After writing your first novel, you likely have some notion that self-editing is required. But after you’ve trudged through the difficult process of writing the book in the first place, it can be difficult to decide where to begin. Most will launch into a start-to-finish read through. Which is a good and natural place to begin. It’s easy, however, to get bogged down in the line by line corrections rather than taking in the story from an objective, high level point of view.

Any first round of editing, even if you’re doing it yourself, should be with a developmental edit in mind. Looking for character issues, plot holes, and pacing missteps. That can be hard to pick up on though when you’re deep in the forest looking for trees.

After I’d written my first book that I knew would become my first published novel, I did my best to self edit. I knew I wanted to self-publish, so I hired a highly skilled editor, Michelle Meade, to work on dev edits with me. I had a lot of work to do and she provided me with mountains of invaluable feedback, but her first suggestion is one I’ve never forgotten, because it put the power in my own hands. This editing advice is one I’ve used on every subsequent novel and it’s a trick that anyone can implement as they are tackling their first pass through of their novel.

The Bird’s Eye View

Often, the hardest part of self-editing is not being able to take a more objective view of your work. Tens of thousands of words is a lot to comb through, so the best thing you can do is slim it down.

This idea that started with my editor and has evolved over three books is what I’ve taken to calling “The Bird’s Eye View” edit. As I’m re-reading my newly finished novel, I write down one or two lines about what each chapter is about. In this process I makes sure to mention:

  • Who is in the chapter
  • What they are doing
  • How it informs/moves the story along
  • Whether I think it’s necessary or driving towards the conclusion

I do it without emotion or attachment to the words or the little imaginary people I’ve created. And I do this for every chapter until I get to the end.

Once I have this all written out, I can look at things a little more objectively and decide if something needs to be cut, added or addressed.

By writing these little summaries and then reading those, you can get an idea for if you’ve lingered too long in one place, if you’ve introduced a character, but never resolved them, and if a scene (whether you love it or not) is contributing to the overall goals of your narrative.

You can also do more playful things like consider a new chapter that might improve the book. Or move around scenes that might help build the tension better.

Uncover the Arc

Most stories follow a three part structure that has a few crucial moments in them.

In act one, you’ll have the Inciting Incident and some rising action. The general rule of thumb is that your inciting incident (i.e. the event that kicks off the whole story’s direction) should take place in the first 50 pages. Mark on your chapter outline exactly where your’s happens and make sure it’s standard for your genre. In romance, it may be a meet cute. In a thriller, it could be the moment an amateur sleuth decides to get involved in the investigation.

You can further assess if your action is, in fact, rising by looking chapter by chapter at whether or not your stories tension and conflict are escalating. If you find a spot where the action plateaus, you can mark that for needing to infuse some more contention into the plot. Conversely, if every scene is off-the-charts action packed with no moments of release where the character can reveal themselves a bit more, you might want to consider some pregnant pauses.

Then of course, in act two, you’ll encounter the rest of the action leading to the Climax. You should also pinpoint where this happens in the story. Does all the previous material lend itself to this inevitable crescendo? Does the climax come too soon or too late?

Finally, in the third act, which will be your shortest (and you can use the outline to make sure it is) you’ll have your Conclusion. How did it go, wrapping things up? Do you feel like you rushed to get to the end? Is there any more opportunity to tie up loose ends? Is there anything left to say?

Make It Visual

If, like me, your eye’s start to cross a bit when you’re looking at lines and lines of text. You can take this approach a step further. Write the information for each of your chapters down on index cards. For my most recent novel, I have written a book from four different POVs. So for each POV, I chose an index card that was a different color and put them on my wall. This way I could not only see how the story as a whole played out, but also see the trajectory of each of my four main characters’ developments. Was there anyone who was static? Did one character’s chapter too closely resemble another? Were they distinct and different, but cohesive? What was the word count for each chapter?

I’d imagine a craftier person than me could have a lot of fun with stickers, tabs and systems that bring even more visual coherence to your narrative.

The point of the Bird’s Eye View edit is to get you off the individual pages and fully into your story. It’s more or less a reverse outline. If you started with an outline, how closely does this end assessment resemble it. And is that a good thing? Were there ideas in your original outline that didn’t make it in? Or are the two similar, possibly indicating that at no point in drafting did the story take you by surprise? Maybe you feel like your ending could use more oomph? Use your outline to play out different climaxes to see how they work with the rest of your story.

At the end of the day, The Bird’s Eye View edit is a means for you to mix up your process and get outside the word count and see your story for all that it is and could be.