This is Part 2 in a 4-part series. Part 1 covers the self-editing process, while Parts 2–4 dive into common issues to look for as you revise your work-in-progress.
Related: Self-Editing Part 1: Getting Started
Writing a story is a complex, messy process. With so many moving pieces—main plot, side plots, structure, pacing, characters, settings, dialogue, etc—it’s no wonder that the first draft often emerges with plenty of gaps. In many cases, reworking the first draft includes reshaping the entire story. It also often includes refining and clarifying characters and pinpointing the motivations behind their actions.
To help you with the work of mending plot holes, strengthening characters, and tightening scenes, here are some common story-level issues to watch out for, based on issues I see again and again in my work as a developmental editor.
Story Isn’t Starting in the Best Place
Now that you’ve written a first draft and have a more complete picture of what this story is about, take a moment to question if the first chapter of your story is featuring the most attention-grabbing and emotionally-engaging moment. All too often, I see opening chapters that are dull, flat, and lacking tension. If you want to hook readers, your opening should be as interesting and intriguing as possible. You want the first chapter—especially the first lines of the first chapter—to leave the reader with burning questions.
According to publishing industry professionals, there are two types of openings that are especially good at killing interest: The main character waking up and starting their day, and prologues. The first is rather self-explanatory: starting with a daily human experience doesn’t immediately set your character apart in a way that makes a reader want to pay attention. It's a great way to make a reader put your book down.
The second is a little trickier. Many highly-successful books start with a prologue, so why can’t yours? While I won’t tell you that a prologue is never the right way to start a story, current trends don’t particularly favor it. Modern readers tend to prefer being dropped right into the action, and starting with a prologue risks losing the reader’s interest before you even get a chance to get them into the real story. So if you have a prologue, you might want to consider taking it out if it’s not truly needed, or else weaving its necessary information organically into your opening chapters. If you want to keep it, be sure you’re clear on why there isn’t a better way to start your story, and be ready to defend it to editors, publishers, or critics.
Chapters Aren’t Advancing the Story or Developing Character
This can especially happen in the “murky/messy middle” of the story. As you revise your story, try to define how each chapter moves the story closer and closer to the climax. At the end of each chapter, your main character should have been set on a slightly different path than the one they were on at the start, and the story should have clearly developed in some way. If you have any chapters that don’t have a clear outcome or are there purely for fun or providing information, consider reworking or even deleting them to strengthen the overall story.
Character Motivation and Arc Is Murky
Character motivations can be surprisingly difficult to pinpoint. What is your character missing in their life? What do they desperately want, and what lengths are they willing to go to get it? How does that affect their response to the inciting incident? Go deep into your character and get as clear as possible on what makes them tick. Then make sure that shows up from page one.
In terms of character arc, your main character(s) should undergo some kind of major transformation throughout the course of the story. They should not be the same person they were at the start of the book. Define how the external story shapes the character’s internal story—their values, perspective, priorities, knowledge—and pushes them on a new internal journey. Once you’ve pinpointed this, ensure it comes through clearly in each chapter.
Narrative Dumps Too Much Information on the Reader
This is especially common in the beginning chapters of context-rich stories—fantasy or sci-fi stories with a new world to build, for example. When you need to communicate a lot of details so the reader can build a working picture of what’s happening, it’s tempting to fall into the “info-dump” trap: pausing the story to write multiple sentences or even paragraphs of pure information. If you notice big patches of info-dumping, look for ways to break it up. Scatter them more evenly throughout the narrative. Better yet, show the reader what they need to know by depicting the characters interacting organically with their surroundings and with each other.
A good rule of thumb as you're self-editing: If you have more than two or three sentences of pure information clustered together, it’s probably an info dump.
Narrative Tells Rather Than Shows Action and Emotion
Ah, the old “show, don’t tell.” One of the most basic “rules” of narrative writing. Surprisingly, it’s also one of the hardest skills to master. I often hear writers say, after moments of telling has been pointed out to them, “I’d already worked on this. I thought I wasn’t telling.”
I don’t believe that all telling is bad—in fact, it’s often necessary—but I do believe that frequent telling, especially in immediate scenes, weakens a story. In our image-saturated world, readers want to be able to “see” the story in their head, to be given the pieces to form their own images rather than being told what they should be imagining.
While I could spend a whole article on catching and fixing telling alone, I’ll give one important tip here: think about sensory detail. Tap into sound, touch, taste, smell, and sight when describing action and emotion. Rather than telling the reader that an object is heavy or light, describe how it feels in the main character’s palm. Rather than telling them the character felt sad, show the look on their face, or show the reader the thoughts that made them sad.
The Book’s Word Count Falls Outside the Norm
Word count standards matter, both in traditional and self-publishing, but I often see manuscripts whose word counts fall outside their genre’s standard ranges. If a manuscript is much too short compared to genre standards, there’s a good chance the story is underdeveloped. If it’s much too long, then there’s a good chance it needs to be trimmed down or divided into multiple books. Either way, take your book's word count into consideration as you self-edit.
While you can always find runaway success stories of books that break word count standards, it’s better not to assume that yours will also be a runaway success—it’s rarer than you think in the publishing industry. Do some research on typical book length for your genre as you revise, and decide whether the word count is appropriate—both for the story itself as well as for your genre.
Wrapping Up
I hope this guide helps you avoid some common pitfalls as you revise your way through your story's big-picture issues. And keep an eye out for Part 3 of this Self-Editing series coming next week, which will focus on self-editing for sentence style and flow.