Self-Editing & Revision

Brooke McIntyre of Inked Voices explains what to look for in a critique group and how to find the best writing critique group for you.

Making the leap from short online articles to longer, narrative work brought one writer into contact with a new challenge: being truly edited.

If you’re overwhelmed by the volume of accumulated words after months or years of generating new material, here’s how to tame and shape them.

Stories are like trains: a connected chain of main events (railcars) and transitions (couplings), with very little stopping at platforms.

One writer explains why you shouldn’t necessarily get feedback on your first draft—and what you should do instead.

Even experienced novelists overwrite. Here are five insights about ruthlessly cutting a manuscript—and why that’s a good thing.

A writer’s script-editing experience helped fix her novel’s problems with pacing, flat characters, and scenes that didn’t propel the story.

When agents suggest further revision, we might need time and distance to see our MS through their eyes—but doing the work can pay dividends.

If the manuscript you once felt passionate about has fallen silent, here’s why this may be happening and how to gently find your way back.

Embrace the fact that creation is never truly finished—it’s simply released at a point where it can begin its life in the world.

Ensuring your stories are imbued with meaning can be a huge task. Luckily, three magic words will help you strengthen your story’s trajectory.

When the revision process meanders off-course, leaving a project stranded, here are some tips for regaining momentum.

If you’ve amassed a heap of assorted essays, flash pieces, chapters, and ideas, here’s a step-by-step guide to shaping them into a book.

One writer found herself chained to an idea that just wasn’t working, and needed fresh perspective from a colleague in order to break free.

Just as you wouldn’t paint a house under construction, you need to revise with an eye on story structure before you dress up the writing.

Giving your beta readers structure makes it easier for them, and helps ensure that your specific concerns will be addressed.

Using a phone’s text-to-speech feature to read your story aloud while doing chores is a great way to catch errors that you might otherwise miss.

If a scene, storyline, character, or image doesn’t quite belong in your story, save it for later use—as Taylor Swift does with song ideas.

By paying attention to how you are impacted by story, you can learn to trace those effects back to the techniques that elicited them.

One author believes that celebrating your rejections is part of how you take your power back.

Finished a first draft and unsure where to go next? Here’s a 5-point checklist of what the second draft revision process should accomplish.

Before spending time on a story that doesn’t work, ensure you’ve addressed the critical questions of character, plot, goals and motivations.

Like writing, editing and revision are skills that take time to learn, and they develop only with practice.

We writers know that critiques are an integral part of improving our work. But we rarely learn how to receive feedback or what to do after.

Good editors are expensive, so the best time for a full manuscript review is when you’re pretty sure your book is ready for publication.