Self-Editing Guide for Writers

A Practical Guide for Authors (including information about editing in general)

This document is an introduction on what editing actually means and how to self-edit your own writing to reap at least some of the benefits of a proper edit. The target audience is especially web serial authors, most things should be true for any writer.

What is editing?

Editing means polishing a draft to resemble a finished work of art.

This usually happens in steps: a rough first draft can be borderline nonsensical mess that is shaped into a decent RR fiction with the first edit pass. An almost finished manuscript can be polished from a great book to an excellent one by one more intense pass of line editing, making the prose sing from one sentence to the next.

How important is editing?

The simple answer: Web serial readers crave content. It’s fine, just ship it.

The slightly more nuanced answer: Editing is not really about perfecting the grammar or turning the prose “more professional”. The more important facet of editing is making sure the story itself holds together and excites and rewards the readers, keeps them turning the page.

Also, and maybe even more importantly, editing is where learning happens. How would you even know if your writing is getting better unless you read it and think about it?

Editors?

An editor is a person helping an author edit their book. The author always stays the ultimate authority on their story. It’s their name on the cover. No matter what the editor says, the author decides on every single suggestion.

Editors have the advantage that they don’t suffer from author blindness (more on that later). The main skill of a proper editor is that they will be able to accurately articulate their opinions on the work. A reader can say the pacing is too slow, and the author can retort that this is supposed to be a slice-of-life book, but an editor can point to how these four chapters retread the same emotional question in the same way three times even when the details of what happens are all different from each other.

Additionally, a good editor has read extensively and thought about writing and stories a lot. They will have things to teach you, no matter which one of you is the “better writer”.

In addition to all of this, editors speed up things. Maybe you could do everything an editor could, but it might take six months and extra two hundred hours of working time. Instead, you can recline on a sofa or write new chapters, while the editor tells you that there are continuity issues on pages 45, 124, 242, and 396.

Levels of editing

Edits happen on different levels. This is the rough shape so you know what people are talking about.

Developmental edit

Dev (or structural) editing means working on the structure of a book. On a higher level, dev editing answers questions like: What is this story even about? Who are these people, really? What is promised in the beginning of the story and are those promises paid off? Does the pacing sag or is it too fast on a manuscript level?

On a more micro level, dev editing answers questions like: Does this chapter go somewhere? Do these characters feel like real people and act like themselves? Does this emotional moment land?

Line edit

Line-editing means polishing the intended meaning of what’s on the page. Is this sentence beautiful? Can I track what’s going on in this fight? Why is this line of dialogue wonky? Does this pastoral scene evoke tender feelings?

Copyediting / Proofreading

Copyediting and proofreading are the final pass to tighten the nuts and bolts. Is the dialogue formatted correctly? Is there a typo or grammatical mistakes? [sic]

I’m clumping copyediting with this category, as it’s about making sure the formatting is all similar, all the names are the same across the whole book, Fire Punch doesn’t become Fiery Punch at some point, etc.

Self-editing?

For many web serial authors, hiring an editor is not feasible or sensible. Hiring an editor can cost thousands of dollars. The alternative is to do it yourself, and that’s what this document is really about.

So let’s go.

Author blindness

To prime things, let’s discuss author blindness. The way I phrase it is: “I know what I meant, so I don’t see what I wrote.” You know how cool the fireballs look and how they rattle as they fly through the air across this field that’s about 90 feet across, but you might actually not have described any of that at all, as you already imagined it. Or there might be a word missing from the sentence and you skip noticing it every time, as you know what is supposed to say. And sometimes even the spell checker won’t save you.

Most self-editing tips and tricks focus on fighting Author Blindness: how to trick yourself into seeing the writing on the page instead of the story in your mind.

Being a better writer than you are

Another weird thing about self-editing is that it requires you to be a better writer than you are. But what does that even mean, man?

The key is that appraising the quality of a thing is a separate skill from creating a thing of quality. A writer needs both skills, and the appraisal skill is always the one that is stronger. Unless you knew how to say if something is good, how would you even know if you’re getting better or worse?

