Prisimpad: A Guide to Wattpad, Writing, and Whatever

ON WHATEVER: Editing

So you've finished that first draft, now what? Let me be blunt for a second...you're not ready to publish it so don't publish it! Far too often I see Wattpadders finish their first draft and then skip over to Amazon or Smashwords or fall victim to a vanity press and publish it. It's one thing to post your unedited MS on Wattpad and ask them to read it free, it's another to publish it and ask people to give you real money for it. If you truly think your first draft is perfect and ready to go without editing or rewriting, do yourself a favor. Find someone that will be brutally honest with you.

I'm not talking about your mom/dad or bestie, chances are they'll spare your feelings, but someone who will read that MS and tell you their honest opinion, even if that opinion is it completely sucks. If they say it's ready to go, good for you! Publish or query away. Chances are, however, it won't be. No matter if you're a pantser or a plotter, that first draft needs editing. That's where this chapter comes in.

Editing. There aren't enough words in the English language to properly explain how I loathe editing. Perhaps it's because Freelander was the first time I did a real edit and it just about killed me or maybe I'm just really bad at editing, either way...I hate every minute of it. Which is a big reason I don't do a full edit unless it's something I want to peruse publishing. As it stands now I've edited two projects: Freelander and Guardian of Calandria. Will I edit more? Time will tell. It really depends on how I do with GoC. If I have the same breakdowns I did with Freelander then honestly, probably not. I'll be a one draft and done writer because I enjoy the writing far more than the editing, but you can't publish for real without the editing.

In my opinion, there are two levels of editing: basic and full.

Basic is when you might do one or two read throughs of a chapter to catch stuff, but otherwise all you do is run a spell check. All my books here on Wattpad fit this bill, except for the Freelander edited draft I decided to go ahead and post. While I've put some effort into finding typos in my books, I haven't done enough and will never deny that. However, aside from during Nano, there is no reason not to do at least a basic edit on your work before posting it to Wattpad or anywhere else. Run it through spell check! The Wattpad editor has a spell check so there is really no excuse not to. The majority of my typos are sadly ones spell check can't catch since the word is spelled right but used wrong.

Full edit is when you look at everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything. Look at your sentence structure, your word count, your adverbs, and similes. Think about the character development and the plot. Every ounce of the story is to be ripped to shreds with a fine tooth comb and rewritten or fixed. If you're charging money for something you had better care about typos, I include myself in this statement. I'm putting more effort in catching my errors in my final drafts than I will on anything else. Typos might still sneak by, they do in published books all the time, but you better work your butt off to keep them to a minimum.

Writing is rewriting. There is no getting around that. Be it a full rewrite or a partial, you're rewriting something from that first draft. Maybe even from the second and third draft. The point is, you will have at minimum a second draft. Now how many drafts you have will depend on the kind of writer you are, a plotter will have less work than a panster in the editing stages, but there will be a second draft.

In a perfect world, we would all be able to hire an editor or be picked up by a publisher that will have an editor available for us.

This isn't a perfect world.

 Part of the reason self-publishing has such a stigma surrounding it is because of the volume of people who publish without proper editing. Don't be that author!

Before you begin editing, however, there is one question you have to ask yourself. How will this be published?

You have to decide the answer to this because it will greatly influence how you edit. Why? Because the traditional route has standards you're going to want to follow. This is where the word count is very important. While there are exceptions to every rule, most first time authors will be ignored if their first novel is over 100K words, regardless of the genre. Why? Because most books over 100K have loads of places that can be hacked and slashed. They have sticky sentences, abused adverbs, fluffy bits that do nothing to progress the story, etc. Agents and publishers will look at it and think you didn't edit. But if you're self-publishing, you might not need to care about the word count.

Myself, I'm editing to try to traditionally publish because I just don't see self-publishing as a viable option for me. So when I edited Freelander I had a bitch of a time trying to cut it down from 130K. Eventually I did, I got it down to a little more reasonable range of 110K before I did a couple of queries and realized I wasn't mentally ready for that route.

Another reason to decide how it'll be published is because if you're intent on going the traditional route, you might not want to pay for a freelance editor. Doing your best might be enough. However, if you're self publishing then paying for a freelance editor for help will be the right call. That way you ensure your book is at it's best before publishing.

So think about your goals, then start your editing.

Now let's say you are hiring a freelance editor, here's something very important: Have them edit a sample. Why? Because you want to make sure they know their stuff and they will help you make your MS shine. If you have to try out a couple of different editors, do it. Any editor who refuses to do a small sample edit probably isn't an editor you want to hire. Now when I say small, I mean small. We're talking maybe 1000 words at most. You want to make sure you and the editor mesh because you're going to be a team for a long time.

Brace yourself, dear author, the editing storm has arrived!