Simple, quick tips for improving both your writing quality and your Wattpad experience. Open, friendly, and conversational, this book will give you that little info boost you need to tackle common problems and often-overlooked issues.
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How to Edit Your Book
The editing process can be described as any point in the writing process after the first draft is completed. Lots of people publish first drafts on Wattpad. While that's something some people don't have an issue with, opinion is shifting to the idea that it's muchmore beneficial to go through an entire rewriting and editing process before your book hits the Wattpad stage. The obvious question: with so many moving parts to writing fiction, how does one make their novel-editing process less daunting?
The key is breaking the process down into individual tasks. Though many fiction writers denounce the writing process in the cookie-cutter sense, one might find it beneficial to refer back to its basic framework. The main steps in the writing process as learned in school are planning, drafting, revising, editing, feedback, and publishing. A basic knowledge of the writing process, even if you aren't strictly following those steps in that order, greatly helps. From there, one can further divide the workload into manageable steps. I'll be focusing on revising, editing, and feedback in this article.
Though this is technically part of the drafting stage, I strongly advise rewriting your first draft (I only do it once, but oftentimes people will do it many times before editing). Rewriting gives you the opportunity to correct the biggest plot and character problems in a much more organic way than scrutinizing the draft for mistakes that will take more energy to complete. The steps that I'm advising to follow below all assume you have already rewritten your novel.
Step 1: add and/or rewrite any scenes to convey your ideas in a stronger way.
Revision is everything related to the elements of the story itself: plot, character, conflict, theme, and setting. (There are many guiding questions you can use as you revise your novel online, so I won't go into detail about the mechanics of each element.) The first step is to quickly read over your manuscript and see if there are any additional scenes that need to be added into the book or rewritten to better convey your character, plot, and theme-related ideas. This is also a great time to add subplots to the story if you want.
Step 2: spam comments for plot, character, conflict, theme, and setting.
This involves things such as removing minor out-of-character instances and changing details of the plot to make more sense. I find these revisions usually don't require a total scene rewrite unless the problematic detail is prevalent throughout a chapter, act, or the whole book. The way I tend to revise these minor bugs is going through the whole manuscript in a week and spamming the thing with comments in Google Docs. These comments can range from "Add more emotion in this scene" to "Remove instances of crying for this character, unless it's at a serious plot beat for her", and they are all a huge help for later.