Self-editing flexes the appraisal skill and forces us to figure out ways how to try to catch up to it with our creation skills. We take one step with the left foot and catch up with the right one. This is actually one of the main reasons why you SHOULD do self-editing. You can’t get stronger by lifting the same weights forever. Self-editing is a way to put more metal on your metaphorical writing barbell.

Requirements

Self-editing doesn’t cost money, but it’s not free.

The main requirement is time. To self-edit, preferably you should have a lot of calendar time reserved for that: actual weeks spent not looking at the text to let yourself forget it, so you can read it more like a reader would. This might be feasible or not. When you start working on an ebook, you might already have two years since you’ve seen that first chapter you posted on RR back in the day. The problem is that preferably you should have time to forget again between every pass of editing.

Ain’t no one got time for that, so we have some tools to try to trick ourselves and avoid holding the writing in a drawer for six months multiple times, but self-editing also takes working time. You could be writing new chapters, but instead you’re wondering if describing shadows as looming or creeping is more effective. No way around that unfortunately, so let’s get into the trenches.

Practical Guide to Self-Editing a Book

I’m assuming you’re starting to self-edit a book or a sizable arc of a web serial. If you’re working only on one chapter, then apply only the parts that make sense.

This guide assumes you’ve already had people read and give feedback on your work in critique circles or such etc. All that’s important and nice, but doesn’t cover what we’re going to be doing here.

When editing, always start with the highest possible level. There’s no use in fixing dialogue formatting of a scene that you’ll end up rewriting or cutting completely.

This is a practical guide. I’m going to prescribe concrete steps instead of listing ten different frameworks and weighing the good and bad of each. I’ve picked up these ideas as I like them and think they are a pretty good guess of what would benefit any book and best bang for your time spent editing.

Dev edit

1. Put down your draft. Don’t pick it up for two weeks.

2. Create a dev document. Write down the following on it. No need to answer at this point.

   1. What promises does my book make to the reader?

   2. How does my book deliver on its promises?

   3. Themes and arcs.

   4. List every chapter of your work in order.

3. Read your whole book in one go. No stopping for line edits, no stopping for anything. You can and should write notes on your dev document, though.

4. Answer the questions on your document. Instructions below.

Making promises: Your cover, blurb and the first chapters of your book make promises to the reader. Is this going to be a fun LitRPG romp? A brutal cyberpunk critique of capitalism? A fun guy being funny? Look honestly at what you’re doing with your first chapters and write down what a reader would assume based on them.

Delivering on promises: Think honestly if you delivered on the promises you made. Did you actually end up writing a harem story with smut? Don’t break promises. If you want to, really know what you’re doing.

Themes: Maybe you weren’t going to write a story about racial trauma and being colonized, but now that you squint at the work, can you spot something? Even for a lolzer-pantser, there are often leads buried in a story that can be pulled out and made stronger and more coherent when you focus on it intentionally.

Arcs: Same applies with arcs. Now that you read the story, the young apprentice seems to actually be the most clever person of this group, so what does that mean for their character and how can you thread it across the whole book?

Chapters: For every chapter, check if it deserves to stay in the book. Answer these three questions:

• Do I care about the stakes of this chapter?

  • Is something at risk that is worth the risk?

• Does something change in this chapter?

  • Safety turns to danger, love turns to hate, slow turns to fast, man turns to woman, etc.

• Does the chapter work enough jobs?

  • Aim for at least three.

  • Jobs include things like: advancing plot, developing characters, worldbuilding, foreshadowing/paying off things, making us feel emotions, changing relationships

If you can’t answer YES to all of the three questions, think about what would need to change so you could. Write down your answer.

5. Look at all your answers and implement the changes they inform you should do.

Line edit

The story holds water and the structure is sound, so next we want to make the prose as good as it can be. This is the part where you get to be the best writer you can be.

However, this document isn’t really about craft or what good dialogue looks like. That you have to mostly figure out for yourself by reading books, listening to people talk, looking at a leaf and seeing the lighter green stems reaching and curving up, the drops of dew rolling off it. That part is going to take the rest of your life, but self-editing this book can’t.

