You've finally done it. After months of wrestling with character arcs, plot holes, and that stubborn middle section that refused to cooperate, you've typed those magical words: "The End." Your first draft is complete, sitting there on your computer like a 100,000-word monument to your persistence.
But now what?
If you're like most writers, you probably opened that document the very next day and started fixing sentences. Maybe you rewrote Chapter One for the fifteenth time. Perhaps you got lost tweaking dialogue tags and obsessing over whether you used "said" too many times. And three months later, you're still stuck in the same five chapters, polishing the same scenes over and over while the rest of your manuscript gathers digital dust.
This is exactly what I talked about with Alice Sudlow, a developmental editor and book coach, on the Fiction Writing Made Easy podcast. Alice and I have been in the editing world for nearly ten years, and we've both observed this pattern repeatedly. The problem isn't your writing ability. It's that nobody taught you how to edit a novel.
The Manuscript Editing Mistake That Keeps Writers Stuck Forever
Most writers approach editing like they approached writing their first draft: they start on page one and work their way through. It seems logical, right? After all, that's how you wrote the book in the first place.
But as Alice explained in our conversation, editing a book is a completely different beast from writing a book. It requires a different process, different tools, and most importantly, a different mindset.
Read the full article: https://www.savannahgilbo.com/blog/novel-revision-strategy-with-alice-sudlow
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