We’ve talked about the editing process on this blog before but not about how to know when your book is finished. There are no exact answers, but with these editing tips, you can decide for yourself when to stop working on your future best-selling novel.
So how many times should you edit your novel? And how much editing is too much?
Related reading: How to edit a novel – Things to remove from your novel
Don’t skip any stages of editing a book
I know it can be tempting to finish editing your novel as quickly as you can but I can’t over-emphasize the importance of editing. It’s where you really make your writing shine. The first draft is just you telling yourself the story and all the following drafts are for making your vision readable. It takes time.
Instead of going from the first page to the last during every round of revisions, you should have a clear goal whenever you’re editing your novel and only focus on that. (I go into more detail about it in my post about things to look for when editing a novel.) When you actually know what you’re doing and you know what you still need to tackle, you’re less likely to want to skip anything.
Whether you decide to edit your novel in the same order as I do doesn’t matter as long as you address each aspect of your story. Only after that, you’re ready to fix the nitty gritty details like spelling and grammar.
How long does it take to edit a novel?
How long does editing a book take is relative. It’s impossible for me to give you an exact timeline but generally editing takes a lot longer than writing the first draft. At least, it should.
You can absolutely churn out a first draft in 30 days but you shouldn’t expect to fully edit a novel in a few weeks. I can tell you that editing a novel takes months, but how many months totally depends on how well you had planned your novel, how fast you edit and if you’re getting any outside help with the process. Fully editing a sweeping, multi-layered story could take you years but it’s totally worth it.
If you want to make the editing process as quick as possible, you need to plan your novel incredibly well. That way you’ll end up making fewer mistakes with your storyline and you’ll end up with less rewriting. Sure, it takes a little more time to start with, but a great outline saves you so much time in the long run.
“No, but HOW MANY DRAFTS do you actually need to write?”
I don’t know! I can’t tell you!!
First of all, the concept of “draft” can be fleeting. Yes, if you rewrite your every drafts, starting from scratch every single time, it’s easy to say where one draft ends and another begins, but I don’t recommend doing that. Completely rewriting some drafts can be warranted, but not all of them.
Because you shouldn’t go over every single thing in your story for every single round of edits, it’s not always quite as easy as knowing your draft is over when you’ve reached the last page. Sometimes, you might jump from chapter to chapter, or might go backwards at times. Fortunately, it doesn’t actually matter how many drafts there are exactly – the editing police won’t knock on your door and demand that information.
But let’s stop avoiding the question and let’s assume you can easily tell what is a single “draft”. How many of them do you need to do? Again, hard to say. Depends on your novel. For a short and not particularly complex novel, I’d say five is the absolutely minimum and even that sounds too small a number so let’s say seven instead. For most novels, I’d suggest ten drafts is more realistic and anything above that is totally normal.
If that number seems too big, perhaps you either don’t know what to focus on during editing or maybe you try to do too much at once. Look at my editing process again. When you’re laser-focused with your revisions, you’re going to need more drafts, but at the same time, those drafts will be easier to conquer.
Don’t look at the number of drafts too closely, is what I want you to remember from this. Focus on fixing all the elements in your story and the drafts will take care of themselves,
What if you’re not any good at editing?
What if you want to make your writing better but you just don’t have the skills? It would probably be extremely frustrating to keep staring at your manuscript not knowing what to fix! I hope you read my blog post on editing your novel because having a focus for each round of edits is massively going to help with the whole process and being laser-focused will help with the overwhelm.
There’s also the option of getting professional help. There are editors for different parts of the editing process so you can get the exact kind of help that you need. If you’re feeling lost with the different types of book editing like “copyediting” and “developmental editing”, don’t be afraid to contact an editor you’ve found and tell them exactly what you need help with. If they’re not the right fit for you, they’ll be able to tell you that and they might be able to refer you to someone else.
That said, I’d be critical of the idea that you’re “not good at” editing. What does that even mean? If you don’t know how to make your writing better, you need to learn more. Check out some of these books I can recommend for all writers. Becoming more competent will help you edit more efficiently.
You also need to look at your feelings about editing. Maybe you’re telling yourself that you don’t know what you’re doing when it’s actually your difficult feelings that you’re avoiding. Here’s the thing: there are all kinds of feelings you can’t avoid when reading your own work, so don’t even try to avoid them. Just feel your feelings. What you can control is what you make those feelings mean. They don’t mean you suck as a writer and they definitely don’t mean you need to avoid editing forever.
