I’ve edited short stories, chapters, scenes, and other small-to-medium snippets, but starting this month I’ll be editing the first draft of my novel. More than twenty thousand words is a new experience for me. I copy edited a smaller novel once as an exercise but this will be something else. Creative editing is a totally different animal. For the next week or so I’m going to be preparing in advance, reaching across all the different authors I can think of and learning their processes. I doubt I’ll follow one of them to the letter, but I’ll definitely be carrying a lot of their advice, their key points to focus on, and of course some of their best tricks into my own process. I think for the next few days, maybe into next week as well, I’ll make a series of posts about the authors whose editing processes I like to see the most. This blog has been focused on the writing half of things since the beginning, but I think its time I made an effort to write about editing. Not quite as sexy I guess, but nobody can deny that it’s what makes or breaks a novel. A bad draft can become something great, but an unedited draft will always be incomplete.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley