How I edit my NaNoWriMo first draft

The time has finally come to edit your novel. Here's 5 tips~

You've finished your NaNoWriMo 50k novel and are super excited to share it with the world. If you're anything like me, you wish you could skip the editing and go straight to publishing. Unfortunately, that's not how it works.

Editing can feel much harder than actually writing the initial book. It can feel overwhelming and you might be tempted to put your draft onto the back burner and start writing the next book leaving editing for another day.

But before you know it years pass and the draft becomes a reliec of your past and you end up never share it with the world.

Some authors suggest letting your novel sit for a few months before editing. I agree. Allowing the time to pass will let your brain come into editing with a fresh perspective. 

You'll be surprised at how much of your novel's narrative doesn't follow a logic path.

I do warn you, you can accidentally slip into never touching your draft again given enough time. To prevent this set a date on your calendar to start editing the draft and commit to it.

When you're ready I recommend the follow tips for self-editing your first draft.

5 tip for self-editing you novel

Once the day has arrived to begin editing your novel you might be wondering what are the best practices to editing. Here's how I do it:

1. Read your whole draft first and take notes
2. Build a story map
3. Build a character map
4. Commit to ruthless cutting
5. Rewrite what feels right
6. Bonus: do it again

Read your whole draft first and take notes

You maybe tempted to go straight into the first chapter and start editing away. I highly discourage this. The problem with this method is you'll edit away hacking at the trees when the entire time the forest was already messed up.

What I mean by this is when we write a novel the logical story path makes sense in our heads but because we're taking days (or months) to write it we lose track of the actual flow of events that happen.

Your book might start off as a vampire romance but gets turned into a vampire crime novel with a love interest plot take began in modern New York City but ends in 1800s London. 

By reading your whole story first you can take note of where you went off the deep end and where you need to tighten it up.

Plus, it'll get you doing steps 2 and 3 alone the way.

Build a story map

As you read your entire novel for the first time, take notes of the story along the way. Make note of locations, time of day, what characters are in the room and where the story is going.

You might notice you accidentally started a scene in the morning during a terrible storm and a conflict forces a character to runs outside in anger. Then another character follows them and somewhere along the way they begin to talk under the warmth of a sunshine. I suppose that could happen but to a reader it might seem off.

You'd be surprised at how massive story plots can diverge without you even noticing. 

For example, I wrote a novel that started off with a major car crash and the actual novel is about how the characters found themselves in this life or death situation. When I got to the last chapter, I fully knew who my characters were and actually had changed the location of the crash, who was in the front seat and who ended up dying. If I had just went straight into editing, I may have missed the consistency of the most important part of the book. 

A story map doesn't have to be elaborate, just small notes to ensure your novel is heading in a logical direction. 

If you're looking for tools to help, I suggest using Notion or other note taking apps that allow you to link to new pages as you make notes. Break out your novel into separate documents per chapter. Then make notes per chapter and make the connections along the way. 

At this point you can start editing your novel by adding, removing or rewriting but I suggest reading the whole novel once still before doing it. Since you're taking notes this time around it'll be easier once you do start editing.

Build a character map

Just like putting together a story map make a character map to ensure consistency. A character map can be a profile of your character but you'll also want to add notes per chapter about their whereabouts, their motives, what they were thinking or who they were with.

An outline like this can actually help form better dialog or show you where you can improve the characters growth throughout the book.

A character map is also useful if you have a high amount of characters such as in Fantasy or Crime novels. In a crime novel you may have 3–4 suspects and a detective tracing their MO and alibis. If you don't flush out these characters properly. your writing might seem shallow or worse, confusing. 

Just like writing a story map, use the first pass of reading your novel for just taking notes, then come back to this map when it's time to actually edit the novel.

Commit to ruthless cutting

You've read your novel all the way through once, you made a story and character map and you're ready to start editing. Editing might seem like just changing words or fixing grammar but the best writers know it's time to actually cut sentences, paragraphs, or even entire chapters from your book.

Not every initial word or idea needs to make it in your final cut. You may love the scene where your main character bakes a cake for a friend but unless that cake or that friend helps move the plot along, it'll probably distract your readers. 

The point of ruthlessly cutting is to make your novel as tight as possible so that the reader doesn't want to put the book down.

One concern a lot of writers have about removing words from their novel (especially when you're working with a 50k NaNoWriMo novel) is your novel gets turned into a novella or short story. 

The point is to improve the overall quality and pacing of the story.

The idea is to turn long repetitive dialog into concise dialog. Turn meandering plot into a captivating story. No one looks at a fantastic book and thinks about the number of pages after reading. They tout the quality of the writing and story. 

The substance and impact is the most important and not the length.

But ultimately it is your novel and you are free to cut or keep as you wish. This is where the idea of style and voice is formed and one you will know intuitively as a writer.

Rewrite what feels right

Speaking of intuition, when you begin editing you might get into the habit of fixing grammar or keeping paragraphs because they convoy the message well enough. 

During the first draft maybe this type of editing is ok, but there will be times where it's just easier to rewrite something completely over.

If you have ever written a school paper or even an email and just before you finished, some how the work disappeared, you know how powerful this can be. We've all been there and after the initial frustration we rewrite it and some how it's better than the first time. 

I suspect this is because we are rewriting it with all the previous context but concisely because we know the parts that need to be written to get the point across. This works the same way in editing. 
Try rewriting a section of your novel multiple times and see which one you like best. This is actually a practice taken on by big name authors with their ARC team. Authors will A/B test parts of their novels and see which version gets the bigger traction. 

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Bonus: do it again

So you've finished steps 1 to 5 and you think your first draft is ready to publish! Maybe it is or maybe it's not. 

The first novel I only went through editing once. I never hired an editor or even tried an ARC team. That wasn't my goal for my first novel. But nearly every time I opened the book or shared it with a friend, we'd almost always find a spelling mistake or a sentence that didn't make sense. 

So I began to follow these tips at least three times before sending it off to an editor. I have a stronger desire to build a career as a writer and as such I want to put more time and effort. 

Regardless, if you do it once or twenty times when it is ready to release you'll know.

If anything, let someone else read your novel once with a guideline of these tips and see what they notice. Even if it's for a single chapter. 

I hope you're editing goes well and congrats on finishing your first draft. Let me know in the comments when you release your book!