Writing Tip #13: Six Stages of Self-Editing

A writing tip a day, every day for 2025

Congrats! You wrote a book!!! Now what?

Now you edit that book, of course.

But deciding where to start editing is a daunting task in and of itself, forget the actual editing itself. You could spend hours picking apart a scene and putting it back together, stitching together beautiful language and nuanced character interactions laced with subtext… just to delete the entire thing next week.

Instead, I recommend a six-stage approach to self-editing. None of this is a rule, and no one is going to grill you on the order in which you performed your edits, but this tool can be helpful. I designed this process to go from the “big stuff” to the “little stuff” so hopefully you can feel like you’re working efficiently, rather than spinning your wheels.

Stage 1: Structural Edit
Use a beat sheet or other diagnostic tool to make sure you have all the scenes you need and that they’re in the right order. Do you hit the necessary genre expectations (like that HEA/HFN requirement in romance???) and do those expectations get fulfilled at the right times in the story? If the first draft is just shoveling sand into a sandbox so you can make castles later, think of this round of editing as pushing sand into the proper shape for your foundation and general structure. You might even throw some sand out to make room for the final product.