How to Become a Better Writer: A Wattpad Guide

TIP #22: Editing Your Work

So, you've done the hard part and written your first chapter or first five chapters or even the entire story. Now comes the harder part where you clean it up...unless, of course, you think you have a Pulitzer prize from jump.

Does My Work Need Editing?
Your growth as a writer depends on your ability to evolve, and this evolution is often evident by the stark differences between the stories created when you first started writing versus those created after having a few years of writing under your belt.

Have you ever gone back and reread one of your stories and found that you now hate portions (or nearly all) of what you'd written? What once sounded good now sounds horrible? Yes, alrighty then.

Here's a little secret: not only does this show that you are evolving as a writer, but it is also an indication that your precious work still needs a lot of work.

How to Start the Editing Process
The best suggestion I can make about starting the process—outside of having already urged you to utilize the tips in this guide—is to tell you to reread your work over and over again. As you read over your work, you need to ask yourself a series of questions that will help you determine what needs editing (Check out the next section).

What to Edit
When editing, it's good practice to start with the bigger (more complex) things then move on to the smaller things. Frame your editing process by way of questions. For example, ask yourself:

- Is this my best effort?
- Do I have a plot? What is my plot? What is the story I'm telling?
- Who is main character (MC)? Have I fleshed out this MC sufficiently?
- Did I provide enough history or backstory?
- Am I telling too much of the story? Did I write to the sensory?
- Am I giving too much detail, causing sensory overload?
- Does this title work for this story? Does it drive interest?
- How is my grammar in this paragraph or next or the next and so on?
- Did I add punctuation to everything?
- Is everything punctuated correctly?
- Did I spell everything correctly?
- Am I missing words anywhere?
- Am I reusing a certain word too many times?
- Am I overcompensating for something else by using too many complex words?

When to Edit
As with anything, there are varying degrees of editing and ways of going about doing so. Some might write a few pages then stop to edit that new content, essentially editing as they go. Others prefer to write the entire story—crank out that first draft—before beginning any edits. Entirely up to you.

REMEMBER: Essential to the editing process as much as it is to the writing itself is taking the lessons/tips you've learned and applying them.