Don’t be a perfectionist when editing your novel
Wanting to write a fantastic novel that your readers will love is a good goal. I’ve seen writers settle for a lot less and it makes me sad every time.
But the difference between perfectionism and striving for excellence is that perfectionism isn’t about wanting to produce great work. It’s about wanting to be above criticism because you’re scared. That’s a pretty selfish goal.
There aren’t published novels out there with no mistakes and nothing to fix. Where the Crawdads Sing and The Family Upstairs – just to give you two examples – are incredibly popular books that both have their flaws and could have used more editing. And those books had been read by several professionals before they got published, so don’t expect yourself to be able to write a flawless book all by yourself. Even with a team of editors, it just isn’t feasible. The perfect book doesn’t exist.
Mind you, this isn’t an excuse to produce sloppy work. There’s A LOT of ground to cover between sloppiness and perfection, and I really hope your destination is Excellenceville and not That’llDo-Town.
Just do your best, okay? Make sure you look at every aspect of your story, including storyline, scenes, characters, dialogue and settings, and make sure you choose the exact right words that do justice to how you see your story in your mind. Then put every comma where it needs to go and make sure every single word is spelt correctly – ask for help if needed. That’s the most you can do.
Apply feedback to your manuscript
Maybe you think you’ve got a solid story in your hands, but then you get the feedback from your beta readers and you realise you still need to make changes. That’s okay!
I know we take it very personally when people criticise our writing, but if you want to write a GREAT story and not just an okay one, you need to be prepared to accept feedback and learn from it. Not every reader will be right about what isn’t working and why, but if multiple people are saying the same thing, they might be onto something.
Take the hint
If you’re trying to get traditionally published and you’re getting nothing but rejections, it’s not the time to sit back and wait.
People like sharing stories about successful writers who didn’t get a publishing deal until after 200 rejections, but they’re leaving out something important. More than likely, those authors were improving their manuscripts whenever they got any feedback from agents or publishers. They weren’t just pushing and pushing the same manuscript until they got a yes.
Yes, you do need to believe in yourself and keep trying if you want to get published. But you also have to be humble enough to realise that your perfect manuscript isn’t so perfect after all. Not every great book ever gets published, but if you’re getting nothing but rejections, you might want to look at why that’s happening.
Me, I started writing a novel in early 2019 and I THOUGHT I was done with it in 2022. Now, when I’m editing this post in 2024, I’m working on that novel again. “Again” or “still”, who knows. After all this time, I’ve still found ways to improve my writing because I’ve been continually improving my writing skills, and I’m not just pushing the same version of my manuscript to agents and publishers.
Yes, your query letter and synopsis matter and you’re going to want to keep improving them as well, but since you’ve written an entire novel, you don’t want all your hard work go to waste by not making sure you’ve really made the most of it.
When to stop editing your book
You can’t make a book too good by editing it too much, but you can fry your brain while doing it. Try to avoid that!
If you find yourself fiddling with the same details and scenes, you might be overthinking it. There aren’t right or wrong answers when it comes to writing fiction, so you can’t choose the universally correct words no matter how many times you edit your writing.
When you find yourself editing something over and over again and you’re not sure when to stop, ask yourself this: what is this trying to accomplish? If you can’t pinpoint exactly what you’re trying to fix and why, you might just be acting out of insecurity and worry. Just stop editing and do what I tell you next:
Give your writing time and space
When you think you’ve finished editing your book and there’s nothing more for you to do, or perhaps you’re getting sick of the whole editing process and you just want to be done, it’s time to take a break.
Leave your story for a few weeks. Read some books and maybe do some writing exercises that aren’t even supposed to produce “good writing”. Give yourself a break and then come back to look at your manuscript with fresh eyes. Read it ONCE, write notes about any glaring issues you find during your read and then fix those issues.
In theory, you could spend the rest of your life editing your novel, but you do have to draw the line somewhere. Chances are, you won’t ever feel completely confident with your writing but you still need to take the next step eventually if you want something to come out of it.
Protagonist Crafts is a blog about writing fiction, written by a published author and creative writing teacher. You can find more writing tips and inspiration in the blog and you can get the best author tools at Writer Lifestyle on Etsy.