That’s why I’m mostly giving you tricks on how to fight past author blindness and try to see what’s on the page so you can make it sound to other people like it sounds in your head. I’ll also add in some very general writing craft tips that should be applicable to any written work.

Fighting blindness

• Distance

  • Do one editing pass, hide the manuscript from yourself for two weeks, then do another.

• Changing medium

  • Print out the whole book on paper or use an e-ink device. Read it and make notes using a physical pen. The idea is that the different format tricks your brain to notice the actual text more.

• Text-to-Speech

  • Run the story through a text-to-speech thingie. I suggest using a simple machine voice instead of using the AI voice services like ElevenLabs etc. Even if you don’t care about the very murky IP practices some of those have, I feel a “higher quality” narration might mask problems that a very flat reading would make apparent. Figure out a way to make notes as you listen, so you can easily mark down things like echoing words or places that sound dumb. As an example, when I listen to stuff while walking or cycling, I ask Siri to “remind me when I get home to remove echoing wand in chapter 9” etc.

• Retyping

  • The nuclear option. Retype your whole story. Open the writing on one monitor/window. Open a blank document on another. Retype every single word by punching letter on the keyboard.

  • This sounds insane, and it’s a lot of work for sure. With a respectable 40 WPM, a 100k word book would take a solid 42 hours of typing, no breaks. Retyping is still probably one of the most efficient and effective ways to self-edit a book. The way wonky stuff just JUMPS out at you when retyping is really something.

  • But do be careful as this is also a great way to break your hands if you have any trouble with RSI. While retyping you can accidentally go straight for four hours and your wrists will fall off afterwards.

Le Cráft

Genre web serial writing is very different from traditionally published literary fiction and each serial is different. “Show, don’t tell” or other instructions might not apply at all, but I’m trying to give you some generally applicable things for you to consider, no matter your genre. Find some examples of applying these concepts in the comments.

• Voice

  • You, your narrator, and your characters have a voice. Does your POV character describe things in a snappy way? Does some character speak like they were airlifted from a Jane Austen novel, even when everyone else is from Glasgow? When reading, pay attention that the voice stays consistent and doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the story.

• Environment and blocking

  • The readers need anchors to understand what’s going on. They don’t know the corridor is 10 feet wide, that the light is behind the orcs, or that the fireball rushed past from the right. You have to tell them this stuff. Describing the environment and making sure readers know where stuff and characters are is important.

• Taking the reader out of the story

  • Which leads to the second general thing. The main problem with grammar mistakes, weird anachronisms, or bad flow is that they stop the reader and make them go “Wait, what?” when you’d want them to keep reading and enjoying the story. When a fire mage shouts “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!” it might be a pretty good joke, but it will also cost you in immersion.

• Varying sentence rhythm

  • General wisdom is that when things are slow, prose can be expansive. When things are surprising or fast, the sentences go fast too.¹ If everything on the page has the same rhythm, the reader will get mechanically bored, no matter what the events are.

• Avoiding over explanation

  • If you describe something well and write impactful and gripping dialogue about it, you don’t need to explain what you are going to do or what you just did². This is a hill I’ll personally die on, but some people disagree.

• Crutch words prune

  • Find a tool (there’s one created by the RRWG server!) that counts for you most used words and see if you spot something that probably shouldn’t be there. Additionally, ctrl-f at least:

    • Just: the single most over-used word in all drafts. Reasonable number to have per 100k words: 75 - 100. Check out how many you have and be surprised 😉

    • Categories to squint at:

      • Hedging: basically, simply, very, really

      • Throat-clearing words (when starting a sentence): Suddenly, Immediately, Then

      • Useless intensifiers: totally, entirely, completely

LLMs

At this point I’ll address the elephant in the room, that is using large language model AIs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. Disclaimer: this is written more a random person with a free chatGPT account than for someone with a finely tuned professional editor project built for Claude Pro (which will still suffer from most of the problems outlined here…).

LLMs can be an excellent help for editing, BUT this comes with pretty big caveats. Always remember that LLMs are statistical prediction machines regurgitating the most probable replies to any prompt.

The amazing and useful thing about AIs is that they don’t suffer from author blindness. They will notice things that you’ve read 10 times and thought are fine, but aren’t actually even English.

Some guardrails for using these:

• LLMs are unreliable little shits. Do not let AI touch your writing directly. It will do something stupid and you won’t notice. Only let it suggest you things, and make every single edit yourself.

  • Do not expect AI to actually finish what you told it to do. If you ask it to proofread a chapter of 2000 words, it will generally bother handling maybe 60% of problems.

• LLMs will tell you any random bullshit with absolute confidence, so YOU have to know what advice to take. Be especially wary about their suggestions, as those are often wonky AF, especially if they are trying to reach for some effect.

But still, AIs are reasonably useful if you are a confident writer and want to run a blind test on your writing. It’ll pick up things for you to consider and sometimes it will even be right.

Find a general use prompt you can try to use on this footnote³. On unprimed ChatGPT, this will give you about 50% usable feedback and 50% bullshit (Claude does better). It is what it is.

Damn it, Jim. I’m an editor, not a prompt engineer.

I wouldn’t trust LLM to do dev editing or proofreading unless you, the user, really know what you are doing.

Proofreading

Just use Grammarly, LanguageTool, ProWritingAid or one of those tools. Note that all of them have had AI crammed into them and nowadays offer you godawful stylistic suggestions that you should probably always ignore. Inspect even the grammar fixes, because they keep getting some of those wrong as well, so the same applies as with real LLM chatbots.

Closing notes

This guide tries to give you a framework on how to approach self-editing your story, but this is only scraping the surface of how far you could go thinking about the Monomyth or using Story Grid to find the perfect All is Lost Moment or something.

Self-editing is a lot of work. Possibly even lots and lots of work. But remember that you’re not only making your story better, you’re going to the writer’s gym to build muscles that will help you write all your future stories. And editing will be fun too, when you see how much stronger your writing gets!

But if it ever starts to feel like too much, that’s why there are editors 😉

You can find this guide also as a Google Docs document.

1. An example of applying varying sentence rhythm for effect:

I turned the blade, letting the sunlight glare into my eyes. The leather of the hilt creaked under my fingers as I lifted it higher, pointing the tip to the skies. A lone cloud floated past, casting us in shadow.

I cut. The blade shrieked through the steel chain, setting the ship loose.

"Nice," I said.

2. An example of how to over explain (don’t do this):

Mortimer was gripped with rage.

His eyes bulged out and he puffed out his cheeks. His skin started turning red as a high-pitched squeak, like something from a steam-boiler about to blow, was heard from somewhere around his nose.

"You fucking turd," he said, very angrily.

3. You are a professional line editor. Your job is to flag problems in the prose below — do not rewrite anything unless the fix is a single, obvious word-level change. Work through the text paragraph by paragraph, and for each paragraph produce a numbered list of issues you find.
Here are example problems, but if you see something else worth noting, comment on that too:
• Clarity & flow — sentences that are confusing, ambiguous, or hard to follow
• Grammar & mechanics — errors in punctuation, syntax, agreement, or usage
• POV consistency — any slips in point of view or psychic distance
• Sentence rhythm — monotonous length/structure, or rhythm that undercuts the scene’s tone
• Grounding — moments where characters act or react in an empty void; missing physical context, setting detail, or sensory anchoring that leaves the scene feeling unplaced
For each issue, diagnose it — explain what effect the problem has on the reader, or what rule it breaks. Naming the category is not enough.
Before flagging anything as a tonal inconsistency, an error of voice, or a stylistic problem, read it against the narrator’s established voice in the surrounding prose. If the surrounding text supports the word or phrase, treat it as intentional.
If something could be intentional — a stylistic choice, a voice quirk, dialect — say so before calling it an error. If a fix depends on the author’s intent, flag the ambiguity rather than declaring a correction.
Do not flag something as weak or generic unless you can explain specifically what effect that has on the reader in this moment. Vague quality judgments are not useful.
Do not compliment the writing. If a paragraph has no issues, skip it. If you see a moment with no problems but a clear opportunity to strengthen the effect, mention it — but only when the opportunity is significant.
The context is web XYZ.