If you picture your editing process, like a road trip. All of those recursive iterations. Feel like you got all the way to Utah only to turn your car around and drive back to New York to start over. The days that you've spent driving across the country, feel like wasted time. Like you made a mistake, the minute you left your house And if you just could have gotten it right, then you'd be in California now rather than wasting gas and time driving back and forth across the country. Like, this is somehow your fault. Like you're doing this wrong. Like you're not a good enough writer to just figure the story out already. But editing. Isn't like a road trip. And you're not doing it wrong. Here's a better analogy. Imagine you're walking up a spiral staircase. If someone finds a drone up to the top of the staircase to look down, and we assume that all of the stairs are clear in the staircase they're made of glass. Then in that video, you'll look like you're just walking in circles. You'll keep going back to the same spot over and over and over sickly returning to the beginning and working your way to the end again and again, and again. But if they look at that spiral staircase from the side, they'll see the truth with every cycle you're climbing, You're making incremental, but steady progress upwards. And in order to do that, you must keep circling the same area. There's no ladder here to take you upwards in a straight line. If you want to reach the top of the tower, your metaphorical publication ready novel. You have to take the stairs. You have to walk in circles, gradually climbing upwards, continually returning to the same points over and over. and yet making steady progress all the while. Here's some things that count as making progress in your editing. Going back to revise chapter two, a fifth time after you revise chapter three. Going back to revise act one, because you figured out something important in act four. Going back to your outline to revise the structure of your story after draft three. Editing that outline then getting feedback, then editing that outline again before you write the next draft. Opening a new document to rewrite your story, starting with a blank page. Putting your pages down for a couple of days. So you can think deeply about a sticky problem in your story. Going back to the drawing board. And reinvisioning what story you want to tell at all who you want to tell it to and what form it needs to take in order to share that story with that audience. And here are some things that do not count as making progress in your editing. Quitting. Or holding on to words that, you know, are not serving your story simply because it took a lot of work to get them down on the page in the first place. And it will feel like you're moving backwards. If you let them go. As long as you were open to changes, no matter what form those changes may come in. Your making progress in your editing. Uh, the only way to stop making progress is to stop making changes. It's so easy to get discouraged here. It's so easy to look at your process from the view of that drone overhead and just see the circles that you're making around and around and around. It's easy to feel like you're stagnating or even moving backwards when you keep going over the same story or even the same piece of story again and again, and again. But this is editing. This is what editing progress looks like. The trick is to remember that the drone view doesn't tell the whole story. I look at that spiral staircase from the side and you'll see how far you really come. If this is hard to do, If you feel stuck or overwhelmed, or like the only view available to you is the drone view. I encourage you to reach out for support. This is the kind of space where working with a book coach can be really helpful. A book coach not only gives you feedback on your writing, but also helps you navigate the process. When I work with writers. Yes. I send them back to revise their scenes and their act and their outlines. And sometimes I even help them decide to tackle a page one rewrite. But I also support them through that process. And when they feel like they're moving backwards and they wonder whether we're actually going back to New York city, I help them see how much progress they've really made and how every recursive cycle on their manuscript is making it better and better and better. If you're interested in working with me and getting that kind of feedback combined with support, I'd love to hear about your story and talk about how I can help you. I'm currently booked up, but you can join my wait-list by going to Alice sedler.com/waitlist. And filling out the form, then you'll be the first to know when I have space available for new clients. Or if you've mostly got this and you don't want to hire an editor or a book coach right now, but you've felt this feeling before that worry, that you're moving backwards in your book rather than forwards. I recommend that you save this episode. Whenever you feel like you're going back to New York and you'll never, ever reach California. Come back here and listen again. Make a list of what progress has looked like for you in the past. Remember that as long as you're open to changes, you are making progress. The only ways to stop making progress are to hold on. So tightly to what is that you can't make space for what could be, or to quit. Don't quit. You've got this, I believe in you. I am celebrating your progress and cheering you on every step of the way. Happy editing.