When you’re editing fiction, whether it’s a short story or an epic novel, you need to edit on several different levels.
There’s the full-scale revision stage: where you go from first draft to second draft, and probably lose or gain some
characters, cut or add a bunch of material, and make some major alterations to your text.
Depending on how tidy your first draft is, you might go through several complete rewrites. But at some stage, you’ll get to a point where you’re fairly happy with the broad strokes of your novel: you’ve got the right scenes, in the right order, and you’re pretty happy with the general
progression of paragraphs: the pacing feels good and you’ve got a balance of dialogue and narrative that’s appropriate for your style and genre.
At that point, you’re into the “sentence-level” of editing. This is where you zoom in on the details and make sure that every sentence is pulling its weight … and that there aren’t any awkward words or phrases that distract your reader from your
story.
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