This was the prompt:

What is your favorite method of editing? Do you print it all out and paint it red? Do you use a computer program like Scrivener or Liquid Story Binder to arrange things? Or maybe you just trash the first draft and try it all over again?

What do you find the most in your editing? Are you a repeated-word-abuser? A comma-phile? Or maybe your grammar just ain’t no good?

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One of the things that we have to do as writers is editing.  For some of us, it’s a little like cleaning our room or eating our vegetables: something we do because we know that we have to do it.  I have to admit… I’m one of those people.  I know my story needs to be edited, but I hate the actual moment of sitting down to edit.  Like eating my vegetables… I usually find that I enjoy editing, once I start.  It’s just taking that first step that’s so daunting.

I’ve tried printing out the entire story and editing it.  That works fine with short pieces, but… I look at all the paper I use with my longer pieces and cringe.  There’s so much clutter!  My favorite method of editing is through multiple pass-throughs (which is another reason why printing things out to edit them makes me sad.  It’s not just a single 50K word novel – it’s that novel several times and each time, it’s longer!)

The first pass-through is when I find all the little grammatical errors and misspellings.  It’s when I find all the plot-holes and skipped scenes and write them in.  The subsequent pass-throughs are when I’m reading it to make sure that it now makes sense.  Each time, it gets a little cleaner.

My most recent editing project is a fanfiction for Hetalia.  I’m taking all the pieces that I wrote relating to the Soviet Union (my favorite characters are Poland, Romania and Gilbert, so you can imagine that there are quite a few) and making sure they fit together into the historical timeline and with each other.

The first thing I did was try to group the stories into ways that made sense as a single story – grouping them by theme.  Then, I made sure that they were strung together in a way that made sense (i.e. – there were no jumps or massive skips that don’t make sense).  Then, I looked at my historical outline and made sure that the stories fit properly with that.  That made things have to be cut from this story and moved to that one, which meant more editing.  On top of that, I have to make sure there’s internal consistency.  For example, I have a story where Russia takes Gilbert’s bird away – I can’t have him running around with it on his head after that point!  I have a story Gilbert gets a scarf from Russia – he can’t have that scarf before that story!

The way I’ve described this project, it sounds like a massive beast that will never be complete.  However, I can already see the light at the end of the tunnel.  Three out of the nine stories are already finished.  Two more are pretty close.  I’m better than halfway through the massive task of editing these stories.  When I’m done… I’ll have nine stories, each with between 17.5K and 40K words and I’ll have straightened out my head canon with regards to the nations of the Soviet Union.

The thing I find happening in both my normal stories and ones like my current editing project is… I skip scenes.  I will mention, for example, some little noodle incident that is probably fairly important.  I never write the scene, however, I skip it entirely.  Other times, it’s as simple as… the character will go to bed and I never mention that they’ve changed for bed.