The (red) pen is mightier than the sword

Last night, I was talking on the phone with my sister, catching up on the news of the day and filling each other in what's been going on in our worlds. We do this pretty regularly, since both of us have a lot going on these days. She's been apartment hunting while I've been job hunting, and we've come to find the two hunts are surprisingly similar in their ups and downs and in how we approach things.

The conversation falls to the side project I've been working on, which is editing a novel. My mom has been retired for a few years now and one of her passions has always been writing. She wrote a lot of children's stories when we were small, but didn't have a lot of time to write longer stories during her career as a teacher. Since retiring, she's taken up writing again and has finished her first full-length novel. She passed it over to me to edit it and get it ready for publication, so I've been working on that on and off for the past few months.

I was explaining the process I've been following while editing, and my sister asked "so how did you come up with that process in the first place?" And it seems like such a simple question, but it really made me stop and think. 

Because in a nutshell, what she was really asking was "how did you learn to do what you are doing?" And I don't have a good answer for that. Not all writers are editors, not all editors are writers, but some of us really like both. Writing is fun because it's creative and it's a great outlet for an introvert like me. Editing is fun because you get to slash and burn the works of others. (Sorry Mom, but it's true.)

If I had to tell you how I learned to edit or if there are finite steps involved, however, I'd be at a loss.

So my general answer is, "it depends."

In a business environment I'm mostly tasked with editing small articles and documents. Because of that, I can edit for content and for grammar at the same time.

Novels throw most of those rules out the window. I've never edited a novel before, so I had to figure out the best way to do it on my own.

So here's what I did: it may seem simple, but the first thing I did was read it cover to cover. No red pen in hand, no desire to wordsmith, no nothing but an avid reader picking up a book and reading it.

The first step is to know what you're dealing with.

The second step is the high-level edit. I'm not going to spend time adding commas or removing apostrophes if there are plot points that need work or entire chapters that need to be moved around. So step two left the red pen at home as well, and involved writing up a few pages of "here's where your book needs work."  I handed these pages back to Mom, who got to work on a new draft.

Step three is to get the novel back and read it again, this time with an eye toward the changes I suggested and how the overall story flows. I'm not surprised to find the story has a wonderful feel to it and is almost there.

Step four, where I'm at now, is nuts-and-bolts editing of this draft into a final draft. Which means, huzzah, red pen time!

Most of the stuff I know how to do is because somebody taught me how to do it. A few things I know how to do are because I just had to get it done and didn't have a model to follow. Business writing and editing don't really equate to works of fiction, but in the end it's a good thing because it's a new skill I'm developing and I'm having fun learning along the way.

And, I love red pens.