Made in the Edits: Lessons from My First Novel, part 3

Sometimes you actually have to finish something before you really understand the process. My first novel was a great example of this principle.

Some background: I wrote what I thought was a detailed outline and character description before I started on the first draft of Pursuit of the Heliotrope. I finished the first draft, and it just barely reached 50,000 words. And, to be honest, by the time I was working on the last third of the book, I was feeling pretty tired of it and definitely wasn't doing my best at that point. And I wasn't even really crunching to finish it! I just found it hard to maintain interest in writing the same thing for such a long period.

Five Editing Foci

As I finished up editing my first novel, I spent some time considering the different things I was looking for each time I went through a new draft. I came up with a list of five things to focus on during a particular editing stage, and thought this might be helpful for people who spend all their time looking for typos or feel like they're just doing the same thing over and over each time they edit.