Writing Tip #14: The Structural Edit

A writing tip a day, every day for 2025

Yesterday, I gave you my summary of the Six Stages of Self-Editing. Today, you get an in-depth look at the first of those six stages.

The Structural Edit

Long before you decide to move commas around and figure out whether or not you really do know what “belied” means, it’s a good idea to do a structural edit. No sense agonizing over word choice and punctuation styles if you’re just gonna delete the entire chapter eventually.

I recommend using a beat sheet or some plotting tool at this stage. If you plotted carefully before starting, this stage might go quickly for you. Or, you might consider your plotting/planning stage to be the structural edit; it just happens before you start drafting.

While every story is a little different, I use a very general structure that can overlay on a lot of different types of stories and has some wiggle room for individualization.

0–5% of the story is your hook. This establishes “normal” for your character and helps us get acclimated to your story and world.

5–10% of the story is your inciting incident. This is the event that takes your character off their normal path — the path they were planning to tread — and puts them on a new path. In romance, this is your meet cute.

10–25% of the story is the first pinch point. This changes a lot, depending on your genre, and can sometimes be referred to as the…