My Self-Editing Process

Background

I recently finished the self-edits for my upcoming novel, The Chameleon Killer. It was a joyous day in our house because I spent 5.5 months doing self-edits on that book. The manuscript I now have is a perfect candidate for beta readers.

I'm currently pursuing professional editing and publishing for the narrative. Given my correcting amount, I am curious about how expert editors see it. For my first tale, Growing Future Operators, the editorial firm initially told me they wanted to do a developmental edit because I was a new author. Once I delivered the volume, they decided it was structurally sound and skipped the exploratory reformations.

Most of the changes I make are preliminary. I start with the first, zero, or garbage draft, depending on what you call it. While writing that publication, I kept a spreadsheet of alterations I needed to make. Some were structural, and others were copy. My highest expense modifications, in time, are complete book revisions. For the Chameleon Killer, I performed four edits that covered every chapter.

Reading and Editing

The first thing I do with the initial manuscript is read it front to back. This allows me to find grammatical problems, unearth scenes that can be deleted, identify remainders that need replacing, and log them all in my worksheet.

For The Chameleon Killer, that list started with 110 tasks. By the time I finished those, I had completed 102 of them—the other eight lost significance because so many changes were made to the work. I spent over two months making those modifications.

I am ruthless when it comes to the zero draft. That first run of the entire book includes removing whole chapters, rewriting scenes, and promoting characters up and down depending on their importance in the story I wrote. By the time I was done with those, the first volume had changed about 85% of the narrative. If I gave you both versions, you would think it was a different narrative.

AutoCrit Edits

The next step in my self-edits was to upload the tome to my AutoCrit account. AutoCrit has AI analyzers and a ton of edit reports you can use to improve your tale. As soon as I uploaded it, I ran the fiction analyzer, producing reams of information. You can learn a lot about your novel with that tool. It identifies your character archetypes so you can match the findings to your planned archetype characters. It also provides growth results for your protagonist. I was pleasantly surprised with what it found in The Chameleon Killer.

Next, we get down to the nuts and bolts of editing reports. I am talking about repeating words, generic descriptions, showing vs telling, and filler wording. AutoCrit matches your number for a category to a typical book in your genre.

My biggest fault is using repetitive text. The first time I ran that report, I had more than 4700 repeated lettering, compared to the typical book's more than 2300. I spent about two months working on that one and got my amount down to less than 1000. The summary recap also shows the grouping numbers under which the editing reports fall. Those categories are Pacing & Momentum, Dialogue, Strong Writing, Word Choice, and Repetition. Those counts range from 0 to 100.

When I started on the repeated characters, the repetition type total was 73.3. When I was done, it was 98.7. That is quite a jump, and it made all the work worth it. For that synopsis, you need a thesaurus and the willpower to bring down the count for each word to one. Of course, you can’t do it with every word. I never try to get 100% of these things done because it would drive me crazy.

The other reports I mentioned were a little different than the repeated words. Those show you the word, how many times it was found, and how many are in excess. If you eliminate the excess ones, the red words drop off the report.

By the time I finish working on the AutoCrit reports, I might have found a few extra edits, usually fast fixes.

Here is an example:

Hunt down and remove subpoena as synonym for warrant. Check summons for the same thing.

That was based on me using the wrong words for a search warrant.

Dialogue Review

The last edit of the book I did was a dialogue review. I entered the Growing Future Operators book in a contest and received an editor's review. They nailed me on expository dialogue and too many names in the dialogue. I wish the professional editor I used had found those.

An example would be character A talking to character B and something like this.

Characters A and B met for coffee. Character A sat down across from Character B.

“Hey, B. What are you drinking?”

“Hi, A. I have a large iced coffee.”

“Cool B. I will order the same.”

“A, how is your job going?”

“B. Too many hours and too much stress.”

If their bit of dialogue drives you crazy, imagine what I dealt with for all the conversation between my protagonist and her lieutenant. I need to thank that editor for opening my eyes to my bad habit.

The dialogue review was a new one for The Chameleon Killer. It only took me three days to scour every piece of dialogue to remove the findings based on what I learned from that contest. I turned expository dialogue into narrative and removed 99% of the names in the dialogue. The resulting dialogue for the new book is much crisper than the first tome. This review is something I will do for every future novel I write.