Last week, we looked at finding a balance with your editing – doing enough, but not getting obsessive over it. If you missed that newsletter, you can find it here in the archive:

Today, I want to look at the different stages of editing, because it's crucial to distinguish between these and approach them in the right order.

"Editing" covers a huge range of activity, and can be broken down into:

#1: Revising (also called "rewriting" or "redrafting"). If you're hiring an editor to help you, this stage is the "developmental edit". It's the big picture phase of editing, where you go from a scrappy first draft to a much more in-shape second draft. You might be making huge changes at this stage, like cutting out whole chapters, removing or adding secondary characters, changing your protagonist's motivation, altering key events in the plot, and so on.

#2: Line editing (also called "close editing"). This second stage of editing is where you hone the work you've already knocked into shape. Any major changes have, ideally, already been made: now, you're focusing on things like the pacing of each scene, the ordering of paragraphs, and the flow of your sentences. You might occasionally take out a few lines, but you won't be cutting whole scenes or chapters at this point.

#3: Proofreading. At this point, you're essentially checking for errors: spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes, inconsistencies with punctuation or capitalisation. You'll probably also be on the look out for any very small things to tweak (like a clunky-sounding sentence, or using the same word three times in a paragraph). 

If you're writing a short piece, like a blog post or very short story, then these stages of editing may not take long at all. Depending on how well you planned, or how smoothly the drafting went, you may be able to skip the "revising" stage entirely: perhaps you've got everything you wanted, in the order in which you wanted it.

For a long, complex work, like a novel, you may end up repeating some of the stages. You might make sweeping changes as you go from first to second draft, for instance, then go through and do a tidying-up line edit before handing your work to a beta reader or editor. Their feedback may prompt you to go back to big picture revision again: perhaps you need to make some drastic cuts to your manuscript, for instance.

What's important, though, is that you generally approach your edits by making the big changes first, then tweaking the details. After all, there's not much point in perfecting a chapter that you later end up cutting altogether. (Plus, if you've spent ages getting that chapter just right, you'll find yourself very reluctant to cut it – even if removing it would make for a stronger, better-paced book.)

Next week, we'll be taking a closer look at the "revising" stage of editing, and I'll be giving you some tips on how best to identify and tackle the big-picture changes that your work in progress might need.